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      ‘Four Samosas’ Review: A Romp Through Little India

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      This snappy indie comedy by Ravi Kapoor sees a group of Indian American teenagers hatch a harebrained plan to steal a bag of diamonds.Colorful and handsomely composed like a Wes Anderson movie, but far from that director’s world of gloomy, globe-trotting dandies, “Four Samosas” is a jovial romp through the Indian enclave of Artesia located outside of Los Angeles.The film, written and directed by Ravi Kapoor, is steeped in the traditions of Indian culture and its cuisine. It’s a carousel of sari shops and curry stands — bursts of sparkly, Bollywood-inspired dance numbers as well. Inside jokes that might only perk the ears of other Indian and Indian American viewers are scattered throughout, too — there’s a shop girl with a perpetually bobbing head, and a general emphasis on the maintenance of one’s eyebrows — but this quirky comedy’s snappy humor and winsome (if slightly amateurish) cast should make everyone feel right at home.Vinny (Venk Potula), a charismatic wannabe hip-hop musician, mills about town with his second-in-command, pining over his nihilistic ex-girlfriend, Rina (Summer Bishil). Turns out Rina is engaged to Sanjay (Karan Soni), a goat-poop recycler who, douchey as he may be, also makes good money off his smelly cash scheme.The revelation prompts a particularly harebrained plot: steal the diamonds that Rina’s father has locked away for her wedding — to, uh, pay for Vinny’s aunt’s surgery, of course. The duo join forces with a Hermione Granger-esque brainiac, Anjali (Sharmita Bhattacharya), and an unusually industrious computer engineer, Paru (Sonal Sha), to infiltrate Rina’s dad’s grocery store.But the endgame matters little — “Four Samosas” is all about the team’s goofs. They’re not particularly original (there are silly disguises and a marathon-eating competition), but Kapoor’s timing and the actors’ commitment to the bits pull it off.And, unlike so many new movies that seem to be algorithmically manufactured to appeal to diverse audiences and tick the boxes of representation, “Four Samosas” feels organic and true as a slice of Indian American life — even if it’s all fun and games and movie magic.Four SamosasRated PG-13 for stylized burglary and rude language. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘2nd Chance’ Review: Just Shoot Me

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      Ramin Bahrani’s first documentary feature profiles Richard Davis, the irrepressible inventor of a modern bulletproof vest.In “2nd Chance” the director, Ramin Bahrani, introduces Richard Davis as the only man to have shot himself 192 times. The number is impressive and also excessive, which is one way of describing Davis, the jolly inventor of a modern bulletproof vest and a born salesman. Shooting himself repeatedly on tape, he wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his vests, but what he was also doing was building a gonzo reputation too catchy to ignore or resist.It worked — I started this review with his pitch — but, directing his first documentary feature, Bahrani doesn’t content himself with Davis’s self-mythologizing, or with debunking it, really. As he chronicles the amusement-park ride of Davis’s life — from pizzeria owner to multimillionaire entrepreneur, through divorces and lawsuits and accidental deaths — he describes something akin to a human perpetual motion machine, running on entrepreneurial passion, gun-nut melodrama, a habit of hokum, and greed on autopilot.Davis’s prototype bulletproof vest arose out of a near-fatal 1969 shootout on a pizza delivery run, with three assailants. Typically enough, this encounter may not have happened as advertised, but in any case, Davis built up a successful new company, Second Chance, marketing to police departments with re-enactment-style promo films. Interviewed today in what looks like his den, he sits for Bahrani’s questioning looking like a relatively harmless uncle who can’t stop gabbing about his war stories.But Davis has also had trouble with sticking to the facts when his business interests were in jeopardy. That happens most egregiously when a ballyhooed new vest model proves to be fatally ineffective at stopping bullets. This and other failings carry a personal sting in the telling here by former employees, partly because the Michigan-based Second Chance seemed to retain a surprisingly local feel. (It was also a family affair, employing Davis’s formidable grandfather, dutiful son, and an ex-wife, Karen. Another ex-wife, Kathleen, offers inside scoops and colorful commentary.)Bahrani’s film (which he narrates) beetles along without fully exploiting Davis’s ample entertainment value, which is counterbalanced by accounts of his dubious actions and sometimes unseemly opinions. The vest scandal was no career-buster: Davis, and his son, eventually regrouped and started a new company. Davis’s collaborators, on the other hand, can’t help but look back: we hear extensively from Aaron Westrick, an eager-beaver police officer who went to work for Davis’s company after a vest saved his life.Despite Davis’s showmanship, Westrick might actually be the film’s most resonant figure — all the way up to and including a paradigm-shifting but somewhat overcooked reunion with Westrick’s assailant from decades ago. Westrick wants to believe in what Davis is selling, even as he is repeatedly disappointed — a loyalty to a myth that might have more to say about the country than Davis.As a fiction filmmaker, Bahrani often returns to the theme of the American dream and its not-so-surprising fallacies (“Man Push Cart,” “99 Homes”). Davis’s go-for-broke spirit seems to repel analysis here, and his story can even sound comparatively tame against the Wild West backdrop of mainstream gun culture. But maybe Davis’s vaunted 192 shots say it best after all: they suggest someone both acting out a kind of immortality and demonstrating an unmistakable death wish.2nd ChanceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Framing Agnes’ Review: Transition, Center Stage

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      The documentarian Chase Joynt stages re-enactments of midcentury medical interviews with transgender people.In the 1960s, a sociologist, Harold Garfinkel, and a surgeon, Robert Stoller, led a clinic for the study of gender at the University of California, Los Angeles. The clinic performed some of the first gender confirmation surgeries that were available to intersex or transgender people in the United States, and as part of the team’s medical research, Garfinkel interviewed the patients. The documentary “Framing Agnes” uses these patient interviews to reflect upon the history of transgender people.The director Chase Joynt reimagines Garfinkel’s interviews as black-and-white talk show segments, recruiting transgender actors to perform scenes from the archived transcripts. The rest of the film consists of colorful talking-head interviews with the actors, as well as researchers who have studied the archives in the present day. Of particular interest to Joynt is the story of Agnes (played in re-enactments by Zackary Drucker), a transgender woman who initially presented herself as intersex to the medical staff at U.C.L.A. to receive gender-confirming medical care. But Joynt also stages re-enactments of interviews with transgender men and teenagers, and even enlists Angelica Ross (“Pose”) to perform as Georgia, a Black transgender woman who described her struggles with racial and gender discrimination to the clinic.Joynt’s scope as a researcher is admirably broad, but what his film lacks is a sense of purpose as a work of cinema. The re-enactments are staged in a perfunctory, static way, despite brief standout performances from Ross and Jen Richards, as a transgender woman who found a community of women like her in the 1950s. More frustrating is that Joynt’s interviews lack insight. The documentary reminds its audience that it’s impossible to truly know people based on their responses to medical interviews. But this approach unfortunately prevents the film from achieving either catharsis or understanding.Framing AgnesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Darby and the Dead’ Review: Sixteen With a Sixth Sense

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      A high school junior talks to dead people in this familiar but good-natured tale of adolescent female friendship.Seeing dead people may seem like a curse, but to the teenage protagonist of the gothic, good-humored “Darby and the Dead,” necromancy is a Friday-night side hustle. Directed by Silas Howard, the movie begins by bringing us up to speed: When Darby (Riele Downs) was 7, she survived a drowning accident that accorded her the ability to speak to lingering souls, and she began to act as their envoy to the earthly.That’s a hell of a lot of narrative table-setting. Yet the movie’s real drama occurs not on the stairway to heaven, but in the terrestrial halls of high school, where Darby wears black clothing and sneers at her cliquey classmates. Most loathsome of all is Capri (Auli’i Cravalho), the school’s flawless queen bee who disdains Darby for her stubborn self-sufficiency. But after a tragedy unexpectedly unites the two teens, the social rivals are forced to band together.Setting aside the sixth sense element, “Darby and the Dead” borrows liberally from “Mean Girls”; similar to the machinations in that teen classic, Capri gives Darby a makeover that earns her a gratifying degree of popularity, before the power goes to Darby’s head. The predictable story arc is spiced up by Darby’s frequent, sassy asides to the camera, reminiscent of the TV series “Fleabag.” (A third-act moment breaking the fourth wall nearly quotes a “Fleabag” scene.)But as familiar as this tale of female transformation feels, there is an authentic sweetness to Darby and Capri’s fledgling friendship. Their bond resuscitates a movie that might otherwise have been dead on arrival.Darby and the DeadRated PG-13 for ghostly gossip. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Return to Seoul’ Review: Found in Translation

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      On a whim, a Frenchwoman goes to visit South Korea, the country of her birth, in Davy Chou’s drama.“Return to Seoul” is a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house. The first-time actor Park Ji-Min, a French artist, delivers a full-bodied performance as Frédérique Benoît, a reckless 25-year-old adoptee born in South Korea and raised in Paris who books a flight to her birthplace on a whim. Freddie doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t have the names of her biological parents, and doesn’t want to blend in. Nudged to obey the local custom of pouring alcohol only for others, she snatches a bottle of soju and chugs.In this boozy opening sequence, the writer-director Davy Chou unleashes a character who, one senses, has never felt comfortable anywhere. Magnetic, sexy, mercurial and bold, Freddie is an object of fascination to everyone she meets: a bookish hotel clerk (Guka Han), a sweet-faced nerd who wants more than a one-night stand (Kim Dong-Seok), a grimy tattooer with a stash of psychedelics (Lim Cheol-Hyun) and an international arms dealer twice her age (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) who arranges a rendezvous on a hookup app.Freddie craves stimulation, shifting personalities several times over the eight years of the film — tomboy to glamour punk to wellness drone — confessing that South Korea’s effect on her is “toxic.” The script, shot in vivid colors by the cinematographer Thomas Favel, doesn’t indulge in psychoanalysis. Still, it’s not hard to imagine how a kid who couldn’t help standing out in the schoolyard would grow into a misfit incapable of forming genuine bonds with those she meets and discards.Chou himself is the French-born grandson of a Cambodian film producer who vanished in 1969 as the Khmer Rouge began to seize control and shred the country’s movie industry, and he seems to understand the contradictions in Freddie’s feeling that she’s been robbed of a life she doesn’t actually want to live. The director is intrigued by dislocation, and is attentive to both its dry specifics and its messy frustrations. The film credibly details the strict procedure through which South Korean adoption agencies connect children to their estranged families (telegrams!), yet the reveal that Freddie’s blood relatives named her Yeon-hee, meaning “docile and joyful,” lands like a bitter joke. Clearly, they never knew her in the slightest.Park’s trickiest scenes are with the fantastic actor Oh Kwang-Rok as Freddie’s birth father, an air conditioning repairman who, like her, acts out when he’s drunk. Their time together feels both momentous and aggressively dull: awkward lunches, boring drives, stilted exchanges of banalities peppered with grand statements that strike Freddie as pushy and overly paternalistic. Barriers of language and resentment are difficult to surmount, especially when the acquaintance Freddie totes along to interpret pads their conversation with anxious politesse, making a frank talk frankly impossible.When communication fails, music takes charge. Jérémie Arcache and Christophe Musset’s score is made of thrumming drums and insistent bleeps, building twice to explosions where Park dances with abandon, gyrating as though Freddie doesn’t care if she sees anyone in Seoul ever again. The camera chases after this human whirlwind, and we’re thrilled to be swept up in her storm.Return to SeoulRated R for drug use and nudity. In Korean and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power’ Review: A Movement That Changed America

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      With arresting interviews and archival footage, this documentary looks back at a 1960s voting-rights campaign in Alabama that gave rise to a national movement for Black power.“Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power” opens with interviews with men and women who grew up in the titular Alabama county in the 1960s. The Black interviewees, children of sharecroppers, recall an atmosphere of poverty, racism and bloody violence; their white counterparts, members of landowning families, remember a “peaceful, almost idyllic place.”These discrepant versions of life in Lowndes set the stage for Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary, which retraces the story of how one of the most inequitable, fiercely segregated counties in America gave rise to a national movement for Black power. In 1965, Lowndes had no registered Black voters, despite its population being 80 percent Black. The directors follow the ripples of change that started when a local man, John Hulett, began organizing Black voters, culminating in the founding of a new party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, with an influential symbol: the black panther.The film teases out one of the many microhistories in the Civil Rights movement. Notably, Lowndes did not see the sustained involvement of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; instead, its grass-roots struggle drew the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led by Stokely Carmichael, which took a more local — and more radical — approach.Yet the power of the collective, more so than any individuals, is the focus here. The film is anchored with the arresting faces of Lowndes locals and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers, who recall a range of stirring details — from setting up camp in a house with no running water to internal debates over the term “Black power.” The archival footage, too, mixes protest images and quotidian scenes, illustrating the simple acts of community that underlie any political movement.Lowndes County and the Road to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Farha’ Review: A Most Brutal Coming-of-Age Story

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      Set in the early days of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this drama depicts the upheaval of Palestinian society from a 14-year-old girl’s perspective.Set in 1948, the year that Israel declared independence, spurring a war that would result in the upheaval of Palestinian society, “Farha” depicts a relatively small-scale tragedy considering the scope of the violence. Yet the drama, which primarily unfolds in a tiny storage room, speaks volumes.The film, by the Jordanian writer-director Darin J. Sallam, is a brutal kind of coming-of-age story. It follows Farha (Karam Taher), a plucky 14-year-old who chafes against gendered traditions. She petitions her father (Ashraf Barhom), the leader of their village, to let her go to school in the city with her best friend, Farida (Tala Gammoh). Dad eventually concedes, with nudges from a modern-minded relative, but Farha’s time on cloud nine is abruptly cut short.Sallam doesn’t go out of her way to detail the politics fueling the moment — basic knowledge of what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) that impacted the region at the time should make it clear that the newly arrived soldiers are from the Israel Defense Forces.From Farha’s teen-girl perspective, life is scowling at boys and daydreaming about urban adventures. So when the gunfire starts and the village descends into chaos, it’s all a blur. Not grasping the dangers, Farha impulsively jumps out of the family getaway vehicle, refusing to leave her father behind.Almost immediately, Farha’s father throws her into a storage cellar and locks her in for her safety. She remains there for an indefinite amount of time, rummaging through the preserves, catching rainwater, peering out of a peephole. She finds a gun buried inside a sack of grains — was the threat present all along?One day, a scene of great barbarity plays out before her tiny window, with the camera approximating Farha’s obstructed point of view. Most of the rest of the time, however, Sallam keeps the camera fixed on Farha’s face. Farha doesn’t do much besides wait, yet, by simply looking at this young girl, we witness a devastating transformation.FarhaNot rated. In Arabic and Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Scrooge: A Christmas Carol’ Review: Slightly Off Key

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      Luke Evans, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley lend their voices to this animated musical of the holiday classic.In a season of movies that singe the rich — we see you “The Menu” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” — the animated musical “Scrooge: A Christmas Carol” spares one of literature’s more infamous capitalists, Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge (voiced by Luke Evans). Perhaps “spares” is not the right word for what Jacob Marley’s partner in predatory lending endures in the director Stephen Donnelly’s vivid if hardly warranted adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella.The timing for Dickens’s Industrial Revolution jabs may be apt, but this outing’s gilded extravagance muffles the author’s less-is-moral observations. The animation waxes psychedelic. The songs, arranged by Jeremy Holland-Smith, often have an auditioning-for-Broadway belt to them. The opener “I Love Christmas” — with Scrooge’s good-hearted nephew, Harry (Fra Fee), singing and dancing his way to his uncle’s establishment — feels pushy.Before his death in 2021, the distinguished lyricist-composer Leslie Bricusse wrote that new song. Holland-Smith and Donnelly penned two others, and the arranger revamped the other songs, which Bricusse had created for the 1970 adaptation, “Scrooge,” including the Oscar-nominated, zest-for-life-and-death number “Thank You Very Much.” That film starred Albert Finney and featured Alec Guinness as Jacob Marley. This cast, too, brims with class acts: Jonathan Pryce as the cautioning Marley; Olivia Colman as Past; Jessie Buckley as Scrooge’s onetime fiancée. Especially winning are Giles Terera (as Tom Jenkins) and Trevor Dion Nicholas as that most Falstaffian of the Christmas Eve ghosts, Present.This update has its moments of aplomb, but too many of Dickens’s most incisive lines are no more, which invites the not entirely charitable, two-word retort Scrooge made famous.Scrooge: A Christmas CarolNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More