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      At New York Children’s Film Festival, the Films Come First

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      The New York International Children’s Film Festival returns with a diverse, sophisticated slate, including Richard Linklater’s animated take on the 1969 moon landing.When Chloé Zhao won the Academy Awards for best director and best picture for “Nomadland” last year, some who felt special pride were neither her relatives nor her film industry collaborators. These delighted fans were the team behind the annual New York International Children’s Film Festival, which in 2011 showed one of Zhao’s earliest projects: “Daughters,” a 10-minute short about a 14-year-old Chinese girl being forced into an arranged marriage.The festival, whose 25th-anniversary edition begins on Friday evening at the SVA Theater in Manhattan, has long showcased filmmakers who either go on to distinguished careers or have already achieved them. This year’s opening-night titles include “Where Is Anne Frank,” a haunting animated feature about children affected by wars past and present, from the award-winning Israeli director Ari Folman (“Waltz With Bashir”). On March 19, the festival will close with “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood,” an animated examination of the 1969 moon landing by the acclaimed American filmmaker Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”), who will conduct a livestreamed Q. and A. with the audience.“We are a film festival first,” Nina Guralnick, the organization’s executive director, said in a video interview. In choosing sophisticated works, she added, “we want the program and the experience to be part of a continuum of film appreciation and film discovery, and not kind of segmented as something for kids.”This year, Guralnick and Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, are confronting the challenges of the pandemic by presenting both in-person screenings — almost all at the SVA Theater — and virtual offerings. Although the 20 features and more than 60 shorts make up a robust and global slate (this year includes the festival’s first film from Kyrgyzstan), the programmers will host fewer screenings, showing some titles in the theater only once, and others only online.“Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood” is an animated examination of the 1969 moon landing by Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”).NetflixThe streaming works, which will be available through April 3 — past the festival’s official end date — will include all those for children under 5, who are still too young to be vaccinated against Covid-19. This year, however, also gives children ages 3 to 5 a broader range of short films than in the past, as well as a feature: the Swedish director Michael Ekblad’s “Best Birthday Ever,” an animated tale about a kindergarten rabbit who must cope with a baby sister.“We really wanted to get back into the theater this year, if we could safely,” Guralnick said. And while circumstances won’t allow in-person award festivities, the festival will still feature its audience-choice and jury prizes. (It is one of the few Oscar-qualifying children’s festivals, meaning that its prizewinning shorts are eligible for Academy Award consideration.)This year, one of the programming highlights is animation, which Villaseñor described as a way to give young audiences “a different point of access” to subjects that might otherwise be too harsh.“Charlotte,” for instance, a feature by the Canadian directors Tahir Rana and Éric Warin, uses painterly animation to illuminate the life and work of Charlotte Salomon, a young German Jewish artist — voiced by Keira Knightley — who died at Auschwitz.Folman also chose intricate animation for “Where Is Anne Frank” because, he said in a phone interview, it offers “endless opportunity to do crosses between reality and imagination, between conscious and subconscious, between dreams and true stories.” Folman undertakes all of these in the film, which focuses not on Anne but on Kitty, the imaginary friend to whom Anne’s diary was addressed. Kitty emerges from the journal as a girl in contemporary Amsterdam, traveling across time to learn what happened to her friend. During her quest, she encounters refugee children who reflect Anne’s legacy.“I don’t look at it as a Holocaust movie,” Folman said. “I look at it as a coming-of-age movie.”The festival, however, does not neglect animation’s affinity for the wildly comic. In Domee Shi’s “Turning Red,” from Disney and Pixar, a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl transforms into a big red panda whenever she’s too excited.“Oink,” Mascha Halberstad’s stop-motion feature about a pet piglet.Viking Film/A Private ViewOther boisterous travails occur in “Oink,” the Dutch director Mascha Halberstad’s stop-motion feature about a little girl with an imperiled pet piglet. But this is no “Charlotte’s Web.” Oink, the piglet, makes an indelible mark in not always welcome ways — housebreaking is an issue — and Babs, his owner, has her hands full, especially with a visiting grandfather obsessed with a sausage-making contest. Halberstad, who will attend the festival with the producer Marleen Slot for a Q. and A. on Friday, explained in a video interview that she was aiming for a tone like that of Roald Dahl because “he doesn’t underestimate children.” Though the film ends happily, “it has a bit of an edge,” she said.The festival also offers titles that capture an interplay between art and science. “I wanted to eliminate the divide between them,” Villaseñor said, “and have people realize how vitally important the creativity in the arts is to innovating in the sciences.”“Gagarine,” for instance, a poignant, inspiring movie that was selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, mingles a teenager’s passion for space exploration with his desire to have a home. The first feature from the young French directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, the film was shot at the real Cité Gagarine, a housing project outside of Paris that was torn down in 2019.“We were really roommates with the demolition team,” Trouilh said as he sat next to Liatard in a video call from Paris. Their fictional protagonist, Youri (Alséni Bathily), refuses to leave, constructing for himself an elaborate kind of secret space capsule in the shadow of the wrecking ball.“Because of the empty space left by the absence of his parents,” Liatard said, “we imagine that space is the thing that is a refuge for Youri.”Alséni Bathily in “Gagarine,” about a teenager’s passion for space exploration. It was shot at a Paris housing project that was torn down in 2019.Cohen Media GroupMore technology-fueled dreams appear not only in Linklater’s “Apollo 10½,” in which another boy imagines himself lifting off, but also in the festival’s annual shorts program “Girls P.O.V.,” which this year features young female science pioneers, real and imagined. Still other budding innovators occupy the spotlight in Thomas Verrette’s documentary “Zero Gravity,” about diverse middle school students in a NASA coding competition.Such films capture the enduring principles of the festival, which was founded by Eric Beckman and Emily Shapiro, parents who in 1997 made a commitment to offering children more independent and less commercial fare.“We’ve wanted to help kids dream beyond the limitations of their own reality,” Guralnick said. Through the festival’s many iterations, she added, “we’ve been trying to be a gateway for children for 25 years to what they envision the future to be, to what they envision their world to be — should be, can be.”The New York International Children’s Film FestivalMarch 4-19; 212-349-0330; nyicff.org. More

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      ‘After Yang’ Review: Do Androids Dream of Sheep, Babysitting, Being?

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      Colin Farrell plays a father who tries to repair the family’s caretaker-android in a science-fiction tale about what it means to be human.“What’s so great about being human,” a character asks in “After Yang.” Fair question! People are trouble, though not as much as usual in this muted, melancholic tale about being and belonging. Set in a future that’s at once recognizable and enigmatic, the movie envisions a world so outwardly peaceful it can be hard to believe that it takes place on Earth. Tears are shed, yes, but nearly everyone is awfully nice and almost always uses indoor voices, including the clones and androids that — or, rather, who — are part of the family.The human-machine interface is teased throughout “After Yang,” which was written and directed by Kogonada and tracks what happens when a family’s android, called Yang, stops working. The shutdown rattles the household, especially the father, who is also the focus of Alexander Weinstein’s original, tart story “Saying Goodbye to Yang.” In both versions, the busted android creates logistical hurdles: The parents work and need a caregiver for their child. But what animates the movie, imbuing it with rueful feeling and nosing it down some lightly philosophical byways, is that the father seems almost as broken as the android.Soon after the movie opens, Yang (Justin H. Min) shuts down, following an amusing, wittily staged and shot family dance contest. A so-called technosapien with a human countenance and — like the people in his life — the tamped-down affect of someone who needs to cut down on his antidepressants, Yang was bought by Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) to care for their young daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). Yang teaches Mika, who was adopted from China, about her heritage, rattling off “Chinese fun facts.” He’s also there for her when she wakes up in the middle of the night.Repairing Yang proves unsurprisingly more challenging than poking around under the hood of a car. Yang is a secondhand model, “certified refurbished,” yet used nevertheless. And while his warranty is still valid, the store where he was procured, Second Siblings, is out of business. “I told you we should have just bought a new one,” Kyra chides Jake with the old I-told-you-so sigh. In the future, men still take care of the big household chores; wives berate their husbands for making foolish decisions; and some families live in swoon-worthy houses with floor-to-ceiling windows and open-floor plans.Kogonada (“Columbus”) has a fondness for 20th-century modernist architecture and a skill for creating a countervailing air of claustrophobia. Much of “After Yang” takes place in Jake and Kyra’s home, a handsome maze of glass that suggests a transparency unmatched by the family’s relationships: There’s no oversharing here. In some scenes, the glass frames the characters as if they were pictures, much like the display boxes in which Yang exhibited his butterfly collection. Throughout, including in the house and costume design, with its robes and black slip-on shoes, there are distinct, meaningful Asian influences and flourishes.The tomorrow of “After Yang” is casually multicultural, visually detailed and at times thematically and frustratingly elusive. The expressive production design mixes old and new, organic and tech, like the surprising bits of wood and green plants inside the family’s driverless vehicle, a pod that suggests a moving terrarium. The family itself always seems caught in a bubble, despite sporadic trips outside and views of their unnamed city, with its dense foliage and far-out buildings. If climate change is a problem you wouldn’t know it, though there’s plenty of grim news cluttering up a bulletin board in a repair shop Jake visits.That bulletin board and the racist anti-Asian messages pinned to it are in the original story, which is set in Detroit and invokes that city’s violent past. Kogonada adds more items to the board, notably headlines referring to a decades-long war and clashes between China and the United States. But the close-up of the board lasts only seconds and its contents are easy to miss. Then it’s back to Jake’s repair journey, a quest that leads increasingly inward. Yet there’s more to this quest than might appear because along the way Kogonada is upending the noxious stereotype of the “stoic” Asian, a familiar cliché, including in science fiction.The effort to fix Yang gives the movie its narrative spine and slow-building emotional punch. Particularly potent is Jake’s discovery of Yang’s memories, which are initially represented as pinpricks of light. Using a viewer, Jake narrows in on different pinpricks, which then expand until they fill the frame, becoming movies-within-the-movie that he can freeze and replay. Some memories last only as long as it takes for a friend of Yang’s, Ada (Haley Lu Richardson), to turn to the camera with a searching look. Others seem like excerpts from a series of disconnected stories, an assemblage of opening, middle and concluding paragraphs that together create a mosaic portrait of Yang that eventually changes Jake.As Yang emerges more clearly, so does Jake. Farrell is the most experienced performer in the main cast, and he’s able to create depths of feeling — as well a sense of untapped mystery — within the largely unmodulated expressive range that Kogonada favors, at times to a fault. With eyebrow flicks, tiny physical modulations and shifts in pitch, Farrell movingly turns a shadow into a recognizable person, while also bringing much-needed humor to the movie. Min has the trickier, less-satisfying role — he is, after all, playing an android — but he does what needs to be done: He makes you see, really see Yang as he was, alive to the world and to love.After YangRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters and on Showtime platforms. More

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      ‘Nightride’ Review: One Last Job

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      The movie is indebted to neon-lit crime thrillers set behind the wheel of an outlaw’s automobile, but it fails to deliver the goods.Stephen Fingleton’s “Nightride” is indebted to a rich tradition of nocturnal, neon-lit crime thrillers set behind the wheel of an outlaw’s automobile, beginning with Walter Hill’s 1978 classic “The Driver” and continuing through Michael Mann’s 1981 heist flick “Thief” and Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 throwback “Drive.”As if to make these connections even clearer, in an early scene a drug-dealing Ph.D. candidate called Scholar (Ciaran Flynn) is speaking to his supplier, Budge (Moe Dunford), and holding forth on the brilliance of Mann, who also directed the 2006 film “Miami Vice.” Scholar believes that “Miami Vice” is “the apex of Mann’s post-celluloid filmography.” But the Mann picture that “Nightride” most resembles is probably “Collateral,” which similarly concerns an all-night criminal odyssey and takes place primarily inside a car. Had Fingleton included a hacker as a character, we could have had a bit of “Blackhat,” too.The plot of “Nightride” is little more than an assembly of stock types: the crook trying to go clean (Dunford), the loan shark feared for his vicious reprisals (Stephen Rea), the well-meaning girlfriend who becomes endangered when the big score goes wrong (Joana Ribeiro). Its distinguishing feature is that the action unfolds in real time, in one (seemingly) continuous 90-minute take, as Budge, the drug-runner played by Dunford, cruises around Belfast trying to pull off one last job.The one-take gimmick — much easier to achieve now thanks to digital cameras —has become common enough that it barely qualifies as novel, having been used in “Birdman,” “Victoria,” and “1917,” among many others. As in those movies, there is a kind of “Look, Ma, no hands!” bluster to this technique that smacks of needlessly showing off, calling attention to the aptitude of the filmmaker at the expense of the characters and the story. It’s worth noting that while Mann’s crime films are aesthetically sumptuous, the images are always in service of the ideas — not the other way around.NightrideNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Fresh’ Review: First Date? Try the Veal.

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      Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan star in a dazzling (and very funny) cannibal romance from Mimi Cave.Dating is innately predatory in “Fresh,” a wickedly funny cannibal romance and dazzling feature debut from the director Mimi Cave. Even the run-of-the-mill rotten blind date that opens the film has stomach rumbles of menace, with crabs trapped in tanks, chefs slamming knives and ducks dangling in the window. Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a doe-like graphic designer in Portland, Ore., finds herself on the hook to split the check with a dingbat (Brett Dier) who loots her leftover noodles and leaves her feeling chewed up and spat out.This singleton and her cynical best friend, Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs), consider themselves alert to the warning signs of a bad boyfriend. But a charming doctor named Steve (Sebastian Stan), who scores Noa’s number in the produce aisle of a grocery store, manages to earn Noa’s trust, and ours, during two dates and a road trip. It’s a substantial amount of time to savor Stan and Edgar-Jones’s playful chemistry — right up until Steve drugs Noa with a poisoned cocktail, handcuffs her in the basement of his vacation home and announces his hunger for a harrowing dinner. (The screenplay was written by Lauryn Kahn, who cut her teeth writing shorts for the comedy website “Funny or Die.”) Cue the opening credits which, coming 30 minutes into the movie, are effectively a prankish declaration that the film has played its audience for lovesick fools.Now, the real heartbreak (and cleaving) begins. Edgar-Jones, who starred in Hulu’s “Normal People” in 2020 and who leads a feature for the first time here, can let her eyes well with wet vulnerability and, a beat later, burst into giggles at a joke about eating breast meat. She plays Noa’s predicament straight. Yet the frame around her performance is marvelously askew. Cave, the director, is a sharp observer of details: wet lips, nervous feet, the cocky way Stan plays air guitar on a severed thigh. Comedy sharpens the film’s fangs, as do Martin Pensa’s witty edits and Pawel Pogorzelski’s bold, intelligent camera movements, which stumble and swoon and occasionally somersault to make it truly feel like Noa has gone through the looking glass of terrible dates. (As a grace note, the score includes a warbling ballad played on a musical saw.)“Fresh” wants to do — and say — everything. As a result, it can feel overstuffed with ideas. In addition to demonstrating a fluency in horror tropes, Kahn’s script pokes at a dozen modern mating stereotypes, even getting in an elbow at how today’s internet-savvy woman needs just five minutes of social media sleuthing to become a 21st-century Columbo. Cave lets the tone waltz from silly to sad and back again, but neither she nor Kahn buy into lazy fictions about girls who confidently transform into vengeful killers. Instead, they maintain a conviction that men have the same exploitable soft spots. “Giving yourself over to somebody, becoming one with somebody else forever,” Steve purrs to Noa, “that’s a beautiful thing, that’s surrender, that’s love.” No, that’s a predator’s dream — and not all predators brandish forks.FreshRated R for coarse language, coarse meat and hazy sex. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Huda’s Salon’ Review: The Services Are Not What You’d Expect.

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      In Hany Abu-Assad’s pulpy thriller, two Palestinian women are trapped between political enemies that are united in their misogyny.“Huda’s Salon” opens with an audacious rug-pull. Behind an unassuming storefront in Bethlehem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the middle-aged Huda (Manal Awad) attends to a young mother Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi), as they gab about Facebook, frenemies and Reem’s controlling husband.Reem suddenly collapses, and event take a shocking turn. Huda has drugged her, and proceeds to strip Reem and stage compromising pictures of her with a man who had been hiding in the back room. When Reem awakens, Huda reveals that she’s an informant for the Israeli Secret Service. Unless Reem wants the pictures to be released, she must become one, too.This is the first of many twists in Hany Abu-Assad’s pulpy thriller, which cuts between two tinderbox scenarios. As soon as Reem leaves the salon, Huda is captured and interrogated by the other side, Palestinian fighters hunting down the many women Huda has recruited to spy for the Israelis. Reem, realizing that they are on her tail, paces around her tiny apartment, desperately contemplating her options: tell her husband and risk his wrath, or turn to the Israelis.As convoluted as it gets, “Huda’s Salon” makes a simple and forceful point: Caught between political enemies united in their misogyny, Palestinian women have no way out. Where Abu-Assad falters is in turning Huda into a didactic mouthpiece for the very themes that Reem’s tribulations, filmed up-close with a jerky camera, convey effortlessly.Pitted against a Palestinian leader, Hasan (Ali Suliman), in an extended interrogation, Huda offers smug, simplistic retorts: “It is easier to oppress a society that’s already repressing itself.”Awad’s formidable swagger notwithstanding, Huda’s back story as a denigrated divorcée is sketched too thinly for her self-righteousness to be convincing. That she somehow manages to rattle her ruthless interrogator — and contrive a sentimental out for Reem — takes the sting out of the film’s critique.Huda’s SalonRated R for nudity and graphic violence. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Mother Schmuckers’ Review: Dumber and Dumbest

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      In this atrocious comedy, two boneheaded brothers search for a lost dog.The title is bad enough, but it’s all downhill from there in the revolting Belgian farce “Mother Schmuckers.” I would say words fail me, but they don’t. It’s just that most of them are unprintable.Written and directed by the siblings Lenny and Harpo Guit, this tasteless first feature presents the appalling adventures of Issachar and Zabulon (Maxi Delmelle and Harpo Guit), adult brothers who reside in Brussels with their permanently distraught mother, Cachemire (Claire Bodson). A prostitute who is equally fed up with her job and her idiot offspring — who are introduced frying up feces for breakfast — Cachemire issues the dolts an ultimatum: Find the family dog they recently misplaced, or get out.What follows is an odious odyssey from one dust up to another as these two public menaces gobble trash, shoot a homeless man and, in one especially loathsome sequence, gate-crash a private bestiality club. Encounters with acquaintances — most only marginally less moronic than themselves — pad a screenplay with no apparent notion where it’s going, or how to get there. (The inexplicable slumming of Mathieu Amalric, as the men’s befuddled father, is another matter entirely.)Ugly to look at and puerile to listen to, “Mother Schmuckers” makes 70 minutes feel like as many hours. Despite claiming inspiration from Italian comedies and the Farrelly brothers, the filmmakers seem unable to construct a truly funny joke or coherent story. We do eventually learn that Issachar and Zabulon believe themselves unloved; as far as this viewer is concerned, they’re absolutely right.Mother SchmuckersNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Asking for It’ Review: A Few Rude Men

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      An all-female gang of vigilantes pursue despicable men in this oppressive revenge fantasy.Subtle as a sledgehammer and shallow as a saucer, “Asking for It” is painted in such broad strokes that — with just a smidgen of humor — it would pass for satire. Yet this grim face-off between monstrous men and damaged women unspools with so much self-righteous swagger that the earnestness of its writer and director, Eamon O’Rourke, is never in doubt.After Joey (Kiersey Clemons), a sunny waitress, is sexually assaulted by an old friend, her shock is catnip to Regina (Alexandra Shipp) and the band of punk feminists — all survivors of some form of abuse — who have made it their business to punish errant males. Led by Sal (Radha Mitchell) and armed with grenades, guns and chemically castrating gas, these vengeful vigilantes roam their state (the movie was filmed in Oklahoma), meting out punishment to variously vile white men. Prominent among these is the repellent Mark Vanderhill (Ezra Miller), a top-hatted twerp whose Men First Movement preaches an ‘if you want it, take it’ philosophy to would-be alpha males.As the women battle fraternity bros, human traffickers and the racist police who enable them, this mirthless tale hinges on Joey’s unconvincing transformation from gentle homebody to violent avenger. On-the-nose dialogue (“Black and sweet, just like God made you,” responds one of Joey’s customers when asked how he likes his coffee) and distracting flash cuts substitute for back story in a film that cares little for differentiating one violated woman — or one pasty-faced jerk — from another. Instead, “Asking for It” is all about the trauma: Its heroines have nothing in common but suffering and nothing on their minds but revenge.Asking for ItRated R for racist attitudes and misogynist philosophy. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Long Walk’ Review: A Ghostly Future in Laos

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      This Laotian drama from Mattie Do presents a world where spirits linger on into a future that has been shaped by technology.The Laotian drama “The Long Walk” takes a languid look around a near-future dystopia where fighter jets leave smoke trails in the sky and government authorities track missing people using microchips embedded in their bodies. In this reality, a spiritual, occult world exists underneath the noses of officials.The movie follows an unnamed protagonist (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy), an isolated older man known by the people in his town as someone who can communicate with the dead and find people who have gone missing.But what the medium’s clients don’t know is that he also helps women who are sick and desperate for relief from life’s hardships facilitate their own deaths. When a young woman (Vilouna Phetmany) seeks him out for guidance in finding her missing mother, she doesn’t know that the body he leads her to is one he buried himself.The hermit travels along the road connecting life and death, accompanied by ghosts and in possession of powers that allow him to visit and potentially alter his own past. Yet despite the high concepts that drive the film’s story, its writer and director, Mattie Do, does not overburden the movie with exposition or explanations.She sets a leisurely pace, pausing to watch how the humid air interacts with the smoke from the shaman’s vape pen. The atmosphere here is dense with textural detail and requires patience to sift through the layers of meaning that are packed into each frame. The reward for waiting for the fog to lift is a movie that presents a unique take on science fiction, one that looks for the ghosts that linger on in a world that has been shaped by technology.The Long WalkNot rated. In Lao, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More