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      French Female Directors Continue Hot Streak at Rendez-Vous Festival

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      The series returns in-person with an especially strong slate of work by Frenchwomen — fitting, given their run of honors at top festivals.Sex and the city, false identities and love triangles feature prominently in this year’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema, an annual showcase of contemporary French filmmaking held by Film at Lincoln Center.Since last year’s virtual edition, female directors from France have been making headlines, with two major European festivals awarding their top prizes to Frenchwomen: Julia Ducournau took home the Cannes Palme d’Or for her gender-bending love story “Titane”; and Audrey Diwan nabbed Venice’s Golden Lion for “Happening,” about a young woman in the 1960s seeking an abortion. Even the master filmmaker Claire Denis received one of her only competitive awards when she won best director for “Fire” last month at Germany’s Berlinale.“Fire,” a brooding melodrama, will be the opening-night film when Rendez-Vous make its return to in-person screenings on Thursday in New York. A pared-down pandemic production stocked with booming performances by Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon and Grégoire Colin, the film is Denis’s second collaboration with the screenwriter and novelist Christine Angot. Unlike their first effort, “Let the Sunshine In” (2018), a sly romantic comedy in which Binoche played an artist drifting through a succession of frustrating relationships, “Fire” is all Sturm und Drang. It focuses on the love lives of a late-middle-age couple with the kind of tempestuous passion befitting an adolescent affair. Though Denis obliquely weaves in broader social commentary with a subplot involving a troubled mixed-race son, the film’s shambolic qualities stoke the erotic follies at its core with transportive delirium.Anaïs Demoustier as the title character opposite Christophe Montenez in “Anais in Love.”Danielle McCarthy-Bole/Année ZéroAt Rendez-Vous, Denis is joined by other established French directors like Arnaud Desplechin (“Deception”), François Ozon (“Everything Went Fine”) and Christophe Honoré (“Guermantes”). But a newer generation of filmmakers is making a strong showing as well, and many of them are building on the great promise of the festival-winning streak for Gallic women.Three of the four feature debuts in the program are by women, including Constance Meyer’s “Robust,” a handsome-looking dramedy about an aging actor (Gérard Depardieu) who strikes up a friendship with his female bodyguard (Déborah Lukumuena). Though significantly less flamboyant, “Robust” takes cues from the 2012 interracial buddy blockbuster “Les Intouchables.”What may be the strongest debut in the lineup is Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “Anaïs in Love,” which would make a fine double feature with “The Worst Person in the World”; both are about impulsive 30-somethings who fall in love and lust at the clip of a pop song. “Anaïs,” a jaunty summer story full of droll chatter and sparkling countryside vistas, follows its capricious heroine as she enters into an affair with an older man, only to find herself more interested in his novelist wife.Films like “Anaïs in Love” that relish the frisky humor and whimsy of modern romance without moralizing guilt would seem to fit squarely in the sexually liberated tradition that many see as central to France’s artistic heritage. The debate between a younger generation of feminists spearheading the country’s #MeToo movement, which has been gaining momentum after a feeble start, and elite figures who denounce the movement as extreme and puritanical continues to cast a shadow over the French film industry. This year’s Rendez-Vous selection certainly straddles the old and the new — though conspicuously absent is the Rendez-Vous regular Jacques Doillon, whose strong, if thorny, new film, “Third Grade,” concerns the playground intrigue between two children, one of whom sexually harasses the other. Nevertheless, the program keeps in step with the national penchant for sexual audacity.Jade Springer as the daughter of divorcing parents in “Petite Solange.”Aurora FilmsMale directors have rarely had any qualms about examining the intimate lives of women, and Jacques Audiard’s “Paris, 13th District,” a punchy drama in slick black and white about the messy dating lives of young Parisians, continues that tendency. It’s a pleasant surprise, though the auteurist theory explanation for a film’s success (or failure) is particularly questionable here. Consider the compelling performances by the film’s lead actresses: Noémie Merlant plays a law student whose life is thrown into shambles when her classmates mistake her for a popular camgirl; and Lucie Zhang makes her auspicious debut as a first-generation Franco-Chinese immigrant, a punkish, bedraggled young woman with a self-sabotaging romantic streak. Complex and not necessarily likable without falling into the “messy woman” archetype of so many pop feminist characters, the women of “Paris, 13th District” must have benefited from the august scriptwriting team — Audiard, Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) and Léa Mysius — who temper the director’s penchant for vacuous stylization with grounded humor and pathos.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Against the Ice’ Review: Snow Buddies

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      A hard-core first half is deflated by sleepy melodrama and a formulaic script in this adventure film about the Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen.Streaming on Netflix, “Against the Ice” gives the mission to secure Denmark’s claim to Greenland the survival flick treatment, and the explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen a glow up in the form of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (“Game of Thrones”).Though set in the early twentieth century, this Danish production by the filmmaker Peter Flinth has a slick digital sheen that makes the absence of technology feel like an accident. This anachronism looks cheap, and the script by Coster-Waldau and Joe Derrick (based on Mikkelsen’s memoirs) checks all the boxes you might expect from an arctic adventure story — polar bear showdowns, starvation blues, yearning hallucinations of a woman.In other words, it’s perfectly formulaic.The film opens jarringly when a comrade returns to base camp from a failed expedition with his feet grossly frostbitten and swollen like plums, to which the steely Mikkelsen takes a machete. Dashing patriot that he is, Mikkelsen refuses to abandon the cause, though none of his men care to join him aside from Iver Iversen (Joe Cole), a chipper volunteer who doesn’t know what he’s in for.In an effective, if transparently manipulative narrative element, the duo’s sled dogs are the prime casualties, and we witness their ranks whittle down in a variety of horrifying ways. Dog lovers beware: In one scene, a fazed Iversen must sacrifice one of the pups to provide food for the rest. Mikkelsen embodies this unapologetic survival instinct, and he’s not impressed with his sentimental partner.The saintly younger man, however, puts up with his captain when he experiences visions of his girlfriend, and Flinth confusingly skips past swaths of time to cram in more moments of brotherly friction. Disappointingly, this shift from a relatively hard-core first half to a second bogged down by desultory dramatic beats significantly lowers the stakes. It’s a known fact that Mikkelsen and Iversen made it home, but “Against the Ice” doesn’t succeed in making us feel anything when they do.Against the IceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Bong Joon Ho and Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Oscar Surprise ‘Drive My Car’

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      The Korean filmmaker and the Japanese director have long admired each other. The two explain why Hamaguchi’s best-picture nominee resonates.In January 2020, just weeks before his film “Parasite” would make Oscar history, the director Bong Joon Ho was in Tokyo doing a magazine interview. By that point in what had become a very long press tour, Bong had dutifully sat for dozens of profiles, but at least this one offered a little bit of intrigue: Bong’s interviewer was Ryusuke Hamaguchi, a rising director in his own right.For Bong, a fan of Hamaguchi’s films “Asako I & II” and “Happy Hour,” this was a welcome chance to mix things up. “I had many questions that I wanted to ask him,” Bong recalled, “especially since I’d been doing many months of promotion and I was very sick of talking about my own film.”But Hamaguchi would not be deterred. He was a man on a mission — “pleasantly stubborn and persistent,” as Bong remembered him — and every time a playful Bong tried to turn the tables and ask the younger director some questions about his career, Hamaguchi grew ever more serious and insisted that they speak only about “Parasite.”“I really wanted to know how he made such an incredible film, even though I knew how tired he was of talking about ‘Parasite,’” Hamaguchi said. “I felt sorry for him, but I still wanted to ask him questions!”Now, two years later, Bong has finally gotten his wish: The 43-year-old Hamaguchi is the man of the moment, and Bong is only too happy to jump on the phone and discuss him. Hamaguchi’s film “Drive My Car,” a three-hour Japanese drama about grief and art, has become the season’s most unlikely Oscar smash, receiving nominations for best picture and international film in addition to nods for screenplay and directing.Hidetoshi Nishijima, left, and Toko Miura in “Drive My Car.”Bitters EndThose happen to be the same things “Parasite” was honored for two years ago, when that South Korean class-struggle thriller collected four Oscars and became the first film not in the English language to win best picture.Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.“‘Parasite’ pushed open that very heavy door that had remained closed,” Hamaguchi told me through an interpreter this week. “Without ‘Parasite’ and its wins, I don’t think our film would have been received well in this way.”Called a “quiet masterpiece” by the Times critic Manohla Dargis, “Drive My Car” follows Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater director grappling with the death of his wife, as he mounts a production of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima. The theater company assigns him a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who ferries him to and from work in a red Saab while holding back vast emotional reserves of her own. Though Yusuke at first resents Misaki’s presence, a connection — and then a confession — is finally made.“There are many directors that are great at portraying characters, but there is something peculiar and unique about Hamaguchi,” Bong said via an interpreter by phone from Seoul. “He’s very intense in his approach to the characters, very focused, and he never rushes things.”And though that unhurried approach can result in a long running time, Bong felt that the three-hour length of “Drive My Car” only enriched its eventual emotional impact.“I would compare this to the sound of a bell that resonates for a long time,” he said.Perhaps it’s fitting that the film’s awards-season journey has been slowly building, too. Unlike “Parasite,” which rocketed out of the Cannes Film Festival after winning the Palme d’Or, the intimate “Drive My Car” (adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami) emerged from Cannes last summer with a screenplay trophy and little Oscar buzz. But after critics groups in New York and Los Angeles both gave their top film award to Hamaguchi, the movie’s profile began to steadily rise.From left, Choi Woo Shik, Song Kang Ho, Chang Hyae Jin and Park So Dam  in “Parasite.”NeonStill, the road to Oscar is littered with plenty of critical favorites that couldn’t go the distance. When I asked Hamaguchi why “Drive My Car” had proved to be his breakthrough, the director was at a loss.“I honestly really don’t know,” Hamaguchi said. “I want to ask you. Why do you think this is the case?”I suggested that during the pandemic, it affects us even more to watch characters who yearn to connect but cannot. Even when the characters in “Drive My Car” share the same bed, the same room or the same Saab, there’s a gulf between them that can’t always be closed.Hamaguchi agreed. “We are physically separated and yet we’re able to connect online,” he said. “It’s that thing of being connected and yet, at the same time, not.”To illustrate what he meant, Hamaguchi recalled that 10 years ago, while working on a documentary about the aftermath of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, he traveled through eastern Japan interviewing survivors. As he lent those people a camera and his trust, deeply buried thoughts came spilling out of them.“After the interviews, I wrote out the words, and I realized that the ones that really shook me were the words that were quite normal or ordinary,” he said. “They were things that perhaps these people had already thought but had never thought to verbalize until that moment.”The same is true when it comes to the “Drive My Car” characters, whose internal struggles can only reach the level of epiphany when they find someone to confide in.“It’s possible that when the characters say what they’re thinking, the audience could think, ‘Oh, they didn’t actually know this?’ But it’s about the journey of being able to get to a place to verbalize that, and for that journey to happen, it’s because someone is there to witness it,” Hamaguchi said. “Somebody being there to listen has an incredible power.”And Hamaguchi wouldn’t mind some company himself, if only to help him process all those Oscar nominations. When I spoke to him last week, he was quarantining in a Tokyo hotel after returning from the Berlin Film Festival. “I haven’t seen anyone, so no celebration for me,” he said.As the Oscar nominations were announced on Feb. 8, Hamaguchi was flying to Berlin; when the plane landed hours later, he turned on his phone and was flooded with text messages. Even now, recounting the story, he remains in a state of disbelief.“To be honest, I don’t think I’ll feel like all of this is real until I’m actually at the awards ceremony,” he said. “No matter how many congratulations I get, it’s hard to believe, especially when I’m confined to a narrow, small hotel room. Perhaps when I’m at the awards ceremony and I see directors like Spielberg there, reality might kick in.”Bong, center, onstage at the Oscars when “Parasite” won best picture in 2020.Noel West for The New York TimesBong was less gobsmacked by Hamaguchi’s nominations. “I knew ‘Drive My Car’ was a great film, and I didn’t find it surprising,” he said. “And since the academy lately has been showing more interest in non-English films, I expect that the film will do well at the awards.”His own Oscar ceremony was a whirlwind experience — “I can’t believe it’s been two years already,” Bong mused — but he declined to offer advice to Hamaguchi on how to navigate the night.“I’m sure he will do well,” Bong said. “He is someone who is like an ancient stone — he has a very strong center.”Instead, Bong extended a request. When they first met in Tokyo, and again last year during a panel discussion at the Busan Film Festival in South Korea, there wasn’t much time for the two men to hang out. “So this year, I hope we will be able to get together either in Seoul or Tokyo and have a delicious meal,” Bong said. And after the Oscars, surely they would have plenty of notes to compare.Hamaguchi was eager to accept the invitation. “I’m truly delighted to hear that,” he said, though he cautioned that Bong might not like the topic of dinner conversation: “I would really love to keep asking questions about how he makes such amazing films. I want to keep asking him until he’s sick of me asking!” More

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      ‘Hell Is Empty’ Review: Sins of the Father

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      In this bare-bones horror film, a young woman joins a cult and eventually defies its patriarch.In horror, the burden of taking down the patriarchy — whether symbolized by a group of violent men or just one foreboding male monster — often rests on the humble shoulders of a young woman. “Hell Is Empty,” a film by the director Jo Shaffer about a girl who haplessly joins and eventually dismantles a remote cult, follows this tradition. Unfortunately, its heroine is just one in a series of underwritten characters.The film centers on Lydia (Spencer Peppet), a redheaded runaway who is found, unconscious, in the wilderness and brought to the cult compound by its leader, Ed (Travis Mitchell). Lydia joins four other women in a rickety island shack overseen by Ed, who the followers also call Artist, for his prolific paintings of biblical scenes and the apocalypse. One noticeably pregnant follower, Saratoga (Nia Farrell), claims to be a virgin expecting the son of God. Lydia sees no red flags here and happily stays, eventually fighting back against Ed — and two of the other women — only after things get murderous.Forget about hell, the emptiness these filmmakers must address lies primarily in their predominantly female cast of characters. We don’t know where Lydia comes from, nor why it would be a worse place to return to than a cult led by a rapist. There is no plot justification for Lydia’s bizarre acceptance, just as there is little background for anything else in the script, co-written by Shaffer and Adam DeSantes.One of Ed’s followers, Murphy (Aya), stumbles from scene to scene, hunched over and completely mute. An oblivious crony to Ed, she presents a particularly galling caricature of developmental disability, one that is painful to watch in 2022. The movie’s press notes explain that Murphy grew up alone and feral in the forest, but there is no mention of this in the film itself — an apt example of how “Hell Is Empty” renders all its players with aggravating shallowness.Hell Is EmptyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      James Earl Jones Will Have a Broadway Theater Named After Him

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      The landmark theater will be renamed in honor of the 91-year-old actor who has made 21 Broadway appearances and won two competitive Tony Awards.The Shubert Organization, which is Broadway’s biggest landlord, will rename one of its 17 theaters after the actor James Earl Jones, fulfilling a promise made when Black artists pressed for greater recognition in the wake of the 2020 protests against societal racism.The organization said Wednesday that it would name the Cort Theater, a landmark 110-year-old house located on West 48th Street, after Jones, a two-time competitive Tony Award winner who, over six decades, has appeared in 21 Broadway shows.“He’s an icon — he really is one of the greatest American actors, and this is just a perfect match,” said Robert E. Wankel, chairman and chief executive of the Shubert Organization.In a telephone interview, the 91-year-old Jones said he was honored by the news. “It means a lot,” he said. “It’s too heavy for me to try to define.”The James Earl Jones Theater will be the second Broadway house named for a Black artist; the August Wilson, operated by Jujamcyn Theaters, was renamed for the American playwright shortly after his death in 2005. The Shubert Organization last summer pledged to name a theater after a Black artist as part of an agreement with the advocacy organization Black Theater United; the Nederlander Organization has also promised to take such a step.Jones, best known as the voice of Darth Vader in the “Star Wars” films, has had a long and illustrious career on Broadway. He first worked there in 1957, as an understudy in a short-lived play called “The Egghead,” and then starting in 1958 he had a role in “Sunrise at Campobello,” which ran for 16 months at the Cort Theater.Jones recalled that in “Sunrise at Campobello” he had a line — “Mrs. Roosevelt, supper is served” — that he struggled to deliver because of a speech disorder. “I almost didn’t make it through because I’m a stutterer,” he said. “But it became a lot of fun eventually.”Jones’s most recent Broadway performance was in a 2015 revival of “The Gin Game.” He won his two competitive Tonys for best actor, in 1969 for “The Great White Hope” and in 1987 for originating the role of Troy Maxson in Wilson’s “Fences.” In 2017 he won a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.The Cort, which seats 1,084 people, is among Broadway’s oldest theaters; it is currently undergoing a $45 million renovation and expansion, and is expected to reopen later this year, at which time there will be a rededication ceremony. Until now, the theater has been named for John Cort, a onetime vaudeville performer who, by the early 20th century, controlled multiple theaters across the country. Cort was the first operator of the Broadway house that has borne his name. More

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      Gérard Depardieu, Friend of Putin, Denounces ‘Fratricidal War’

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      “Stop the weapons and negotiate,” the French actor and staunch Russia ally told a news agency.For the past decade, the French actor Gérard Depardieu has been one of the closest Western celebrities to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.In 2013, the movie star became a Russian citizen to avoid taxes in France. In a letter to Russian state television at the time, Mr. Depardieu said, “I love your president, Vladimir Putin, very much and it’s mutual.” Mr. Putin awarded Mr. Depardieu Russian citizenship at a special dinner that year.As tensions between Russia and Ukraine were growing last month, Mr. Depardieu even went on French television to say, “Leave Vladimir alone.”Now, Mr. Depardieu has taken a surprising step toward ruining that cherished friendship when, on Tuesday, the actor denounced the war in Ukraine in an interview with Agence France-Presse, the French news service. “Russia and Ukraine have always been brother countries,” Mr. Depardieu said. “I am against this fratricidal war,” he added. “I say, ‘Stop the weapons and negotiate.’”Best known for 1990s movies including “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Green Card,” Mr. Depardieu later posted part of his statement on Instagram. His agent did not respond to an interview request.Mr. Depardieu’s comments are unlikely to change many Ukrainians’ views of the actor. In 2015, the Ukrainian government included Mr. Depardieu on a list of cultural figures who were a threat to the country’s security. It did not state a reason, but Ukrainian newspapers linked the decision to comments Mr. Depardieu had made questioning Ukraine’s independence. In 2014, at the Baltic Pearl movie festival in Latvia, Mr. Depardieu told reporters that he loved both Russia and “Ukraine, which is part of Russia.”The French tax exile is not the only famous actor to have taken Russian citizenship: Steven Seagal, the American-born star of action movies like “Under Siege,” was naturalized in 2016. On Thursday, Mr. Seagal’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request to discuss the actor’s views on the war in Ukraine.In recent years, Mr. Depardieu has been in the news for controversies aside from his Russia connections. In 2018, French prosecutors investigated rape allegations against him, but dropped the case the following year because of a lack of evidence. More

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      ‘The Jump’ Review: A Seaman’s Story of a Daring Escape

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      This documentary looks back at a Cold War defection drama that took place off the coast of Massachusetts.In its first half-hour, the documentary “The Jump” brings a bracing immediacy to a 50-year-old Cold War incident. In 1970, a Lithuanian sailor, Simas Kudirka, jumped from a Soviet trawler onto a U.S. Coast Guard vessel off Martha’s Vineyard in an effort to defect from the Soviet Union. (The boats were moored alongside each other for talks on fishing rights.)The Soviet crewmen were allowed to forcibly remove Kudirka from the Coast Guard ship and take him home, where he would presumably meet a chilling fate. The episode led to protests in the United States.To lay out these events, the early scenes principally crosscut among three people. Kudirka revisits the Coast Guard vessel he had jumped to a half-century earlier and energetically points out what happened and where.The director, Giedre Zickyte, interweaves Kudirka’s recollections with testimony from the ship’s captain, Cmdr. Ralph W. Eustis, and Lt. Cmdr. Paul E. Pakos, its executive officer, to create a fluid account that shows how the day unfolded from multiple perspectives.When the story shifts to the Soviet Union, Zickyte introduces a K.G.B. interrogator who recalls questioning Kudirka. The sailor received a 10-year sentence but was freed in 1974. In the film, Kudirka revisits a prison where he was held.“The Jump” grows less exciting after that, partly because Kudirka, its most engaging storyteller, was necessarily in the background of efforts to secure his freedom, and partly because his eventual release owed more to incredible luck than to a political breakthrough. In the film, Henry Kissinger recalls that President Gerald R. Ford directly intervened on Kudirka’s behalf. “No professional diplomat would ever have done that,” he says.The JumpNot rated. In Lithuanian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Watch These 13 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in March

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      It’s awards season, and a bunch of great Oscar-winning and -nominated films are leaving this month. Check them out while you can.The Academy Awards arrive at the end of March, and the titles leaving Netflix in the United States this month are steeped in Oscar glory, including multiple nominees and winners for best picture, actor, actress and more. They also include hit comedies, erotic thrillers and family favorites. Queue up these 13 movies before they’re gone. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘Howards End’ (March 15)This 1992 adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel was directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, and is a quintessential example of the “Merchant-Ivory film”: a period literary adaptation of impeccable design and intelligent craft. But Merchant-Ivory productions were too often inaccurately dismissed as airless, stuffy, overly intellectual affairs; “Howards End” is a robust, energetic picture, rife with familial betrayal, long-simmering attractions and class resentment. Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave and Helena Bonham-Carter are all excellent, but the standout is Emma Thompson, who won her first Oscar for her searing work as the protagonist Margaret Schlegel.Stream it here.‘Philomena’ (March 21)The British comic actor Steve Coogan — best known for his long-running turns as Alan Partridge and as a fictionalized version of himself in the “Trip” movies and BBC series — did a surprising shift to the serious when he co-wrote and co-starred in Stephen Frears’s adaptation of the nonfiction book “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee.” Judi Dench received an Oscar nomination for best actress for her heart-wrenching performance as the title character, an Irishwoman who sought out the son she was forced to give up for adoption a half-century earlier. Coogan (nominated for best screenplay) is the journalist who assists her and uncovers a horrifying story of religious hypocrisy.Stream it here.‘Lawless’ (March 27)The director John Hillcoat and the musician and screenwriter Nick Cave, who first collaborated on the unforgettable outback Western “The Proposition,” re-teamed for this story of bootlegging brothers in Depression Era Virginia. The cast is jaw-dropping: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Noah Taylor and Mia Wasikowska all get a chance to shine, and if nothing else, “Lawless” is a priceless opportunity to watch some of our finest thespians rub elbows. But it’s thoughtful and entertaining besides; its Australian auteurs might seem an odd fit for such an inherently American tale, but their outsider perspective keeps them from overly romanticizing this criminal family’s “entrepreneurial” exploits.Stream it here.‘Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’ (March 28)The “Wire” star Idris Elba is in top form in this handsome biopic of Nelson Mandela, tracking his journey from childhood in Apartheid-era South Africa through his protest, imprisonment, release and triumphant election as the nation’s first democratically elected president. The film is plagued by the issues of brevity so common to the biopic form, but the electrifying performances of Elba and Naomie Harris as Mandela’s wife, Winnie, give the picture its forward momentum and a sense of urgency.Stream it here.‘Blood Diamond’ (March 31)Leonardo DiCaprio snagged his third Academy Award nomination for his quicksilver turn as Danny Archer, a morally slippery smuggler and mercenary. Archer will do just about anything for a payday, so his initial presence in Sierra Leone circa 1999 is purely financial, but the more he learns about the struggles of civilians and the barbarism of loyalists, the less he can shrug off what he sees as the price of doing business. The director Edward Zwick is particularly proficient at personalizing stories of political and historical conflict (his earlier films include “Glory,” “The Siege” and “The Last Samurai”), and he is, as ever, a fine actor’s director, stewarding solid work from not only DiCaprio but also his co-star Djimon Hounsou, an Oscar nominee for best supporting actor.Stream it here.‘Bright Star’ (March 31)Jane Campion is heavily favored to win this year’s Oscar for best director for her stunning navigation of “The Power of the Dog.” Her masterful direction is rendered even more impressive by her long absence from the big screen; “Dog” was her first feature film since this fact-based romance, released in 2009. She tells the story of the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his late-in-life romance with his muse, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Other filmmakers might have focused on Keats and viewed Brawne as a mere passing fancy. But as she has throughout her career, Campion is fascinated by the emotional push-pull of romantic entanglements and the unexpected ways women find their power in these encounters.Stream it here.‘Gremlins’ (March 31)The rules have become part of pop culture consciousness: Don’t give them water; keep them way from bright light; and whatever you do, never, ever feed them after midnight. Of course, rules are made to be broken, and one of the purest pleasures of Joe Dante’s giddily entertaining 1984 smash is his winking acknowledgment that we’re waiting for all hell to break loose. Dante’s gift for barely-controlled chaos gives just enough discipline to Chris Columbus’s witty screenplay, while its cheerful disemboweling of twinkly, small-town values feels particularly subversive for a Reagan-era movie.Stream it here.‘I Love You, Man’ (March 31)The best Judd Apatow comedy that Apatow had nothing to do with, this shaggily charming 2009 comedy finds newly engaged (and likably uptight) Paul Rudd seeking out an adult male pal for the first time, and finding himself pulled into the orbit of goofy man-child Jason Segel. The writer and director John Hamburg (“Along Came Polly”) never quite builds up much in the way of stakes, but it’s such a pleasure to watch his stars play — as well as such welcome supporting players as Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, J.K. Simmons and Jane Curtin – that you likely won’t mind.Stream it here.‘Interview With the Vampire’ (March 31)Anne Rice’s best-selling, long-running “Vampire Chronicles” finally made it to the silver screen in 1994, with Tom Cruise in the leading role of the vampire Lestat, a role whose sexual fluidity and camp theatricality seemed to many (including Rice herself) out of the actor’s reach. Yet Cruise acquits himself nicely, conveying the character’s charisma and menace, while Brad Pitt captures the hopelessness of the narrator, Louis. But the show stealer is Kirsten Dunst in a haunting performance as Claudia, a vampire who is “turned” as a child and remains locked at that age. The director Neil Jordan beautifully mixes the story’s Gothic horror and dark comedy elements, ladling on the Bayou atmosphere for extra spice.Stream it here.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More