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      ‘Something in the Dirt’ Review: The Truth Is Over There, by the Sofa

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      Two likable losers fall into conspiratorial rabbit holes while filming the strange goings-on in their apartment building.“Something in the Dirt” is one of those weird little surprises sometimes found skulking in the crannies of mainstream film festivals, slippery and screwy and impossible to categorize. An ambitious potluck of buddy comedy, paranormal puzzle and whatdunnit mystery, this fifth feature from the filmmaking team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead cheerfully substitutes audacity for discipline.A doomy vibe descends immediately as Levi (Benson), a feckless bartender with a sketchy past, moves into a decaying apartment in the Hollywood Hills. Low-flying aircraft rumble overhead and a forest fire belches smoke on the horizon. Inside, there’s a creaking door that won’t close, a dripping ceiling (shout-out to Yah’el Dooley’s excellent sound design) and arcane equations scribbled on a closet wall. Levi’s mood lifts, though, when he meets his new neighbor, John (Moorhead), a recently divorced former math teacher. The two form an instant connection, despite John’s apocalyptic religious views and his apparently blood-spattered shirt.Written by Benson and shot by Moorhead, “Something in the Dirt” is a surreal satire of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking, suggesting both as logical responses to an increasingly scary world. When the friends, hoping for fame and fortune, decide to document what they believe to be supernatural phenomena — a levitating quartz ashtray, a plant that spontaneously grows strange fruit — their obsession with re-enactments digs slyly at the distortions of nonfiction filmmaking. Rambling conversations on aliens and math theorems, time travel and TED talks, contribute to an atmosphere in which everything feels unstable, not least the men’s sanity.Overlong and overwritten, “Dirt” nevertheless unfolds with an enjoyably comic quirkiness, a tale of two doofuses who sought meaning in symbols and found comfort in friendship.Something in the DirtRated R for a little violence and a lot of crazy talk. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Next Exit’ Review: End of the Road

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      Two strangers reflect on their lives as they embark on a cross-country drive to join a study involving life after death.In Mali Elfman’s debut feature “Next Exit,” Rose and Teddy (Katie Parker and Rahul Kohli) are two strangers with something in common: They’d both rather be dead.They embark on a cross-country drive to join an experiment run by a controversial scientist who claims there is life after death. But rather than a spiritual meditation on the great beyond, or a dystopian fable, Elfman’s road movie fits the largely conventional mold of stories about people taking stock before ending their lives.The film begins with the scientist (Karen Gillan) presenting evidence of the afterlife — a slightly janky recording of a boy playing cards with his father’s ghost. Her study involves the assisted suicide of its participants, who can now look forward to an afterlife. (The arrangement sounds more macabre than the film fully acknowledges.) Rose is eager to ditch what she regards as an ill-spent life, and she ends up sharing a rental car with Teddy, who is also deeply dissatisfied but tries to be an upbeat companion.On Rose and Teddy’s drive to San Francisco they have instructive encounters with a priest, a regretful cop, a hippie-dippy hitchhiker, and estranged family members. The reluctant pair keeps recalibrating in response, and trade prickly banter. Their trek sometimes taps the tragicomic feel of a soul-bearing late-night conversation in a bar.But the actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes. When the subject is the explicit consideration of a life’s worth, it’s a tricky road to take and not get lost along the way.Next ExitNot rated. 1 hour 46 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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      Review: In ‘You Resemble Me,’ a Maladjusted Girl Is Interrupted

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      Dina Amer’s film uses empathetic, if simplistic, fictions to try to make sense of the complicated real life of a young Moroccan-French woman drawn to ISIS.In “You Resemble Me,” the journalist-turned-filmmaker Dina Amer uses fiction to try and make sense of a complicated life: that of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a Moroccan-French woman who died at 26 during a police raid on the hide-out of the mastermind of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Initially described in some news headlines as “Europe’s first female suicide bomber,” Boulahcen was found to have been killed in the crossfire, raising new questions about the extent of her involvement with the terrorists.Amer rounds out details drawn from interviews with Boulahcen’s family and friends with her own psychological coloring, striving to give shape to the inner life of a maladjusted immigrant. A whirling camera captures the tenderness and the tragedies of Hasna and her sister Mariam’s childhood, including parental abuse and their separation by the foster care system. The daily degradations of Hasna’s young adulthood as a drug peddler unfold in grimy scenes of Paris nightlife, while her eventual communion with a radicalized cousin is conveyed in hushed close-ups, underlining the powerful promise of acceptance that may have led her to ISIS.But for all its empathetic detail, “You Resemble Me” contrives a rather simplistic cause-and-effect tale, grasping too desperately at elusive answers. Hasna’s ability to adapt to — or dissociate from — harsh circumstances is literalized through the deepfake technology used to morph the face of Mouna Soualem, who plays the adult Hasna, into those of other actors (Sabrina Ouazani, Amer). These interruptions, glitchy rather than compelling, shortchange the spiky rawness of Soualem’s performance. The film needs more facts and fewer flourishes, but its closing turn to documentary footage, comprising brief snippets of interviews with Hasna’s family, is too little, too late.You Resemble MeNot rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ Review: New York’s Last Rock Renaissance

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      The post-post punk New York rock scene gets an archival retrospective in this documentary.The post-post-punk rock scene in late ’90s and early aughts New York saw an unusual flurry of activity, with disparate acts exciting international attention of the sort that hadn’t visited the city since the early days of CBGB. Elizabeth Goodman’s 2017 oral history of “rebirth and rock and roll” is the basis for the documentary “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace.Downtown rock was never homogeneous in style, and the bands considered here are all over the map stylistically: there’s the very East Village scatological shagginess of Moldy Peaches, the minimalist grandiosity of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the hermetically psychedelicized TV on the Radio, and of course the poor little rich boys of the Strokes, whose best work melded Motorik-derived groove with Stonesy/Velvety attitude.There are revealing glimpses into the early work of artists who would morph into entities that were slicker and ostensibly cooler. For instance, Paul Banks, later to front the acclaimed Joy Division sound-alike Interpol, is first seen here bearing an acoustic guitar and a boyish earnestness.The film is entirely archival in its visual footage, much of it shot at the time by the photographer and videographer Nanci Sarrouf. The movie’s new interviews are audio only. As a result, the likes of Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, and the recently reconstituted Strokes, all working musicians still, are never seen as they are today.The most interesting narrative thread is that of Murphy, who arrived in New York as an odd man out with no clue about the dance music he would eventually master. It’s kind of jarring to learn that “Losing My Edge,” LCD’s breakout single, in which Murphy elaborates on the title condition, was born out of genuine desperation rather than ironic drollery.Meet Me in the BathroomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Nocebo’ Review: A Troubled Home and a Sick Mother

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      A new horror starring Eva Green has a point to make about economic exploitation but lacks a sense of surprise.Child care is treacherous work in horror movies. Babysitters are invariably stalked, like in “Halloween,” and in “The Omen, looking after Damien leads his nanny to hang herself. This trope is toyed with in “Nocebo,” a new prestige horror about a stressed-out, affluent couple, Christine (Eva Green) and Felix (Mark Strong). They take on help for their young daughter (Billie Gadsdon), who, in the first sign something is terribly awry, attends a school where the uniform includes a beret.The new nanny (Chai Fonacier), who is Filipino, enters a troubled home and immediately starts handling the family’s problems and concerns, from making dinner to treating the mysterious sickness afflicting Christine using folk healing learned in her homeland. After a telephone call delivering bad news, Christine, a children’s fashion designer, starts feeling extremely off (symptoms include perspiration and seeing scary dogs). Her husband is skeptical.This movie has plenty going for it: excellent actors (Fonacier has a knack for coiled tension), stylish camerawork by the director Lorcan Finnegan and a point to make about economic exploitation. What’s missing is any sense of surprise. The plot unfolds as straightforwardly as a perfectly fine essay for an academic journal. Every twist is telegraphed. And the scenes are so overt and schematic that they prevent the actors from adding much mess or weirdness. The closest we get is Strong’s ability to imbue his flustered dad with an absurd amount of gravitas. Even in a movie haunted by death, you need more signs of life.NoceboNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Good Night Oppy’ Review: Life (Kind of) on Mars

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      NASA’s Opportunity and Spirit rovers didn’t shoot cinematic-quality footage of Mars, but this documentary offers the next-best thing.NASA’s Opportunity Rover landed on Mars in January 2004 and chugged along for more than 14 years before giving out. (In February 2019, NASA declared the mission over.) Opportunity’s anticipated time in service — a span that Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the mission, is heard likening in “Good Night Oppy” to a warranty — was only around 90 days. Oppy, and to a lesser extent its sister rover, Spirit, which “died” several years earlier, was the robot geologist that refused to quit.Neither rover, alas, shot cinematic-quality footage of the red planet, but in this documentary from Ryan White (“Assassins,” on the killing of Kim Jong-nam), visual effects work from Industrial Light & Magic allows viewers to imagine they’re exploring craters and bedrock right alongside the androids. The orange- and copper-blasted images are convincing enough that moviegoers might be fooled, but the technique never plays like an unreasonable sleight of hand.Similarly, the way “Good Night Oppy” anthropomorphizes the robots might sound like pure Hollywood hokum. (The movie, unusually for a documentary, is graced by the imprimatur of Amblin Entertainment.) But White, through interviews and archival footage, makes clear that scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., couldn’t help but regard these bots as living things.Kobie Boykins, a mechanical engineer who was instrumental in building the rovers, recalls getting tingles at Opportunity’s first steps. Vandi Verma, who sometimes piloted the rovers from Earth, says that each one had its own personality. (Driving a Mars rover, we learn, does not offer the instant gratification of turning a steering wheel, because of the time it takes commands to reach Mars.) In keeping with a tradition observed by human astronauts, Opportunity and Spirit were given a blast of pop music to wake up in the morning.“Good Night Oppy” accelerates the decade-plus saga into a suspenseful series of close calls. We hear of how the scientists had to design the rovers in time to make the alignment of the planets; failing would mean being set back by more than two years. Solar flares damaged the rovers’ software en route. And once “Good Night Oppy” finds Opportunity and Spirit safely on opposite sides of Mars, the movie recounts one near-mishap after another, as the droids survive dust storms, lose contact with the humans, encounter steep drop-offs or get caught in sand. Some problems require scientists to play around in sandbox simulations on Earth.The pace is snappy enough that it’s easy to forget just how long many of these maneuvers took. Sometimes the rovers’ travels from one destination to another lasted years, and it’s hard not to gasp as title cards tick off the passage of time. And while descriptions of the aging robots as experiencing arthritis and memory loss are perhaps too cute, by the end of “Good Night Oppy,” Opportunity and Spirit have become no less lovable as characters than R2-D2 or Wall-E. It’s tough not to feel for their loss.Good Night OppyRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me’ Review: An Honest Portrait of Stardom

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      Sincere and soul-baring, the documentary, directed by Alek Keshishian, captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame.“My Mind & Me,” a new documentary about Selena Gomez, doesn’t feel like a publicity device. Sincere and soul-baring, the film captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame. Watching it is like eavesdropping on a 95-minute therapy session with the artist.It opens with Gomez out of sorts. “I have to stop living like this,” she says, as we jump from 2019 back to 2016. Backstage at one of her concerts, she cries, yearning to shed her child-star image and stand on her own as a solo artist. She fears she’s a disappointment.The documentary doesn’t show her forgetting her past as much as confronting it. A road trip to Grand Prairie, Texas, where she reunites with old neighbors and visits her childhood home, is a turning point for Gomez. In contrast is a scene where she’s answering interviewers whose flippant questions leave her feeling, she says, like “a product.” She craves genuine connection, something fame hasn’t yet afforded her.As a subject, Gomez is in the trustworthy hands of the veteran director Alek Keshishian. In 1991, he worked the same kind of magic on Madonna for “Truth or Dare.” Capturing an artist’s fearlessness, as he does in both films, isn’t just up to him, of course; like Madonna, Gomez is boldly unguarded. But “My Mind & Me” also looks outward, framing struggle as the human condition. An honest portrait study of stardom and mental illness, the film offers a hopeful catharsis: How, when we reveal our hardest truths, we can heal together.Selena Gomez: My Mind and MeRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      Dobby’s Grave Can Stay on a Beach in Wales, but Please Stop Giving Him Socks

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      After a grave site for the “Harry Potter” elf became a tourist attraction, tributes to the character prompted environmental concerns.LONDON — In one of the more tragic moments from the “Harry Potter” series — spoilers ahead if you’ve been meaning to get around to it for a decade or two — Dobby, an elf, dies in Harry Potter’s arms on an expansive beach that the creature describes, in one of his final breaths, as “such a beautiful place to be with friends.”The “beautiful place” where the scene was filmed for the 2010 movie “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” was Freshwater West Beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where fans have assembled a memorial to Dobby, a recurring character in the series who befriended Harry and his fellow wizards-in-training and became a fan favorite. Environmental officials, however, became concerned that the site’s popularity with tourists was having a negative effect on the beach and considered tearing the memorial down as part of an eight-month review.Last week, Dobby’s grave site won a reprieve, when officials announced that it could stay, as long as visitors stopped leaving behind tributes to Dobby — or, from a different perspective, environmentally ruinous litter.Dobby, who is voiced by Toby Jones in the “Harry Potter” movies, in a scene from “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.” Warner Brothers Pictures“The memorial to Dobby will remain at Freshwater West in the immediate term for people to enjoy,” the National Trust Wales, the conservation charity that initiated the review of the area, wrote in its assessment. “The Trust is asking visitors to only take photos when visiting the memorial to help protect the wider landscape.”Part of the problem arose from a gesture many fans most likely intended as a tribute but had damaging consequences: People kept giving Dobby socks.In the “Harry Potter” series, Harry tricks Dobby’s master, the evil Lucius Malfoy, into giving his captive elf a sock, which frees Dobby. The elf then wears the sock until his dying moment, making it a memorable symbol of his friendship with Harry.Back in the real world, socks are a bad thing to leave on a beach. Many have been left at the grave site along with messages painted on rocks to match Harry’s final tribute to his friend: “Here lies Dobby, a free elf.”The National Trust Wales said in its assessment that “items like socks, trinkets, and paint chips from painted pebbles could enter the marine environment and food chain and put wildlife at risk.” Tens of thousands of people visit the beach each year, the trust said, and more than 5,000 responded to an online survey as it sought the public’s opinion on the future of the site.“While we’re delighted that so many want to visit, we have to balance the popularity of the site with impacts on the sensitive nature of the beach and wider environment, and pressure on the facilities and surrounding roads,” Jonathan Hughes, an official with National Trust Wales, said in a statement. More