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      ‘Rosaline’ Review: O Romeo, Romeo, Thank U, Next

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      Kaitlyn Dever plays Romeo’s snarky ex-lover in this Shakespeare reimagining, which crosses its source material with present-day sensibilities.For never was a story of more woe than this — and I’m not talking about the trysts of Romeo. “Rosaline,” Karen Maine’s hapless Shakespeare reimagining, stages history’s most famous romance from the novel perspective of Rosaline, Romeo’s jilted ex. It’s a clever enough gimmick. But in playing out the reverie, the movie epitomizes a du jour Hollywood adaptation style that’s nothing short of agonizing, planting one foot in the source material and the other in a cheeky 21st-century sensibility.Like other half-modernized classic works, “Rosaline” strands its irreverent millennial characters in a stuffy olde world. Think “Enchanted” in reverse: Clad in opulent chemises, bodices and waistcoats, Rosaline (Kaitlyn Dever) whines, cusses and flails through Verona, egged on in her diablerie by her world-weary nurse (Minnie Driver) and sassy sidekick, Paris (Spencer Stevenson). When Romeo (Kyle Allen), Rosaline’s then-paramour, tries to woo her with blank verse, she squints and cuts in, “Why are you talking like that?” The engine of this movie is snark, and Dever, overtaxed with carrying the comedy, brings a dauntlessness to the role, even during more daft moments.Romeo snubs Rosaline for Juliet (Isabela Merced). Paris proposes. The Montagues clash with the Capulets. You know much of the rest, though Rosaline’s courtship with a local hunk named Dario (Sean Teale) and a puerile, eager-to-please third act are some of the movie’s bigger breaks with tradition. Shall I compare the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (“(500) Days of Summer”) to the Bard? I’d rather not.RosalineRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Dark Glasses’ Review: She Wears Her Shades at Night

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      A prostitute blinded by a stalker tries to protect a young boy. But in his first film in 10 years, Dario Argento opts for visuals as banal as the scares.Five decades ago, the Italian director Dario Argento (“Suspiria,” “Inferno”) melded slasher flicks with modern art, saturating the screen with lurid colors that were more captivating than the ideas underneath them. Giallo, the genre Argento popularized and, later, clumsily satirized in a poorly received 2009 film of the same name, is often snubbed as having more style than substance. “Dark Glasses,” Argento’s first film in 10 years, responds by stripping away the style, too.Visuals are overrated, this intermittently ticklish thriller seems to insist. Argento and his cinematographer, Matteo Cocco, limit the film’s palette to shades of mildewy gray-green spattered by crimson blood (shot, of course, in gruesome close-up). Our heroine, a surly call girl named Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), is too vexed to fuss about this dishwater depiction of Rome. In the opening scene, she irritates her eyes gazing at a solar eclipse; shortly after, she’s blinded when a serial murderer in a van rams her car into oncoming traffic, killing the other driver and orphaning a 7-year-old named Chin (Xinyu Zhang).How can Diana dodge her deadly stalker when she can’t — and won’t — ever see his face? Argento has masterminded a setup that empowers him to dazzle audiences with sound instead of sight. Oddly, he doesn’t follow through on it, despite declaring his intentions with an extended cameo from his daughter Asia Argento as a care worker who teaches Diana how to listen for aural clues to her surroundings. The inept cops on the case (Mario Pirrello, Maria Rosaria Russo and Gennaro Iaccarino) wax on about the limits of the eye — they’re stymied by fuzzy CCTV footage, microscopic chips of paint, and vehicles that change color from black to white — but the film’s execution never proves their point. In one ineffectual detour, Diana smashes lamps in an attempt to hide from her pursuer. Not only does the scene continue to be filmed in relative brightness, but her brainstorm doesn’t affect the chase one bit.The scares are as banal as the visuals. Argento made his reputation on tangled yarns where witchy women usually wielded the knife. At 82, he’s finally resorted to a straightforward male-sicko-slays-sex workers tale. He and co-writer Franco Ferrini may believe they’re saying something or other about misogyny. (Even Diana’s non-murderous clients are varying degrees of awful.) Still, the writers seem to have spent little time developing their villain, who is so dashed off that the baddie doesn’t even commit to a weapon, reaching for garrotes, blades, nooses and steering wheels as though from a random grab bag. (At least Arnaud Rebotini’s spidery synthesizers set the right mood.)Yet, while it’s easy to dismiss “Dark Glasses” as the work of a master gone soft, Pastorelli’s prickly, sharp-tongued Diana is perhaps the most charismatic leading lady of Argento’s career. She dominates her surroundings — a rarity in his films — and delivers a performance that creeps close to camp (particularly while being strangled by a snake). The best moments of the film involve Diana’s unsentimental alliance with Chin, the orphan who offers her more protection than she’s able to afford him. Their quirkily endearing relationship allows the horror legend to dabble in a genre that’s wholly new to him: the odd couple comedy.Dark GlassesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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      ‘Eternal Spring’ Review: When State TV Got Hijacked

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      Two decades after members of Falun Gong took over local television programming in Changchun, China, a documentary looks back.“Eternal Spring” revisits an incident from 2002, when members of the spiritual movement Falun Gong hijacked local television programming in the city of Changchun, China. Their goal was to air a video that contradicted the Chinese government’s negative portrayal of the practice, which combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism and Chinese breathing exercises. China, seeing Falun Gong’s popularity as a political threat, had banned the group in 1999.This documentary, directed by Jason Loftus, incorporates animation to revisit these past events. In an eye-catching early sequence, the cartoon equivalent of a fluid single take depicts law enforcement rounding up several people suspected of being involved in Falun Gong or of hijacking the TV signal.“Eternal Spring” primarily trails Daxiong, a Toronto-based comics artist who designed the movie’s storyboards. A Falun Gong adherent who says he had disagreed with the hijacking but who fled China to avoid the crackdown that followed it, he visits with participants in the TV takeover and adjacent figures who now live outside China. (Some of the dramatis personae are introduced with comics-style nicknames: “the mastermind,” “the runner,” “the electrician” and so on.) Daxiong draws illustrations as his interlocutors tell stories of the event’s planning and aftermath, and as they share vivid memories of planners who are no longer alive.“Eternal Spring” has value as an educational tool about Falun Gong and its place in China, and as a testament to its subjects’ bravery in defying the state. Still, while the animation gives the documentary some distinction, the narrative can’t entirely shake the sense that this momentous but brief episode is scaled more for a short than a feature.Eternal SpringNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sell/Buy/Date’ Review: The Topic of Sex Work, From All Sides

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      In Sarah Jones’s engaging film about the sex trade, everyone has a say.If you’re hoping to land squarely on an “aye” or a “nay” about the sex-work industry, Sarah Jones’s documentary-narrative feature, “Sell/Buy/Date,” won’t help. And that’s a good thing.Jones — who wrote, directed and stars in the film — doesn’t treat the tensions between exploitation and empowerment, personal agency and systemic cruelties, as binaries. Instead, they are riveting, confounding and, as exchanges between Jones and her mother attest, personal. Why Jones travels with her deceased sister’s journal factors in mightily, too.In 2016, Jones’s solo show of the same name became an Off Broadway hit. Yet the announcement that she’d be turning it into a movie was met with a barrage of criticism on social media — much of it from sex workers who wanted ownership of their stories. (Laverne Cox pulled out as an executive producer; Meryl Streep stayed on.)Instead of scrapping the project, Jones embraced that blistering chapter, inviting sex-work activists more fully into her fraught and comedic reckoning. Among them: the adult-film actress Lotus Lain; the pole-dance instructor Amy Bond; the courtesan Alice Little of Nevada’s Chicken Ranch brothel; and Evan Seinfeld, the founder of the adult social platform IsMyGirl.On her quest, Jones checks in with some friends — Rosario Dawson, Ilana Glazer and Bryan Cranston, among them. She also brings along four of her characters, which she plays herself: bubbe Lorraine; Bella, a sex-work studies major; Rashid, an Uber driver; and Nereida, a women’s rights advocate. The quartet provide comic relief, and more.After Jones’s pleasant tour of Chicken Ranch, Nereida insists she meet Esperanza Fonseca, an anti-trafficking activist who addresses the knotty issue of agency, showing Jones around a Las Vegas hotel room where opulence often masks violence. As the model Terria Xo says, “It’s not a choice if you have to do it to survive.”Sell/Buy/DateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Picture Taker’ Review: Civil Rights Photographer and F.B.I. Informant

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      The documentary, by the director of “Who Killed Malcolm X?,” is a compelling biography of Ernest Withers, whose photographs helped chronicle Black history.After the photojournalist Ernest Withers died in 2007, a bombshell investigation revealed that the respected Memphis photographer, known for taking over a million pictures of 20th-century Black life during his career, had also been a paid informant of the F.B.I.The documentary “The Picture Taker,” directed by Phil Bertelsen (“Who Killed Malcolm X?”), uses this fact as an entry point into a compelling biography of Withers, whose photographs helped chronicle important events in the civil rights movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final days spent supporting the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis.“The Picture Taker” presents several perspectives on Withers’s link to the F.B.I. and noticeably does not come down on a particular side — unlike “Judas and the Black Messiah,” a 2021 historical drama about the murder of the activist and Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, which took up similar subject matter.But the reason to watch the documentary isn’t for the debate about Withers’s motives. It’s to see his impressive archive, which Bertelsen was smart to build the film around.
      From his coverage of the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi to the weddings and first communions of everyday Black people in Memphis, Withers’s photographs give the documentary a visual language that coheres from start to finish.“The Picture Taker” artfully plays with rendering the photographic image for the screen. It graphically alters Withers’s likeness, transforming pictures of him into telling animations and cutouts that pull him out of the background in which he so often dwelled and into the foreground.Ultimately, the film immerses viewers in Withers’s considerable storytelling abilities as an image-maker at the same time that it examines his motives for taking those very pictures — that tension is what makes for an engrossing watch.The Picture TakerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Stars at Noon’ Review: A Not-So-Innocent Abroad

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      Claire Denis’s captivating new film, starring Margaret Qualley and based on the novel by Denis Johnson, treads familiar territory in a foreign land.Based on the 1986 novel “The Stars at Noon” by Denis Johnson, Claire Denis’s adaptation reprises themes to which she has often returned — colonialism, dislocation, the complications of looking — since her seismic 1988 debut, “Chocolat.” The results are sometimes wobbly, but this much remains stable: No living director better understands the politics of sensuality, the terrible power of light and shadow on skin.Denis’s latest not-so-innocent abroad is Trish (Margaret Qualley), a willowy young white American in Nicaragua who becomes ensnared in a corrupt system. Her claims to be a journalist are murky, but she has clearly upset the wrong people somehow, reduced to trading sex for cash and favors in hopes that she can reclaim her passport and escape.In this context she meets Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a mysterious and handsome British man, and the erotic intensity of their easy intimacy bends everything toward it; Daniel, it seems, has his own troubles, and soon the star-crossed couple are running for the border, pursued by a variety of shadowy goons.Denis nibbles around the edges of plot and motivation in ways that sometimes struggle to cohere — details are spare even for a director justly celebrated for her elliptical poesy — and in important ways, “Stars” lacks the specificity of her best films. Shot in Panama and updated to the pandemic present (Johnson’s novel is set amid the Nicaraguan revolution), its sense of place feels less indelible than incidental.But as usual in Denis’s work, the smallest act or subtlest gesture can open entire worlds of feeling and consequence. In her hands, Qualley is a force of nature, moving through space with a manic freedom and energy reserved only for the young, beautiful and damned.Stars at NoonRated R for abundant sweaty sex and some violence. Running time: 2 hours 15 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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      ‘Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles’ Review: A Prison in the Amazon Jungle

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      A documentary from the 1980s, now premiering in a restored version, is an eye-opening visit to a Peruvian penal colony.In the late 1940s, the president of Peru, Gen. Manuel Odría, had a bright idea, or so he thought, about the colonization of the Amazon: start with criminals, convicted or not. This penal colony, called Sepa — which began operating in 1951 and was mostly shut down in the early 1990s — was often a dumping ground for political opponents of whatever leadership was in power at the time. Far from so-called civilization and wanting in many resources, it was an environment in which prisoners were obliged to form functioning communities or die.“Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles,” a short but crucial documentary made in 1986, depicts life in the colony. Sepa was populated by all manner of criminals, some violent, some not: sex offenders, thieves, small-scale drug traffickers‌. But, partially because the environment compelled the inhabitants to work together, this “green hell,” as an interviewee calls it, was in a sense far more functional than most prisons: There were no gangs, no alcohol or drug abuse, and little violence.There was, however, a powerful sense of isolation and a good deal of nonchalant corruption. This comes across in sequences showing the ramblings of an amiable prison director at the time, Alfredo Elias, and in visits with a prisoner nicknamed “the colonel,” who hailed from the United States. These scenes are both humorous and a bit terrifying.The movie was directed by the German filmmaker Walter Saxer, an associate of Werner Herzog, and Saxer’s voice on the soundtrack brings the more famous director to mind. (The narration was written by the Peruvian author and onetime politician Mario Vargas Llosa.) Long considered lost, it’s premiering in New York in a restored version. Seen today, it’s a provocative addition to the literature of incarceration.Sepa: Our Lord of MiraclesNot rated. In German, Spanish and English with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Other Tom’ Review: A Parent’s Right to Choose

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      A single mother in Texas faces off against the state when she refuses to medicate her son’s A.D.H.D.“The Other Tom” is a quiet film following a mother and son who say very little. Elena (Julia Chavez) struggles to raise her son, Tom (Israel Rodriguez), on her own and deal with his academic and behavioral challenges at school. Tom is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Elena dutifully administers his prescribed medication until an accident makes her question whether the side effects are worth the benefits. When child protective services steps in, she must decide for herself what is best for her son and whether to stand her ground.Set in El Paso, the story feels authentic and important, showing the surveillance and control that people living with the help of social services endure, as well as the way A.D.H.D. is misunderstood by uninformed teachers and parents. (Elena herself struggles with her son’s behavior, becoming impatient with what she perceives as defiance.) The film’s set and props feel true to the characters’ economic and social situation, down to Elena’s cracked phone screen or her improvised reading of a skin care routine from a magazine as a bedtime story. Elena provides what she can for Tom with her limited resources and defends him fiercely.But the film, directed by Laura Santullo and Rodrigo Plá, ultimately falls flat, with unconvincing dialogue and a strained delivery by the actors. Even during the most dramatic moments, there is little emotional range, and it’s difficult to become immersed or invested in Elena and Tom’s stories. Still, the film gets a lot right: The dynamic between them is typical of an overworked parent and a parentified child, with Elena speaking matter-of-factly — and sometimes crudely — to Tom. It’s a story not often seen on the big screen, and one that deserves to be told.The Other TomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More