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      ‘Lou’ Review: Unfinished Business

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      A child’s kidnapping ignites a protracted bid for redemption in this down-and-dirty thriller.Whatever else one might say about the Netflix thriller “Lou,” making it must have been murder. Pummeled by near-constant rain, soaked in swampy mud and battered by frequent bouts of hand-to-hand combat, the movie’s headliners look to have suffered miserably.Consequently, my admiration for Allison Janney, already high, skyrocketed. As the formidable title character, a woman of indeterminate vintage commonly accessorized with shovel, rifle or deer carcass, Janney leaves spry in the dust. Unfazed either by the working conditions or by Maggie Cohn and Jack Stanley’s ridiculously over-the-top screenplay, she lends her grouchy character more than a ramrod spine and steely stare: She gives her a woundedness that keeps us watching long after this prolix quest for redemption should have reached its preordained conclusion.When the plot — a dense weave of familial pain and political misdeeds — requires Lou to leave her cabin in the Pacific Northwest and help a young mother (Jurnee Smollett) reclaim her abducted preteen daughter, Lou barely hesitates. Abandoning her careful plans for a final exit, she takes off through a storm-lashed forest on the trail of the kidnapper, distraught mother in tow. The journey will be filled with perils and flashbacks, regrets and secrets as Lou excavates her past; yet the director, Anna Foerster — who, aside from the instantly forgettable “Underworld: Blood Wars” (2017), has worked mostly in television — pays greater attention to the movie’s impressive fight choreography than to the details of its central mystery.Methodically violent and more than a little silly, “Lou” delivers a kick in the head to ageism. When did you last hear an arthritic heroine warn a woman half her age not to slow her down?LouRated R for knives, fists, bullets and a lethal tin can. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘A Jazzman’s Blues’ Review: Tyler Perry Revisits a Jim Crow-Era Romance

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      The writer-director returns to his first screenplay — a dark melodrama with soulful musical numbers — after two decades.“A Jazzman’s Blues,” Tyler Perry’s melodrama about ill-fated teenagers who fall in love in rural Georgia, marks the writer-director-studio head’s return to his first screenplay, w‌hich he wrote in 1995. In the meantime, he broke through with a slew of Madea comedies, and whetted the skills required to deliver the faceted beauty of Bayou — his richest male character to date — with dramas like 2010’s “For Colored Girls.”It helps, too, that he has found a perfect portrayer in Joshua Boone (“Premature”). Bayou, who is embodied with a luminous sincerity by Boone, offers a touching take on the kind of compassionate man a so-called mama’s boy might become.The movie begins in 1987. An elderly version of Hattie Mae Boyd (Daphne Maxwell Reid) paces around her home, listening to a white political candidate (Brent Antonello) being interviewed on television. He blathers about his family’s civic legacy. When he begins nattering on about not being racist, she shuts off the TV. Then, in short order, she arrives at the candidate’s office with a stack of love letters — proof, she says, of her son’s killing in 1947. As the man begins reading the letters, the movie shifts to the past, where it stays for much of the star-crossed, racism-infused romance.Amirah Vann (in a bulwark turn) portrays the younger version of Hattie Mae, the loving mama of Bayou and his brother, Willie Earl (Austin Scott). Solea Pfeiffer, in a promising onscreen debut, is Leanne, the intended recipient of Bayou’s missives.From the get-go, Bayou and Leanne recognize in each other something wounded, yet also sheltering. But their clandestine affection is upended when Leanne’s mother, Ethel (Lana Young), bent on passing for white, wrenches her daughter away. The romance is briefly rekindled when a war injury sends Bayou home to his mother’s juke joint outside Hopewell, Ga., and Leanne arrives, newly wed to a scion of the town’s reigning family.With this turn, the movie might have collapsed under the weight of its twists or drowned in the sentimentality of Aaron Zigman’s score. A volatile scene between Leanne and her childhood-friend-turned housekeeper, Citsy (played with fierce sensitivity by Milauna Jemai Jackson), helps shore it up.When Bayou leaves, this time to avoid a lynching, he heads with Willie Earl and his brother’s music manager, Ira (Ryan Eggold), to Chicago. There, Ira lands a nightclub gig for Bayou, a honey-voiced singer, and his trumpet-playing, heroin-shooting brother. (It is here that the composer Terence Blanchard, who wrote songs for the film, and the choreographer Debbie Allen create some of its most exuberant musical numbers.)“A Jazzman’s Blues” is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes. The relationship of antisemitism to white supremacy gets a significant nod. And while addiction, domestic abuse and rape have in the past been Perry staples — and appear here as well — they’re now in the service of a more expansive, chastising saga.A Jazzman’s BluesRated R for scenes of substance abuse, violence, rape, brief lovemaking and cruel language. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Athena’ Review: Oh Brothers, Where Art Thou?

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      A besieged French housing project is the setting for Romain Gavras’s relentlessly kinetic action movie.“Athena” begins in a state of maximum tension and escalates from there. An angry crowd has gathered outside a police station near a high-rise housing project in the suburbs of Paris. A video of the killing of a local teenage boy, apparently by uniformed officers, has gone viral, igniting long-smoldering resentments. Violence breaks out quickly, and before long, the talk on social networks and news broadcasts will be forecasting not civil unrest, but outright civil war.At the center of the maelstrom, spinning in different directions, are the slain teenager’s three surviving brothers. Abdel (Dali Benssalah), the first one we encounter, is a soldier in the French Army, recently returned from combat in Mali. He’s inside the police station when the trouble (and the movie) begins, and his long walk to meet the demonstrators outside symbolizes his predicament. He’s pulled apart by conflicting loyalties, caught between the power of the state and the rage of the streets.His brother Karim (Sami Slimane) is a militant leader in the process of becoming a military commander as protest accelerates toward armed conflict. With guns and vehicles seized from the forces of law and order, Karim and his army of young men stage a small-scale revolution, taking control of the courtyards and corridors of Athena, the high-rise complex where they have grown up in poverty and alienation.Another brother, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), is a drug dealer whose business is disrupted by the chaos. He and his associates are trying to get out of Athena while Karim is trying to lock it down and Abdel, increasingly desperate and less and less secure in his convictions, is attempting to calm the situation.Fraternal melodrama and social turmoil provide fuel for relentless action. In principle it’s not a bad formula, and “Athena,” directed by Romain Gavras from a script he wrote with Ladj Ly and Elias Belkeddar, is not shy about evoking gangster movies, classic westerns and classical tragedy, investing its contemporary story with brutal, archaic power.Gavras’s filmmaking is technically impressive. He pulls the camera through complex, kinetic tableaus in long, breathless takes. Some of these sequences are thrilling, but after a while they become repetitive, and Athena feels more like a video game background than an actual place. There’s no modulation: Nearly every scene ends in either a screaming argument or a literal explosion. Karim and Moktar rarely utter a line without shouting. Abdel is more of a brooder, at least for a while — Benssalah has a clenched, melancholy watchfulness that holds your attention in the midst of all the noise — but eventually he starts yelling, too.There are other characters: a young riot policeman (Anthony Bajon) who is taken hostage, and a terrorist mastermind (Alexis Manenti) who is coaxed out of retirement to join Karim’s rebels. Their presence complicates the plot, and amplifies the film’s hectic, hectoring gestures toward topical urgency. But like the three brothers, these secondary figures are sociological composites, inserted into a carefully diagramed, ultimately incoherent narrative scheme.You could argue that “Athena” uses the syntax of action cinema to make a point about the state of French society. And while it’s true that there are real issues at play here — police violence, racism, the disaffection of the immigrant underclass — the filmmakers don’t so much explore as exploit them, giving a loud and sloppy genre exercise a patina of relevance.AthenaRated R. Nonstop violence. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘My Imaginary Country’ Review: Chile in Revolt

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      Patricio Guzmán, Chile’s cinematic conscience, chronicles the uprising that shook the country starting in 2019.The most powerful images in “My Imaginary Country” are of the demonstrations in the streets of Santiago, Chile, that began in October 2019. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans took to the streets, at first to protest a subway fare increase, and eventually to demand sweeping changes to the nation’s economic and political order. They were met with tear gas, baton charges and plastic bullets aimed at their eyes. Some fought back with cobblestones chiseled from the street, which they hurled at the police.To watch scenes like that in a documentary film — or, for that matter, on social media — is to experience a strong sense of déjà vu. What happened in Santiago in 2019 and 2020 feels like an echo of similar uprisings around the world; in Tehran in 2009 (and again this week); in Arab capitals like Tunis, Damascus and Cairo in 2011; in Kyiv in 2014; in Paris at the height of the Yellow Vest movement in 2018. Those episodes aren’t identical, but each represents the eruption of long-simmering dissatisfaction with a status quo that seems stubbornly indifferent to the grievances of the people.Accompanying the exhilaration that these pictures might bring is a sense of foreboding. In almost every case, these rebellions ended in defeat, disappointment, stalemate or worse. The buoyant democratic promise of Tahrir Square in Cairo has been smothered by a decade of military dictatorship. Ukrainian democracy, seemingly victorious after the Maidan “revolution of dignity,” has since faced internal and external threats, most recently from Vladimir Putin’s army.Jehane Noujaim’s “The Square” and Evgeny Afineevsky’s “Winter on Fire” are excellent in-the-moment films about Tahrir and Maidan, and “My Imaginary Country” belongs in their company. But it also has a resonance specific to Chile, and to the career of its director, Patricio Guzmán, who brings a unique and powerful historical perspective to his country’s present circumstances. He has seen events like this before, and has reason to hope that this time might be different.Guzman, now in his early 80s, can fairly be described as Chile’s biographer, and also its cinematic conscience. His first documentary, footage from which appears in this one, was about the early months of Salvador Allende’s presidency, which began in an atmosphere of optimism and defiance in 1970 and ended in a brutal U.S.-supported military coup three years later. Guzman’s account of Allende’s fall and the repression that followed is the three-part “Battle of Chile,” which he completed while exiled in France, and which stands as one of the great political films of the past half-century.More recently, in another trilogy— “Nostalgia For the Light,” “The Pearl Button” and “Cordillera of Dreams” — Guzman has explored Chile’s distinct cultural and geographical identity, musing on the intersections of ecology, demography and politics in a mode that is lyrical and essayistic. In “My Imaginary Country” he cites the French filmmaker Chris Marker as a mentor, and they share a spirit of critical humanism and a habit of looking for the meaning of history in the fine grain of experience.While this is a first-person documentary, with the director providing voice-over narration, it expresses a poignant humility and a patient willingness to listen. Guzman interweaves footage of the demonstrations into interviews with participants, most of them young and all of them women.This revolution, which culminated in the election of Gabriel Boric, a leftist in his 30s, to Chile’s presidency and a referendum calling for a new constitution, arose out of the economic frustrations of students and working people. But Guzman and the activists, scholars and journalists he talks to make clear that feminism was always central to the movement. They argue that the plight of poor and Indigenous Chileans can’t be understood or addressed without taking gender into account, and that the equality of women is foundational to any egalitarian politics.“My Imaginary Country” ends with a new constituent assembly — including many veterans of the demonstrations — meeting to write a new constitution that they hope will finally dispel the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s long dictatorship. After the film was completed, voters rejected their first draft, a setback to Boric and to the radical energy Guzman’s film captures and celebrates. Whatever the next chapter will be, we can hope that he is around to record it.My Imaginary CountryNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales’ Review: A Spotlight on Income Inequality

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      This documentary by Abigail E. Disney and Kathleen Hughes is a critique of the Walt Disney Company, but its lessons are basic and obvious.“The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” a questionably well-intentioned documentary about income inequality by Abigail E. Disney and Kathleen Hughes, lays bare the rotten core of the American dream and its promise of upward mobility. In other words, it’s dedicated entirely to stating the obvious. Unless, perhaps, you live under a rock — or in a $100 million penthouse.The documentary begins with a takedown of the Walt Disney Company and its labor practices, underscoring the irony of a business like Disneyland claiming to be the “Happiest Place on Earth” while exploiting its low-wage workers. In one scene, Abigail Disney rounds up several of these disgruntled employees, many of whom reveal they’ve relied on food stamps or experienced homelessness. This revelation triggers a broader — and very basic — analysis of the modern history of American capitalism, weaving archival footage of Disneyland’s humbler beginnings with onscreen interviews that Abigail Disney conducted with economists and historians.Disney, the granddaughter of the Walt Disney Company co-founder Roy O. Disney, positions herself as something of a rogue member of the family. A philanthropist and longtime film producer, she has no role in the company, and in “The American Dream,” she argues that her grandfather would not have condoned such gross mistreatment of his employees. This, and the cutthroat means by which the company has expanded, she blames on the evolution of the country’s business standards and the ascendance of free market ideology.Fair enough, but billion-dollar businesses that unfairly compensate their low-skilled workers are, unfortunately, rules not exceptions. What, then, is the point of “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales”? The centering of Abigail Disney’s voice — we also see her tweets calling out the outrageous salaries of Disney executives — makes the documentary a kind of personal reckoning and an attempt to get through to other wealthy individuals, though one wonders how a film that doubles as a “Capitalism for Dummies” video would make an impact. Instead, the documentary wants, above all, to make sure we know how one particular Disney feels.The American Dream and Other Fairy TalesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sidney’ Review: A Lovingly Assembled Career Portrait

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      Sidney Poitier is memorialized in this thorough, and thoroughly conventional, documentary.“Sidney,” a documentary about the actor and filmmaker Sidney Poitier, who died in January, is a compendium of hero worship. The director is Reginald Hudlin, but, in tone and temperament, this lovingly assembled encomium is peak Oprah Winfrey. As one of the film’s producers and a close friend of Poitier (whom she calls her “great Black hope”), Winfrey glows with emotional authenticity. Her breakdown at the end is unexpectedly moving, if not entirely unexpected.Oblivious to the film’s fire hose of adulation and thicket of talking heads, Poitier (speaking mainly in a 2012 interview with Winfrey) softly addresses the camera, unfailingly modest and supremely chill. Around him, Hudlin unrolls a life that, Poitier believed, fulfilled the predictions of the soothsayer his mother consulted when he was not expected to survive infancy. Having exchanged Bahamian poverty for Jim Crow-era America, barely literate, he claimed, and baffled by segregation, Poitier discovered that acting was therapy, a way to express the many personalities roiling inside him. (Much later, he would require many years of actual therapy in part to process his love affair with the gorgeous Diahann Carroll.)Painstakingly thorough, “Sidney” scans a career freighted with political and social significance, its litany of firsts — including the first Black leading man to win an Oscar for best actor; the first Black director to make a $100 million movie — no deterrence to those who would later accuse Poitier of subservience to the desires of white audiences. Spotlighting the courage of Poitier’s civil rights activism and the daring of his acting choices, Hudlin labors to convey their significance to Black Americans: The man who had grown up without ever seeing a mirror was now tasked with reflecting Black lives back to an audience avid for recognition.The inescapable impression is of a picture buckling beneath the weight of its subject’s achievements. Yet there are moments when the focus shifts and the movie shrugs off its hagiographic shackles: Lulu, the Scottish pop star, belting out the theme of “To Sir, With Love” (1967), her pipes barely corroded; the tart, mischievous interjections of interviewees like Denzel Washington and Spike Lee; and Poitier’s first wife, the admirable Juanita Brady, explaining how she gave her inexperienced spouse critical financial advice, even selling her mink coat to invest in “A Raisin in the Sun,” the 1959 stage play in which he starred.These interludes act like lemon juice squirted on heavy cream, brief reagents in a movie that, despite the meticulousness of its making, seems a peculiarly orthodox tribute to a revolutionary life.SidneyRated PG-13 for racial slurs. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on AppleTV+. More

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      ‘Petrov’s Flu’ Review: Roaming a Grim, Rowdy Underworld

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      In this fever dream of a movie by Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian man wanders a wild urban landscape that he regularly hallucinates his way out of.When the phantasmagoric “Petrov’s Flu” opens on a crowded bus — a nightmare of jostling, babbling bodies — it seems obvious that there’s more troubling its hero than a typical seasonal malady. Sweaty and unsteady, he navigates through the other surging, grumbling passengers. Then a man yanks him off the bus, someone hands him a gun and Petrov is suddenly in a firing squad mowing down prisoners — and then he gets back on the bus and rejoins the clamorous horde he never wholly escapes. Welcome to Russia!For the next two and a half hours in this droll, chaotic, fitfully dazzling movie (it was at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival), Petrov (Semyon Serzin) continues to sweat and stagger as he roams a derelict urban landscape. Feverish and often plastered, he is in bad shape, and so is his world, with its ominous faces, soupy gloom and rowdy human comedy. His reason for rambling isn’t obvious. But as he wanders, he keeps slipping into outlandish reveries amid meeting friends, drinking and drinking some more. It’s unclear at first whether he’s seeking to escape reality or whether it is eluding him.Much of what happens in “Petrov’s Flu” is intentionally and enjoyably destabilizing. It takes place over a fairly compressed period of a day or two (maybe!), but includes several long flashbacks that expand the overall time frame by decades. And while the story is relatively straightforward — Petrov travels through a strange, at times hellish realm, evoking Odysseus and Leopold Bloom in their respective underworlds — the filmmaking is richly imaginative and unbound by the usual time-and-space constraints. When Petrov enters one location, he sometimes exits someplace entirely different.In recent years, the director Kirill Serebrennikov has been best known abroad for his difficulties with the Russian government. In 2017, he was placed under house arrest, accused of embezzling around $2 million. The charges have been seen as retaliation from the Kremlin for both Serebrennikov’s work and his expressed views on, among other issues, Russian censorship, the country’s aggression abroad and its persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. He was put on trial and sentenced, but in March, after the remaining sentence was suspended, Serebrennikov fled to Germany, where he remains.It’s hard not to take this history into account while watching “Petrov’s Flu,” which paints a bleak, wistful, tragically funny portrait of a man, a people, a world. Yet despite the grimness, the violence and the grotesque bleating of some hateful, prejudiced trolls, the movie never drags you down (though it might exhaust you) because it’s buoyed by Serebrennikov’s bravura, unfettered filmmaking. As the gorgeously restless camera travels alongside Petrov — as walls disappear and locations melt into one another — it starts to feel like both the character and director are trying to imagine a way out.As Petrov dreams and boozes and meanders, a sketchy portrait of him emerges. He has a family, though it’s complicated. He says he’s divorced but refers to his ex, Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), as his wife. Like Petrov, she too experiences lurid, vicious fantasies. The pair have a young son, and all three seem to live in the apartment where Petrov draws comics. He and Petrova also sleep together, having sex that turns uneasily aggressive and, at one point, inspires Petrov to get out of bed and draw. Some of the comic panels he’s working on seem to mirror what happens onscreen.Part of what gives the movie its tension and kick is that it’s not always clear how much of what transpires is happening in Petrova’s and Petrov’s heads. The movie is based on the Russian novel “The Petrovs In and Around the Flu,” by Alexey Salnikov. Despite the English-language title, the movie regularly shifts from Petrov to Petrova, who also experiences hallucinations. These take place during fraught, frustrating encounters with other people. She pauses, as if possessed, her eyes briefly blacken, and she wreaks terrible violence: She pummels one man’s face and slits another person’s throat.Whether these dark thoughts originate in Petrov or Petrova seems beside the point. What matters is that these frenzied visions recurrently engulf the characters — and the movie — transporting them from their everyday brutish reality into an equally brutish fantasy world. Asleep or not, they are dreaming, but their dreams are nightmares that are, by turns, inventive and liberating, grotesque and suffocating. At least Petrov flashes back to his relatively pacific childhood, a period of light and tenderness, a time before Russia’s current regime. And of course Petrov is an artist, which I imagine is finally his salvation as much as it is for the wildly talented Serebrennikov.Petrov’s FluNot rated. In Russia and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Greatest Beer Run Ever’ Review: Vietnam on the Rocks

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      Zac Efron plays a man trying to deliver brewskis to his Vietnam War buddies in Peter Farrelly’s film.In the early winter of 1968, the 26-year-old civilian Chickie Donohue arrived in Vietnam with a duffel bag of brewskis and an errand that could be reasonably called idiotic, patronizing, suicidal — and, even, as this shaggily appealing comedy insists, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.” Donohue (Zac Efron) has been double dog dared by his drinking buddies back home in Inwood, then a working-class Irish neighborhood in Manhattan, to hand-deliver a beer to four of their buddies serving in the war. “A sudsy thank you card!” Donohue exclaims, delighted by his own moxie. His farcical mission is mostly true and just the sort of crowd-pleaser about lunkhead enlightenment that intoxicates the director Peter Farrelly in the wake of his Oscar for “Green Book.”Farrelly and his co-writers, Brian Currie and Pete Jones, see the national id reflected in Donohue’s patriotic, ill-reasoned rationale for his quest, which is clearly a few cans short of a, you know. To this layabout slacker, his blustering pals and their jingoistic barkeep, the Colonel (Bill Murray, near-invisible under a gruff flattop), a pull-tab of domestic ale supports the troops by reminding the fighters abroad that America reigns supreme. For a while, Farrelly feigns to agree; the film starts like a Super Bowl commercial and ends like a hangover.When Donohue sets sail for Saigon, public opinion supports the conflict, an innocence Efron embodies by hitchhiking toward the front with a schmucky grin affixed like a shield. (Grunts one soldier, “Every once in a while, you run into a guy who’s too dumb to get killed.”) But by the time Donohue returns home, the Tet offensive — which he witnesses — will have turned the majority of Americans against the war, including him. After all, if a dingbat like him is able to bluff his way past officers to get to the battlefield, things are not under control.The script is grounded in Donohue’s memoir of the same name (written with J.T. Molloy) and captures his bravado. (“I was a four-star general when it came to slinging BS,” he writes.) While the film makes his onscreen portrayal more oblivious, it backs his claim to have seen a United States tank blow a hole in the wall of its own embassy, only to later blame the blast on the Viet Cong.A local traffic cop (Kevin K. Tran) and hard-living photojournalist (Russell Crowe with a brusque, sleeves-rolled-up cynicism) are invented amalgamations of the many people who stepped in to save Donohue’s neck. (If pressed, the movie would rather label its protagonist a dangerous distraction over a hero.) To heighten the tension — as well as extend empathy toward the Vietnamese villagers — Farrelly also concocts a scene where Donohue is forced to hide in the jungle from his own countrymen.A few horrors are embellished from the book, particularly those that inspire the cinematographer Sean Porter to shoot in dramatic slow motion: a herd of napalmed elephants, a prisoner plummeting headfirst from a helicopter, a wounded soldier backlit by flames. Otherwise, the film’s style is, like its subject, stubbornly chipper (albeit with a marvelous psychedelic rock soundtrack that pulls from lesser-known acts like The Electric Prunes). Depth comes from Efron’s visible difficulty maintaining a smile as he comes to sense that he’s crossed the ocean only to discover a permanent gulf between him and his childhood friends. They’ve endured agonies he’ll never understand — and a barfly like him can’t deliver a cheers that will set things right.The Greatest Beer Run EverRated R for language and violence. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More