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      ‘Railway Children’ Review: A Nostalgia Trip, With Lessons

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      This winsome reboot of a British children’s classic, directed by Morgan Matthews, also addresses racial segregation in the armed forces during World War II.The Railway Children universe originates in Edith Nesbit’s 1905 serialized novel about a mother and three children at the turn of the century who leave London to live just off a country rail line. A popular 1970 adaptation starring the British actress Jenny Agutter followed (among others), but the most recent “Railway Children” is set during World War II. The three youngsters in Morgan Matthews’s winsome new film, are shipped to the northern countryside as part of the evacuation of children that occurred during German air raids.Thirteen-year-old Lily (Beau Gadsdon) and her younger siblings Pattie and Ted (Eden Hamilton and Zac Cudby), are taken in by Annie, a kindly schoolmistress (Sheridan Smith) and Bobbie, her mother (Agutter). The city kids go through an adjustment period, but they soon settle into an idyllic Yorkshire, which is bathed in the film’s burnishing glow.Dotted with lessons, this is initially a nostalgia trip handled with the cherubic faces of a children’s show. Tom Courtenay (“45 Years”) turns up as a beloved uncle to deliver a Churchillian speech at the dinner table.Drama arrives with the American soldiers who add fresh drama of a troubling sort. Lily and her siblings secretly give refuge to a very young Black enlistee, Abe (KJ Aikens, a bit wobbly), who’s sought by the military police. Perhaps unexpectedly, “Railway Children” takes up the fact that Jim Crow segregation was enforced within U.S. armed forces.Decency prevails in a somewhat ludicrous finale involving an army of children and a train containing a high-ranking officer. It’s an ending so tidy as to undercut the effort to broach a shameful side to the American war effort.Railway ChildrenRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Catherine Called Birdy’ Review: Ye Olde Lady Bird

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      Bella Ramsey plays a 13th century adolescent in Lena Dunham’s winning film.To flip through the pages of a 13th century manuscript, one might believe the medieval era was beleaguered by more snaky dragons and man-murdering bunnies than temperamental tween girls. Young women’s stories weren’t recorded — certainly not in their own hand, as literacy was low and paper costs were high — an absence that has prodded later generations to imagine the adolescent of the Middle Ages as demure and obedient, neither seen nor heard. Here comes “Catherine Called Birdy,” a headstrong comedy written for the screen and directed by Lena Dunham, to fill in that silence with a shriek.Birdy, played with zest by Bella Ramsey, storms into the frame baring her teeth and flinging mud pies. The 14-year-old daughter of a broke lord (Andrew Scott) and his oft-bedridden wife (Billie Piper), Birdy is mercurial, mulish and emphatically irritated by nearly everyone and everything in her shire. She logs her grievances in her diary, which riffs from Karen Kushman’s 1994 Newbery Medal-winning children’s novel. The film drops Kushman’s unromantic runner about pestilence (“Picked off 29 fleas today,” her Birdy writes) to focus on the girl’s passion for inventing curses (“Corpus bones!”) and her campaign to scuttle her father’s intention to save his estate by marrying his only surviving daughter to a flatulent creep she dubs Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye).Husbands, as seen here, are either too old (81!), too young (9!) or too selfish, in the case of Scott’s repugnantly weak Lord Rollo, who wasted the family money importing tigers and silken robes he wears open-chested with beads, as if presaging Lord Byron’s fashion sense six centuries sooner. No wonder the girl would prefer to suffer a saint’s gruesome tortures than live on as one more forsaken wife.Dunham sets out to make life in 1290 feel as vibrant as if Birdy was rocking the glitter eye shadow of “Euphoria” instead of drawstring underpants. Occasionally, the movie overplays its bid for modern relevance — it’s dubious that a medieval teen would be able to come out as gay with just a knowing look — and the soundtrack’s twee covers of girl power anthems are a warble too far. (No need to perform Elastica’s “Connection” on what sounds like a lute.) But Dunham prevails in convincing audiences that coming-of-age in a so-called simpler time was equally tumultuous, and crams the corners of her movie with images of other female characters discreetly seizing their own moments of satisfaction — glimpses of joys which realize that it’s in the margins of a medieval tale where the best stuff happens.Catherine Called BirdyRated PG-13 for adult innuendo. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Goodnight Mommy’ and More: For the Love (and Hate) of Horror Remakes

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      With the American update of the Austrian horror film “Goodnight Mommy” now streaming, a horror fan discusses why remakes for him are a must-see.The 2015 Austrian psychological horror film, “Goodnight Mommy,” is an eerie little gem. I went into the recent remake with apprehension but determined to keep an open mind, primarily because of Naomi Watts. I remembered feeling similarly territorial over my bootleg VHS copy of the 1998 film “Ringu” before seeing Watts in its nightmarish 2002 American remake “The Ring.” Michael Haneke’s 2008 retelling of his own 1998 home invasion film “Funny Games” was just as terrifying the second time around with Watts in the lead.As the end credits rolled on the new “Goodnight Mommy,” I decided the mournful 1970s tune, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” would have made a better title. No fault of Watts; my issues with Matt Sobel’s film stem from a cloying emphasis on the redemptive power of motherhood, a theme extremely at odds with the original, and how this version bafflingly seems determined to spoil its own twist ending from the start.But I don’t regret watching the movie. I’m passionate about horror; if offered a choice between seeing a critically adored drama or a poorly reviewed slasher, I’ll choose the latter almost every time. There’s only so much time in a week, and as I’m constantly reminded, a masked man could behead me at any moment.Susanne Wuest and Lukas Schwarz in the 2015 Austrian film “Goodnight Mommy,” directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.RadiusHorror remakes surged in the 2000s. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” “Friday the 13th,” “The Hills Have Eyes” and other seminal 1970s and ’80s classics were dusted off, recast and rewritten. In their podcast “Aughtsterion,” the hosts Sam Wineman and Jordan Crucchiola gleefully cover horror from this era in-depth and point out that many of these remakes were crueler than their originals, both in kills and dialogue, and reflected the decade’s cultural sleaze — everything from TMZ to American Apparel ads to “Girls Gone Wild.”The rise of torture porn films, like the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises, during the same period is now widely seen as an allegoric reaction to Sept. 11 and the American-led invasion in Iraq, but a grim failure at attempting this theme arrived with a remake of the 1976 film “The Omen,” 30 years after the original played to its decade’s fascination with religion and cults. The rehash had no interest in disguising its intent and showed footage of the burning World Trade Center to signal the impending end of days. Stephen Holden’s Times review noted that particular choice “sharpens this remake’s sour tang of exploitation.”And yet, even after reading that review, I was at the theater later that night. I needed to witness the mess myself, a sort of cinematic rubbernecking, so I could talk about it with authority among friends. I’ll even admit that I couldn’t resist the studio’s marketing gimmick of releasing the film on June 6, 2006.Dakota Johnson in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of “Suspiria.”Amazon StudiosIt’s thrilling when my devotion to the genre pays off and a remake works, like Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 take on “Suspiria.” Rather than try to replicate Dario Argento’s 1977 gorgeous, color-soaked tale of a witchy dance academy, Guadagnino went with a muted palette, allowing his character-centric story to shine. Here were real women operating a coven, not just the minions of a villainous asthmatic ghoul.On the flip side of classy, but equally cherished in my eyes, is “Piranha 3D” (2010), which transformed a tame “Jaws” rip-off from 1978 into an over-the-top judgment on sordid topless reality TV content. The director Alexandre Aja served up phallus chomping, a Sapphic underwater ballet set to “The Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’s opera “Lakmé,” even a cameo by Richard Dreyfuss, a.k.a. Hooper from “Jaws.”I find as much value in a horror remake with a large budget for entrails as I do in one that’s a moody meditation on the transformative power of dance. I treasure this genre because it allows me to define horror however I want.Jerry O’Connell in “Piranha 3D,” directed by Alexandre Aja.Gene Page/Dimension FilmsOf course I don’t speak for every horror fan. Despite #horrorcommunity being a popular Instagram and Twitter hashtag, the better term for us is horror crowd, as explained by Phil Nobile Jr., the editor in chief of Fangoria magazine.“Horror — as an interest, passion, or profession — has fandoms and sub-fandoms; it has cliques; it has little fiefdoms,” Nobile Jr. wrote in a newsletter last April. “A community is an idea (or maybe an ideal), a crowd is a mathematical reality.” He made this distinction while ruminating on homophobia and political differences among fans, but the phrasing is comprehensive. Put simply, our opinions are all over the place, and that’s often on display when a remake gets released.The new “Goodnight Mommy” left me cold instead of giving me chills, and I’m OK with that. A horror remake sparks discourse, lights up social media, fuels podcasts, spurs think pieces. When this happens, for a brief and lovely moment, I soak it all in and naïvely do feel part of a horror community before slipping back into the crowd. More

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      ‘The 400 Blows,’ a Directing Debut That Still Astonishes

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      In 1959, François Truffaut premiered his first film, about a Parisian boy playing hooky, and moviemaking hasn’t been the same since.One of the most impressive debuts in film history, François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” created a sensation at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and elsewhere. It was voted the best foreign film of the year by New York film critics — a movie that “brilliantly and strikingly reveals the explosion of a fresh creative talent,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.Showing for two weeks at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration, the movie is not only crucial to one’s film education but well worth revisiting.“Amazingly, this vigorous effort is the first feature film of M. Truffaut, who had previously been (of all things!) the movie critic for a French magazine,” Crowther noted. As a critic, Truffaut was particularly harsh on French “quality” films — so much so that Cannes denied him accreditation in 1958. Revenge was swift when he returned the following year and won the award for best director. (Marcel Camus’s “Black Orpheus” received the Palme d’Or. The third French film in competition, Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” came up empty.)“The 400 Blows” has two stars. One is the then-14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel, and thus began a career as the embodiment of the French new wave. The other is the city of Paris — gray, grimy and glorious — the arena for Antoine’s fleeting joys and petty crimes.Antoine is an unwanted child, as was Truffaut. Punished by his teacher, rejected by his self-centered mother (Claire Maurier), he plays hooky, runs away from home, steals a typewriter, gets busted trying to return it, is booked by the cops and winds up in reform school. The movie is full of actual incidents from Truffaut’s childhood, including his fabricating his mother’s death as an excuse for truancy. Few movies have been so personal.“The 400 Blows” is dedicated to the critic André Bazin, Truffaut’s mentor, who died just as the movie began shooting. The early scenes of the boy’s classroom misadventures strongly recall “Zero de Conduite,” the 1933 sendup of French education, directed by Truffaut’s great influence, Jean Vigo. There are other, more inside references, including the unlikely notion that Antoine’s parents might see a quasi-underground work-in-progress by Truffaut’s colleague Jacques Rivette, “Paris Belongs to Us.”“The 400 Blows” is a landmark film for several reasons. It was likely the first openly autobiographical commercial feature, and as such caused Truffaut’s parents considerable distress. It also introduced one of the 1960s’ most resilient clichés — the concluding freeze-frame close-up. Truffaut got the idea from Harriet Andersson’s accusatory stare at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s “Summer with Monika” (as noted when Antoine steals a lobby card of Andersson’s “Monika”). But building on the wistful refrain that runs throughout, “The 400 Blows” ends on a note of sadness all its own.Truffaut and Leaud returned several times to the character of Antoine Doinel. Film Forum is showing “The 400 Blows” with rotating screenings of later films like “Stolen Kisses” and “Love on the Run.” The character survives and even thrives. Yet it is the heartbreaking last shot of “The 400 Blows” that will fix his identity for as long as there are movies.The Four Hundred BlowsSept. 23 through Oct. 6 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org More

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      ‘Meet Cute’ Review: Live. Date. Repeat.

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      This time-loop rom-com takes another swing at the tried-and-true “Groundhog Day” premise.“Meet Cute,” from the director Alex Lehmann, is a “Groundhog Day” movie. Dozens of movies have borrowed the premise of the 1993 comedy in which Bill Murray finds himself caught in a 24-hour time loop, forced to continuously relive the same day: it’s been applied to sci-fi (“Source Code”), farce (“Naked”), horror (“Happy Death Day”), and blockbuster action (“Edge of Tomorrow”), often to amusing effect. “Meet Cute,” like the 2020 film “Palm Springs,” brings the concept to bear on the rom-com: Sheila (Kaley Cuoco) is stuck on a time-looped first date with Gary (Pete Davidson), repeatedly meeting and re-meeting the guy she’s convinced is the man of her dreams.Part of the appeal of “Groundhog Day” (and many of its imitators) is that the reason for the time loop is never explained: Murray’s Sisyphean plight rang true without the need for some literal justification. “Meet Cute” complicates its conceit by introducing elaborate plot mechanics involving a tanning-bed time machine, which results in a number of boring expository flashbacks and, later, an extended riff on “The Butterfly Effect.”Of course, these logistical problems would be excusable if the romance at the center of the movie were remotely compelling or if the jokes were actually funny. At one point, the couple dines at a fancy modern restaurant, and there’s an extended gag about the tiny portions. (“Are we supposed to eat this?” Sheila asks, aghast. “Yes,” Gary says. “It’s one of the best restaurants in the city!”) That joke, like the premise of the movie, might have seemed fresh 30 years ago. Are we stuck in a time loop?Meet CuteNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

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      ‘Escape From Kabul’ Review: Evacuation in Recap

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      This documentary from Jamie Roberts on the evacuation of the airport at Kabul in August 2021 feels more like a lengthy news segment.Airing on HBO a little more than a year after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, “Escape From Kabul” presents a detailed account of the chaotic evacuation at the Kabul airport in August 2021. Directed by Jamie Roberts, whose “Four Hours at the Capitol” premiered just nine months after the Capitol riot, “Escape From Kabul” in some ways feels more like a lengthy news segment than a feature documentary.The stories — and types of footage — will be familiar to anyone who sat glued to the television that August. We hear from Marines who were at the airport; from Afghans who got out and who didn’t; and from Taliban members who moved on Kabul. At least one acts surprised that women and children might be terrified of their arrival.There is talk of the crushing size of the crowds and the squalid conditions at the airport. Lt. Col. Christopher R. Richardella describes logistical difficulties at various stages. Staff Sgt. Maria G. Solis explains how eerily normal it became for American troops to be passed babies by women trying to escape. Afghans like Hasina Safi, then the country’s acting minister for women’s affairs, and Malalai Hussainy, a first-year university student at the time, discuss their fears of brutality and a lack of education for women under Taliban leadership.The movie lays out a clear timeline and is good at conveying the conflicted feelings that Afghans had about leaving their homes and that American troops had as they tried to maintain control of the situation. Still, “Escape From Kabul” is a short-term recap. A more robust movie, following these witnesses over several years, is still waiting to be made.Escape From KabulNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      Mike Birbiglia to Return to Broadway With a New Show This Fall

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      The comedic storyteller, who previously brought a solo show to Broadway in 2018, has a new act for a new age.Mike Birbiglia, the comedic storyteller who has mined his experiences with romance, fatherhood and sleep disorders for narrative purposes, will return to Broadway this fall with a new show prompted by swimming.Birbiglia has been developing the show, called “The Old Man & the Pool,” through a series of performances over the last year at venues including Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 28 and to open on Nov. 13 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.Birbiglia, 44, previously appeared on Broadway in his solo show “The New One,” which had a two-month run that began performances in 2018.“The last show was, in some ways, about birth, and this show, in some ways, is about death, through the storytelling lens of hitting middle age and realizing that our bodies are slowly in decline,” Birbiglia said. “The most crucial thing about it is that it’s funny — it goes to the darkest places about life and death for hopefully 90 minutes of laughs, where at the end of it people feel better on the way out than when they came in.”“The Old Man & the Pool” is directed by Seth Barrish, a frequent Birbiglia collaborator who also directed “The New One,” and includes contributions from Ira Glass, the “This American Life” host, who executive produced “The New One.”Birbiglia said he has felt “euphoric” about returning to in-person performing after the pandemic shutdown, when, he said, he worried about the future of the form. “It’s almost like before the pandemic, entertainment was elective, and now it’s essential,” he said.And why Broadway? “I’ve always thought of the shows as solo plays, somewhere between storytelling and theater and comedy,” he said. “What happens with Broadway, in addition to these being some of the best theaters in the world physically and sonically and in all the technical ways, there are some people who only pay attention to Broadway, so that’s meaningful. It opens up the aperture to more people, and that’s the really the goal.”Although Lincoln Center Theater is a nonprofit organization, this show is a commercial venture produced by Sue Wagner, John Johnson, Patrick Catullo and Seaview, a production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea. More

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      Alain Tanner, Leading Director in Swiss New Wave, Dies at 92

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      With his brainy works of neorealism, he made films that helped establish Switzerland as a film center in the 1970s.Alain Tanner, a pioneering director in the Swiss New Wave movement that took off in the 1970s, known for his cerebral, left-leaning films that challenged bourgeois complacency, died on Thursday in Geneva. He was 92.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Association Alain Tanner, a Geneva-based group that preserves and promotes his work.Growing up in Switzerland, surrounded by France, Germany, and Italy with their rich cinema traditions, Mr. Tanner went on to be a founder of the so-called Group of 5, norm-shattering Swiss directors who helped drive a new form of national cinema. His best-known films tended toward a stark neorealism, laced with incisive dialogue and an arid wit, and often centered on characters struggling against conformity.Looking back on his career in his later years, Mr. Tanner said he was proud to have been part of a generation that strove to shake the social order.“During the second half of the last century,” he said, “I lived through what was probably the most engaging for cinema, with the questioning of the old styles, the break with old structures and the arrival of modernity.”A sharp-eyed observer of discontent, both emotional and social, he never achieved the name recognition of the French New Wave masters like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who died on Tuesday at 91. He acknowledged both as influences.Regardless, critics considered him an important voice. In a 1990 review of Mr. Tanner’s film “A Flame in My Heart,” Vincent Canby described him in The New York Times as a “first-class director” and “one of the most securely cerebral of European filmmakers.”Bulle Ogier in Mr. Tanner’s 1971 film “The Salamander.”Filmo – Verein CH.Film“The Salamander” (1971), which Mr. Tanner shot in 16-millimeter, established his reputation worldwide and had a yearlong run at the Cinéma Saint-André des Arts in Paris. “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976) was an art-house hit in Europe and the United States.Mr. Tanner, a native of French-speaking Geneva, made his early films in French, but his first English-language film, “Light Years Away,” which starred Trevor Howard as a junkyard-dwelling spiritual guide to a rebellious young drifter, won the jury’s special grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981.By that point Mr. Tanner’s reputation in film circles was already cemented based on his groundbreaking films that grappled with the spirit of revolution and personal reinvention of the 1960s.His first feature film, “Charles, Dead or Alive” (1969), conceived in the wake of the 1968 student protests that swept Europe, involved a prosperous middle-aged Swiss watchmaker who abandons a thriving family business, adopts an assumed name and embarks on an ill-fated journey of self-discovery as he settles into a life on the fringes of society with a young couple.Mr. Tanner’s best known films of the 1970s, written with the English novelist, critic and Marxist theorist John Berger, concern the legacies of the tumultuous ’60s.“The Middle of the World” (1974), explores a love affair between an Italian waitress at a railroad cafe and a married engineer who is running for the Swiss Parliament, but also the class tensions between them.Mr. Tanner’s film “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), with the actors Myriam Mézières and Jean-Luc Bideau.Citel Films“Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), focuses on a group of disillusioned friends in Geneva — including an activist-turned-proofreader, an itinerant history professor and a trade unionist — who are prone to extemporizing on topics as diverse as capitalism, revolution, train travel and sex.“Each of the characters is, in his or her own way, as surrounded as Switzerland, hemmed in,” Mr. Canby wrote in The Times in 1976. But, he added, “they have not been anesthetized by mediocrity into dreamless boredom.”Alain Tanner was born on Dec. 6, 1929, in Geneva. His father was a publicist, writer and poet; his mother was a painter.Growing up in Romandy, the French-speaking region in western Switzerland, Mr. Tanner felt alienated from the country’s German-speaking majority. “Switzerland exists much more for the German Swiss than for us,” he was quoted as saying in a 1976 interview with the film critic James Monaco. “They have a real identity, while we don’t.”A lover of movies since childhood, he experienced an epiphany as a teenager when he discovered Italian neorealist directors like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. At the University of Geneva, Mr. Tanner studied economics, but his real passion was for film. He started a campus film club with Claude Goretta, who would help found the Group of 5. Seeking adventure beyond his native country, he joined the merchant navy after graduation.In the mid-1950s, Mr. Tanner and Mr. Goretta settled in London, where they found work curating archives and subtitling films for the British Film Institute. They befriended the young directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, who were involved with a budding school of documentary filmmaking called Free Cinema. In 1957, Mr. Tanner and Mr. Goretta joined the movement with “Nice Time,” a 17-minute documentary rumination about Piccadilly Circus at night. It won the prize for experimental film at the Venice Film Festival.Returning to Switzerland a few years later, Mr. Tanner directed for television before forming the Group of 5 in 1968; besides Mr. Goretta, the others were Michel Soutter, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange. His first feature, “Charles Dead or Alive,” won the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Mr. Tanner is survived by his wife, Janine; two daughters, Nathalie and Cécile; and three grandchildren.By the end of his career he had made 21 feature films, including the erotic psychological dramas “A Flame in My Heart” (1987) and “The Diary of Lady M” (1993), along with numerous documentaries for Swiss television.A director once invigorated by the spirit of revolution had long ago mellowed in his political passions.“I believe that neither capitalism nor Communism does anybody any good,” Mr. Tanner said in a 1976 Times interview. “I’m not so much politically minded; I think more about the individual and peoples’ lives.” More