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      ‘The Invitation’ Review: Nathalie Emmanuel Brings Down the Haunted House

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      Nathalie Emmanuel stars as the unwitting belle of an English manor in this middling gothic horror movie that leaves her blind to the blood-red flags waving at every turn.“The Invitation,” a brittle, droning excursion into gothic horror, primarily takes place at a manor in the English countryside. The setting is admissible, if unimaginative: the exterior of the estate appears constructed of Playmobil; coated in cobwebs, its dingy indoors most closely resemble a dungeon.Outside of the cinema, an invitation to such an abode would ring a cacophony of alarm bells and leave a guest clambering for the door. Not so for Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel), a jaded ceramist in New York who unwittingly becomes the belle of the dwelling after a long-lost cousin, Oliver (Hugh Skinner), invites her to a wedding on its grounds. An only child who recently lost her mother, Evie is tickled by the prospect of extended family, even if the stuffy brood are uniformly white and ominously keen for her company.But soon, Oliver and his vast array of blond brothers and uncles hardly figure into the equation. Once Evie arrives on the property, she takes a shine to the lord of the residence, Walter (Thomas Doherty), a smirking bachelor dripping in wealth and vampiric good looks.What follows is an escalating sequence of creaky-freaky jump scares interspersed with beats from a budding romance between Walter and Evie. Dressed to the nines, the pair drink champagne and smooch under a flurry of fireworks. At the same time, the estate’s maids are sucked into a menacing string of set pieces that invariably end in shrieks over a black screen.The juxtaposition of these events might be exciting — or even mischievously funny — if each scene wasn’t so tedious. For a fright-fest as broad as this one, there’s an awful lot of banal dialogue, and the scare patterns are repetitive enough that even the easiest startlers (I count myself among them) grow immune early on.Directed by Jessica M. Thompson, “The Invitation” makes feeble gestures at issues of class and race, but its efforts are as diffuse as the whooshing specters haunting Walter’s estate. Emmanuel, for her part, admirably endeavors to imbue Evie with smarts and sass, but confined within a story that leaves her blind to the blood-red flags waving at every turn, her scrappy heroine is hard to cheer on. Had the movie emerged as a friskier game of eat the rich, it might have had a fighting chance of survival. Instead, it’s middling, morbid pap.The InvitationNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Foreign Films, English Titles and the Dilemma Distributors Face

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      Leave as is? Translate? Change altogether? A movie’s success doesn’t depend entirely on what we call it, but it can have a big effect.Two years ago, international film releases in the United States reached a new pinnacle with the crowning of Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” as best picture at the Academy Awards. But before “Parasite” or any other non-English-language film even hits theaters, a basic question has to be settled: the title.Distributors say the title can be the first impression a movie makes on prospective audiences, and so they give it a great deal of thought. How do you translate the original title? Do you add a word or two to clarify? Or do you leave the Spanish or Korean or French as is?Titles have been a consideration at least since the influx of foreign films in the 1950s and ’60s. When a title sticks, it has a way of enduring: it’s hard to imagine Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura” being translated as simply “The Adventure.” The cryptic title “The 400 Blows” didn’t prevent people enjoying that film’s riches. (It’s a reference to a French idiom “faire les quatre cents coups,” commonly rendered as “to raise hell.”)The Korean title for “Parasite” was essentially the same word, and more often than not, a straightforward translation makes sense, said Richard Lorber, the president of Kino Lorber, a major distributor of international films.But occasionally a title is changed for clarity. The French coming-of-age drama “Water Lilies” (2008) had a completely different French title for its romantic story centered on three teenage girls who swim at the same pool.The original name translated as “Birth of the Octopuses.” “It’s a tricky title,” Lorber said.The Korean title for “Parasite” was essentially the same word.Neon“Water Lilies” was proposed as an alternative by the film’s sales agent, the professional who sells the rights to distribute films in specific territories like the U.S. The new title (still evocative but a little more straightforward) stuck for the release, which was the debut feature of the director Céline Sciamma (whose latest, “Petite Maman,” opened in the spring).Sometimes a translation or alteration of any sort is unnecessary. The 2020 Brazilian thriller “Bacurau,” another Kino Lorber release, is named after the fictional town where the action takes place.And an English translation may not capture the full meaning of the more evocative original. The title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2006 “Volver” (“to come back” in Spanish) was not translated for its U.S. release by Sony Pictures Classics, unlike, say, his 1999 drama “All About My Mother.” (Almodóvar’s name recognition no doubt aided the profiles of both films.)Whatever the reasoning, distributors agreed that they didn’t assume a non-English title was an obstacle for audiences.“I think the resistance to foreign titles and foreign-language films has certainly been eroded for the better, along with the resistance to subtitles,” said Ryan Krivoshey, who runs Grasshopper Film. He pointed to the success of the Oscar-winning “Drive My Car” and the prevalence of foreign series on Netflix. Grasshopper Film recently distributed “Il Buco” (literally, “The Hole” in Italian) and even has a forthcoming release with a Latin title (“De Humani Corporis Fabrica”).On a wider platform like Netflix, foreign films and series can vary as to whether they are translated, left alone or rephrased.The five-season hit series “Money Heist” received a makeover from the original Spanish, which translated as “The House of Paper,” while the dystopian thriller “The Platform” was originally “El Hoyo” (“The Hole”). But for a number of foreign features it has acquired, Netflix leaves their lyrical titles more or less intact: “Happy as Lazzaro,” “Atlantics” (tweaked from the French, “Atlantique”), “I Lost My Body.” (A Netflix representative declined to comment.)Carlos Gutiérrez of Cinema Tropical, a nonprofit that specializes in presenting Spanish-language cinema, saw a shift in titles at the turn of the millennium.“I think ‘Amores Perros’ opened up the door that it was cool to leave a title in Spanish,” Gutiérrez said of the 2000 film from the future Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Birdman”). Shortly thereafter, “Y Tu Mamá También” was released to widespread acclaim, opening up more doors.The French coming-of-age drama “Water Lilies” (2008) had a completely different French title, which translated as “Birth of the Octopuses.”Koch Lorber Films, via PhotofestGutiérrez also saw a growing potential Spanish-speaking market for films going by their original titles.“After the census of 2000, I think this country realized that there was a big consuming Latinx group that we were not tapping into,” Gutiérrez said, noting that the openness to original-language titles lasted even as the box office share of international features shrank.The journey for many international releases begins at festivals. A sales agent might have already determined how a title is translated or marketed, anticipating the first wave of reviews and other coverage.Last fall, two films directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi crossed over from festivals to open commercially in the U.S. “Drive My Car” shared its name with the Haruki Murakami source material (a story that also used the Beatles song as its title, but transliterated into Japanese); it went on to win the Academy Award for best international feature. But Hamaguchi’s second release in 2021, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” used an extension of the original Japanese title, roughly translated as “Coincidence and Imagination.”The film had already received admiring reviews and recognition, even if some saw an echo of a long-running game show in the title.“Often your feelings about the title per se are secondary to its awareness out in the market, and that’s fine,” Maxwell Wolkin of Film Movement, the movie’s distributor, said. The extended title stayed.The right to change a title might not even be contractually granted to a distributor when it acquires a film, or the approval of the director or producer may be required. But distributors offered up examples of the delicate calculus involved in connecting films with potential audiences: punching up the recent Norwegian oil-rig thriller “North Sea” to the more vivid “Burning Sea” or retaining the Spanish title for the 2019 family drama “Temblores,” partly to avoid referencing a 1980s horror film about underground worms (“Tremors”).Once in a while, a film openly adopts an established title but puts its appeal to entirely fresh uses. Bi Gan’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (2019) is a mind-expanding riff on film noir that features an hourlong sequence shot in a single take and rendered in 3D.Despite the name, it’s not an adaptation of the Eugene O’Neill play. Adding to the mystique, the film’s Mandarin-language title echoes that of a Roberto Bolaño story.“Everybody sort of scratched their head,” Lorber said of the O’Neill reference. “But Bi Gan just liked that play, and he liked the name, and he just wanted to go with it. And the film stood out on its own.” More

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      ‘Me Time’ Review: In Search of Lost Dad Jokes

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      Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg star in this boys’ night out comedy that fails to find its laughs.The hero of the uneasy comedy “Me Time” begins the movie in a flashback, in free-fall. Sonny (Kevin Hart) has just tried to bail on a day of wingsuit gliding with his longtime friend Huck (Mark Wahlberg), but a burst of propelled air has sent him plummeting down the side of the cliff face. Huck dives after, guiding his friend away from certain death. Sonny is saved, but the movie never shakes off this initial sense of panic.In the present, Sonny is a stay at home dad, whose wife Maya (Regina Hall) is a prominent architect. Sonny fears that he doesn’t measure up to his accomplished spouse, and so he brings an overachiever’s anxiety to parenting. With tension at home, Maya offers to take the kids away for a vacation, so Sonny can take a break from superdad duties.Sonny uses his solo time to join in his old friend Huck’s birthday celebrations, and he finds himself drawn into Huck’s daredevil ways. Together, they indulge in a boys’ night binge of bad behavior. They break into the house of Maya’s most solicitous client, engage in a bacchanal at Sonny’s home and, most damningly, Sonny lends Huck some of his family’s money.“Me Time” is written and directed by John Hamburg, and his movie attempts to include domestic conversations that speak to the lives of men who keep house. But this boys’ night out is light on the wisecracks, pratfalls and gags that might produce laughs. There is a flatness that feels apparent in every shot — and not just because the movie is filmed in bright, low contrast lighting. The film’s experienced cast punches their lines in search of jokes that never materialize, leaving the comedy to nosedive.Me TimeRated R for language, drug references, sexual references and brief nudity. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Funny Pages’ Review: Ordinary Life, Complex Stuff

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      Owen Kline’s wonderful feature debut about an aspiring comic-book creator delves into a buzzingly alive, if anxious, world of cartooning.The young director Owen Kline packs worlds of cringe into “Funny Pages” — shame, disgust, embarrassment, sweaty sexual panic, acres of pustules — it’s all here in this terrific, tonally flawless feature debut. Scabrous, painful and true, it tracks a high school senior who, in his ambitions to be a comic-book artist of the highest, purest order, steamrollers over nearly everyone in his life. No one is spared in this portrait of a young artist as a pain in the butt.It’s startling how good the film is, partly because independent American cinema is clogged with bland coming-of-age fictions about nice kids. There’s nothing obviously nice about Robert — a fantastic Daniel Zolghadri — a churlish 17-year-old whose talent is engaged in an escalating war of dominance with his narcissism. Or at least his bad attitude: Robert talks big (and mean), but is desperate for validation, one problem being that he seems to despise almost everyone.The economic if event-filled story fits the coming-of-age template in its broadest, less romantic outlines. In classic striver mode, Robert yearns to become what he isn’t yet, in this case a great cartoonist in the vein of Robert Crumb and his underground comix brethren. Our Robert hopes to attend art school, an ambition that doesn’t sit well with his mentor and teacher, the shambolic Mr. Katano (an indelible Stephen Adly Guirgis). Lavishly praising Robert — and dividing his cartoons as either Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant great — Katano urges him to submit his work straight to Mad Magazine.“Funny Pages” announces its parameters in its inaugural scene, which finds teacher and student yammering in Katano’s office as Robert eagerly flips through some infamous, old-time dirty comics known as Tijuana Bibles. Published first in the 1930s and small enough to hide in your pocket, these comics were explicit parodies of characters like Popeye (he is what he is, but more so) and Mickey and Minnie Mouse, as well as Hollywood stars. Kline fills the frame with panels from one Bible (a parody of “Henry,” a long-forgotten comic-strip) so that the images loom with humorous, unambiguously smutty absurdity.The opener establishes the claustrophobic milieu as well as the open, visceral intimacy between Robert and Katano, admiration radiating off the student’s face as the teacher blows cigarette smoke out the window. It also puts the viewer on notice, announcing the movie’s unflinching embrace of the impolite and the incorrect. Among the film’s virtues is that it’s exhilaratingly free of the do-gooder, aspirational current that runs through so many ostensibly independent features (unless you too aspire to Crumb-like artistry), and that effectively repackage the same Sunday school moralism the old-studio movies did.Caught between childhood and adulthood, Robert struggles, though he often just squirms. He argues with his exasperated parents (Maria Dizzia and Josh Pais), insults other teachers and sneers at Marvel superheroes. (Kline knows his target audience.) Robert’s rebellious gestures are puny and transparent. He reveres Katano but continually hurls brickbats at his closest friend, the unfailingly loyal Miles (the newcomer Miles Emanuel), another comic-book artist. Yet while Robert can be cruel, especially to Miles, Kline never is. He’s deeply fond of all his characters, even the most abject, which is an ethos in itself.Shortly after “Funny Pages” begins, Robert’s life is upturned by a traumatic loss that sends him quietly spiraling and sets the story on its way. Things happen quickly, and before long he’s arrested, drops out of school and moves out of his family’s house. These milestones give the narrative rough shape, but are less the point than Robert’s textured, buzzingly alive, if anxious and pointedly cloistered male world. Both he and Kline have touchstones and influences, and each is working within established frames — the comic-book panel, the movie screen — while also pushing against limits, finding their voices, making their marks.Robert has a ways to go before he catches up to Kline, whose filmmaking here is seamless and confident: He knows how to shoot, and how to stage a scene (an almost lost skill). “Funny Pages” was shot in super 16 millimeter film, which gives the movie a gritty texture that fits the material and, at times, evokes some classics of 1970s cinema. (The directors of photography are Hunter Zimny and Sean Price Williams; the production designers are Audrey Turner and Madeline Sadowski.) More than once, I flashed on Elaine May’s “A New Leaf” with its sui generis characters, off-the-beat comic rhythms and unforgettable faces.The faces in “Funny Pages” are critical to the film’s gestalt, its philosophy and aesthetic, and offer an astonishment of humanity in all its sweaty, wrinkly, frizzy, rheumy, comb-over, tender glory. These are the people whom Robert is drawn to and draws, the people he takes inspiration from and who feed his head and hungry soul. They’re fodder for his art (and would make Instagram influencers shriek), but as familiar as the faces most of us see in the mirror. In conventional terms, and certainly when it comes to the norms of packaged industrial entertainment, they’re imperfect just because they are real, which makes them shocking.In time, Robert takes a perilous turn, most floridly when he meets Wallace (an excellent, fearless Matthew Maher), who becomes a dubious and punishing new mentor. There are fights, a car crash, some domestic drama, but mostly there is Robert in his own wonderland, a dank, clammy, sometimes sordid place of delight, baseness and naked feeling, one that’s far from the one inhabited by, say, the status-conscious music dudes in the film “High Fidelity.” There’s nothing remotely cool about Robert or, really, “Funny Pages.” That’s because cool is entirely beside the point. What matters is a sensibility, a worldview — what matters is art.Funny PagesRated R for nudity and raw language. Running time: 1 hour 26 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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      ‘Private Desert’ Review: Into the Valley of Repression

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      This L.G.B.T.Q. drama from Brazil follows a distraught police academy instructor with a history of violence as he searches for his mysterious online girlfriend.Set in Brazil, where the crime rates against transgender and queer people are among the highest in the world, the L.G.B.T.Q. drama “Private Desert” follows a brawny police academy instructor, Daniel (Antonio Saboia), during a period of intense vulnerability — and, ultimately, transformation.In an extended opening sequence, we see Daniel tending to his aging father, an ex-military commander, and dealing with the shame of suspension and public notoriety in the wake of a confrontation that lands a rookie cop in a coma. Emotionally, Daniel relies entirely on his internet girlfriend, Sara, a blonde bombshell whom he has never met in person.Then, suddenly, Sara stops replying to his texts.The director Aly Muritiba keeps the mood ambiguous as Daniel, desperate to connect with his virtual lover in the flesh, skips town and heads 2,000 miles north to Sara’s rural stomping grounds. There, he slaps missing person posters with her selfie on every street corner. Is Daniel a huge romantic or are his actions motivated by something more sinister?Unsurprisingly, Sara (Pedro Fasanaro) is not entirely who she claims to be. Muritiba delves into her stifling home life and religious upbringing, giving the online catfish a human face.With all its narrative twists, the film loses momentum as it settles into Sara’s point of view, which takes the air out of Daniel’s fastidiously built-up crisis even as Sara’s perspective (and Fasanaro’s performance) compels in its own right.Still, Muritiba understands that any portrait of masculinity that fixates too intensely on the cruelties and self-denials of machista culture is futile. Instead, he finds grace in stolen moments of tenderness — an embrace between longtime pals beneath cherry-red lights, a dance-floor kiss as Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” swells in the background. These moments are rife with complications, but amid a landscape of violence and repression, they shine like beacons of what could be.Private DesertNot rated. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘Samaritan’ Review: Taking Out the Trash

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      In this action film from Julius Avery, Sylvester Stallone stars as a sanitation worker who may be a superhero.“Samaritan,” a grouchy time-waster directed by Julius Avery, pounds the sidewalks of a fictitious city where decades ago, the super siblings Samaritan and Nemesis — mortal enemies and twins — dueled to the death, yet continue on as spray-painted symbols of hope and rage. A 13-year-old petty thief named Sam (Javon Walton) yearns to believe that the gallant brother secretly survived, and might even be his neighbor, Joe Smith (Sylvester Stallone), a sanitation worker with a penchant for musty action hero quips. (“Going my way?” he grunts to an elevator of goons.)This broken town needs a savior. Poverty roils the streets and Sam’s single mother, a working nurse (Dascha Polanco), struggles to make rent. The cinematographer David Ungaro and the production designers Greg Berry and Christopher Glass have created a city so lousy with litter, peeling paint and tatty couches that it’s believable when a criminal named Cyrus (Pilou Asbaek) convinces its citizens to rally behind his staged resurrection of the wrathful twin, Nemesis, who he claims punched the right people. At the same time, Cyrus’s irritable minion Reza (Moises Arias, an electric presence amped by eye-catching tattoos and hair), just wants to punch everyone, starting with Sam and Joe.Bragi F. Schut’s script mumbles its potentially intriguing themes: Do crumbling communities need a fighter or a figurehead? Do good and evil coexist inside us all? In lieu of embodying these questions, Stallone’s character, an apathetic, self-proclaimed troglodyte, glumly flattens a toaster with his bare hands. Michael Lehr’s fight choreography is designed around special effects that require little from the actor, who hurls scores of nameless brutes through walls with just a tap. At one point, Stallone even growls, “I’m not going to wreck my knees entertaining you.”SamaritanRated PG-13 for cursing and combat. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime. More

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      ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’ Review: Desire, Once Upon a Time

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      George Miller directs a visually sumptuous, grown-up fairy tale with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. It jumps across time but too often just stumbles.There are storytellers, and then there is Scheherazade, the savvy bride who in “One Thousand and One Nights” entertains her husband, the king of Persia, by telling him stories. The king has a nasty habit of killing his wives, so to keep her head Scheherazade practices narrative interruptus: Each night, she relates wondrous tales without finishing them, keeping him hooked on her cliffhangers so that she can live another day. For her, storytelling is life.The stakes are far lower for Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) in George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” A self-described narratologist, Alithea has meaningful work, reputational standing, a movieland dream house and a potential new chapter in a mysterious being (Idris Elba). She is also a storyteller. But unlike Scheherazade, Alithea risks nothing meaningful when she spins this yarn, a problem for a movie that insists on the importance of storytelling. Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind.The movie begins with a promising, characteristically energetic Miller-esque whoosh of swooping cameras, brisk editing, pops of colors and a sense of urgency. Things are about to happen! Except — as Alithea explains — everything to come has already occurred. “My story is true,” she says, adding: “You’re more likely to believe me, however, if I tell it as a fairy tale.” And so, with a melodious once-upon-a-time voice, she revs up an elaborate story about a loquacious genie called, well, Djinn (Elba). Soon enough, the story skips back in time, she frees him from a bottle, he offers her three wishes and she reacts warily until she doesn’t.Any movie with Elba and Swinton has its appeal, and the same holds true of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” which pulls you in every time they’re together onscreen. It takes flight with Alithea en route to a conference in Istanbul. Things quickly get weird, and a certain je ne sais what perfumes the air when she meets a peculiar fellow at the airport and encounters an even odder, ominous-looking stranger at the conference. During a lecture on storytelling, Alithea sits before huge images of modern gods like Batman and Superman, a display that gestures toward the continuity between new myths and those of the ancient world. And then she faints.Certainly, Miller — whose fables include the Mad Max series — is keenly interested in the power of stories. But in “Years of Longing,” he has tethered himself to hopeless, uninvolving source material. That would be a self-reflexive, tediously long story by A.S. Byatt titled “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” which also centers on a single, middle-aged British academic who (eventually) travels to Turkey, meets a genie, is offered three wishes and experiences several life-altering changes. Filled with literary allusions and deep thoughts, it is serious stuff, no doubt, but it’s also about a white woman getting laid by an exotic Other.Race doesn’t factor into the original story, or maybe it does; I was so bored I admittedly resorted to skimming chunks of it. Whatever the case, the casting in the movie adds complications because of the way that cinema concretizes ideas. Actors don’t only play parts; they give those ideas flesh, histories, social and cultural meanings. Djinn is a captive to whoever releases him from the bottle; he’s a fictional creation, and this is a fairy tale. Yet it’s also a story in which a sexualized Black man is, at least initially, held captive to the desires of a lonely white woman who wants what he’s got — provocative terrain the movie ignores.“Three Thousand Years of Longing” — it was written by Miller and his daughter, Augusta Gore — has more life than the original story, but it still drags. After Alithea unbottles Djinn, the two face off in her hotel room, where after some awkwardness and silliness (enter a wee Albert Einstein), they settle into matching hotel bathrobes, and he recounts the stories that shaped his previous 3,000 years. As the movie’s title announces, these are suffused with longing. The first involves the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), another turns on an enslaved girl (Ece Yuksel) and yet another on an unhappy wife (Burcu Golgedar).All the stories have their appeal, and Miller, working with a predictably stellar crew, seems to have an enjoyable time playing with his digital tool kit. Yet his exuberance and delight are most evident — and most infectious — at the granular level. Although several of the tales are heavily populated, teeming with intrigues and swarming with minions, the movie charms most successfully with the beauty and wit of its filigreed details: the gleam of its polished surfaces, the hues of its variegated palette and the inventiveness of its smaller delights, like the bewitching musical instrument that plays itself with its own nimble hands.Despite these flashes of playfulness, the stories blur rather than build. They’re overlong, for one, and because Djinn often narrates their characters’ words, thoughts and deeds, they rarely come alive. Much like the figurines in old-fashioned automaton clocks, they enter at the appointed time, execute clever bits of business and exit, leaving no impression other than admiration for clockmaker’s skill. Worse, they take you away from Alithea and Djinn. And while the last half-hour is lovely — it’s here that you see the movie, and feel the tenderness, that Miller himself clearly yearns to convey — by then, alas, the clock has almost run out.Three Thousand Years of LongingRated R for fairy-tale violence, nudity and sex. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Seoul Vibe’ Review: Grinding Gears

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      Set in 1988, this Korean action comedy follows a blithe driving team that goes undercover with holdovers from the old military leadership.On the surface, the Korean action comedy “Seoul Vibe” resembles any studio product getting a kick out of careening cars and snazzy retro gear. But the setting is 1988, when South Korea was transitioning toward freer elections after years of military dictatorship. The heroes of the movie are a driving team with their own custom-car garage, while the baddies hail from the corrupt old regime and have millions stashed away. (Chun Doo-hwan, the era’s ruling general, died last November and was in fact convicted of collecting massive bribes.)Not that any of this history offers more than curiosity value. “It is a fun and brainless action film,” Yoo Ah-in, who plays the star driver, Dong-wook, opined at a recent news conference, and he’s partly right. In the shapelessly long movie, Dong-wook’s team goes undercover for a government investigation, posing as couriers for a big-hair crime boss (Moon So-ri, aptly hard-boiled) and a psychotic ex-military man (Kim Sung-kyun).Dong-wook and his goofball mates (played by Ko Gyung-pyo, Lee Kyoo-hyung, Ong Seong-Wu and Park Ju-Hyun as the female member and motorbike maven) gawp at the loot they transport and the 1980s booty they collect — sneakers, gold chains, mix tapes. The caper, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, isn’t as fun as it insists it is, playing up the crew and its exploits à la “The Fast and the Furious” and “Baby Driver” but never hitting its stride.But the final half-hour of chases is pleasingly raucous as the team bobs and weaves through the streets during celebrations for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, racing toward a new future.Seoul VibeNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More