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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

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      ‘Adieu Godard’ Review: A Poor Imitation

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      This limp satire about an Indian villager’s encounter with the movies of Jean-Luc Godard rehashes regressive stereotypes and squanders a potent premise.Amartya Bhattacharyya’s “Adieu Godard,” about a porn-addicted Indian villager who chances upon the French classic “Breathless” (1960), tries to milk comedy from a condescending premise: that uneducated villagers are too dumb to understand the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Instead, this limp satire only proves that no one fails to understand Godard as spectacularly as filmmakers who think they do.In an East Indian village, a bushy-haired old man, Ananda (Choudhury Bikash Das), spends his days watching foreign pornographic films with his crew of creeps — while his wife and daughter struggle to tune out the moans that sound throughout their house. One day, the local video store owner hands Ananda a DVD of “Breathless” while clearing his inventory. Ananda’s friends are infuriated by the movie: “No song, no dance, no fight, no romance … and it’s a film?” But Ananda is mesmerized, so much so that he decides to organize a French film festival.About a third into the film, Bhattacharyya yanks us out of this narrative — told in black and white — into a color track in which Ananda’s daughter, Shilpa (Sudhasri Madhusmita), relates her father’s story to her filmmaker boyfriend. Her unreliable narration is one of the film’s several aspirational Godardian flourishes, including Dutch angles, nonlinear editing and long conversations about sex and cinema.But it’s a film-school pastiche of the French director’s style, with none of the forward-thinking intellectual curiosity of his movies. Instead, “Adieu Godard” rehashes regressive stereotypes, taking potshots at a mute “simpleton” and turning Shilpa into a vessel for a muddled, moralistic lesson on misogyny. The film looks down the nose at its rural characters, squandering a potent premise about how cinema travels across borders.Adieu GodardNot rated. In Odia and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Out of the Blue’ Review: The Spider and the Fly

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      An unhappy wife leads her younger lover down a dangerous path in this sexy, yet predictable drama from Neil LaBute.From the moment Marilyn Chambers (Diane Kruger) sashays from the ocean in “Out of the Blue,” a vision in a sizzling orange swimsuit, we sense she’s bad news. (And not just because her creator is Neil LaBute, a director not known for writing sympathetic characters.) There’s something about the way she appraises the handsome young stranger, Connor Bates (Ray Nicholson), who’s watching her approach with puppyish delight. Like her adult-movie namesake, Marilyn knows how to cultivate male lust.And poor Connor, a sweet-natured librarian and recovering felon, is instantly mad for her. Soon, though, a discreetly bruised Marilyn will confess a problem: Her wealthy husband, wouldn’t you know, is knocking her about.“Maybe I can be the solution,” Connor offers, his plans to quietly rebuild his life melting between Marilyn’s milky thighs. Marilyn might be a mature-temptress cliché, but she can’t be accused of phoning it in: As the couple bonks relentlessly in the woods, on the kitchen table and even among the book stacks, we can almost see Connor’s brain cells dissolve. And, to be fair, “Out of the Blue” is never less than upfront about the familiarity of its setup (the dialogue repeatedly references “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” most recently adapted for the screen in 1981) and its own old-fashioned rhythms. One climactic scene is even preceded by an actual drum roll.Like most of LaBute’s work, “Out of the Blue” is talky, sparsely staged and presented with his signature detachment. The two leads are fine, though Hank Azaria, as Connor’s probation officer, and Frederick Weller, playing a cross sheriff’s deputy, wrestle with lines that are almost cartoonishly hard-boiled. A last-minute twist comes too late to rescue the plot; Connor, sadly, was always beyond saving.Out of the BlueRated R for enthusiastic, multilocational sex. Running time: 1 hour 44 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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      ‘The Good Boss’ Review: Company Man

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      As the titular boss of this dark comedy from Spain, Javier Bardem engages in underhanded tactics to win an award for business excellence.Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem), the boss of “The Good Boss,” is introduced giving a pep talk to his factory employees, with his words underlined by a jaunty, clarinet-infused score.The company is up for an award in business excellence, he says, so they should be on their best behavior when the judges stroll through. Did he mention they’re like family to him — the children he never had? As if an illustration were necessary, a layoff victim, Jose (Óscar de la Fuente), turns up with his two kids and starts making a ruckus. He demands that someone explain to his son and daughter that he no longer has his job.Julio, in fact, is not the good boss his glad-handing manner might suggest. The movie, a dark comedy from Spain written and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, follows him over roughly 10 days as he ensures that everything is set for the awards committee. That means interposing himself into the marital dramas of an ostensible friend (Manolo Solo) at the factory. It means using his influence to undermine the protest that Jose sets up across the street. The company makes scales, and sometimes, Julio says toward the end, you need to trick a scale into balancing.“The Good Boss” provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount. As satire, though, the movie is facile: not quite mean, outlandish or energetic enough in the challenges it imagines for Julio, notwithstanding a bracingly cynical use of an unexpected death. Nor is it especially incisive, unless it comes as news that a magnate’s warm persona might be feigned.The Good BossNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More