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      ‘Wild Diamond’ Review: The Reel World

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      In this French coming-of-age drama, a young woman auditions for a reality show to escape life at home.In “Wild Diamond,” the dream of reality TV stardom is one young woman’s salvation — a way out of her bleak life in southern France.But should a 19-year-old have to commodify her sexuality in the name of self-worth? Does it become more understandable — or more unsettling — when we learn she’s driven by emotional neglect?Even if we didn’t witness the fame-obsessed Liane (Malou Khebizi) shielding her younger sister from their mother’s sex sounds in the next room, or see the threat of eviction, we’d still sense trouble at home just by her frantic determination to make it onto “Miracle Island.”Liane auditions for the hit reality show, which might be her best shot at breaking free from the confines of her troubled family. But when she tattoos her abdomen — wincing in pain, then calmly flaunting the fresh ink for her thousands of TikTok followers — you want to show her another path. Moments like these crystallize, to heartbreaking effect, the movie’s uneasy compassion for influencer culture.Originally a short film by the writer-director Agathe Riedinger, this feature debut unfolds in waves of tension and release. Khebizi brings palpable desperation to the role of Liane, despite the limited script, while the cinematographer Noé Bach intimately frames Liane like we’re intruding on her space. Her glittering ambitions stand out all the more against this unadorned naturalist look.Eventually, we find out whether Liane got the role. But the film’s most haunting question remains: Which reality is safer — the one she’s learned to survive, or the one that tempts her with its illusion of hope?Wild DiamondNot rated. In French, Italian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sovereign’ Review: The Fringe and the Forgotten

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      Nick Offerman stars as an anti-government widower whose extremist philosophy inches closer and closer to violent conflict.Much of the American moment — of distrust, violence and the inevitable collision between the fringe and the forgotten — courses throughout “Sovereign,” the crime thriller from the writer and director Christian Swegal. In other words, one can immediately recognize Jerry Kane (a remarkable Nick Offerman), even if they are not familiar with the true events his story is based on.A proponent of the sovereign citizen movement, Jerry is intensely anti-government and sees himself as exempt from its laws, a philosophy that hinges closer toward violent conflict as he has run-ins with the police and ignores the bank’s foreclosure notices on his house. A widower and father, Jerry brings his teenage son, Joe (Jacob Tremblay), along to his seminars in which he teaches his ideas. Close to his father but itching for a normal childhood, Joe soon begins to chafe against Jerry’s beliefs.Dual father-and-son stories — one between Jerry and Joe, the other between the local police chief (Dennis Quaid) and his son on the force — form the film’s emotional thrust, sometimes for worse. “Sovereign” is most intriguing for its subtle, if incomplete observations of the more complicated realities of both sides of the law that inform and ripple from Jerry’s paranoid world.Meeting in basement conference rooms, the attendees at Jerry’s seminars are not acolytes of an extremist philosophy, but just ordinary people crushed by bills and the latest family emergency. Disenchanted by a system that seems to have forgotten them, they’re desperate for any answer — even if they don’t know the dark places it might lead them.SovereignRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: Through a Child’s Eyes

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      This drama about a white family in Zimbabwe is told almost entirely from the girl’s point of view.The family drama elegantly realized in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” is relayed entirely through the perspective of Bobo (Lexi Venter), a white child who witnesses her mother spinning out against a backdrop of the bloody transition from Rhodesia to an independent Zimbabwe.Written and directed by Embeth Davidtz and adapted from Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, the film takes place during the 1980 election, when Robert Mugabe became prime minister.Tensions are high on the modest farm Bobo’s family, who comes from Australia, maintains alongside a small staff of Black laborers. An outdoorsy child, Bobo understands the world by observing the adults around her, particularly her mercurial mother, Nicola (Davidtz), whose feelings of entitlement over the land degenerate into racist mania. Amid the friction, Bobo’s chief ally is Sarah (Zikhona Bali), a Black maid who indulges Bobo’s longing for companionship despite concerns that her affinity with a white child could make her a target for Black militants fighting for independence.Davidtz, who grew up in South Africa during apartheid, uses jump cuts and an ever-moving camera to build a mood of youthful wonder, and the movie’s best sequences foreground Bobo’s childhood innocence. Because she lacks a conception of colonialism, Davidtz sometimes struggles to negotiate the film’s fidelity to her point of view with a more complete picture of the war. It doesn’t help that a past tragedy meant to round out Nicola’s character comes off as oversimplified. But as the spunky pixie holding the story’s reins, Bobo commands our attention.Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs TonightRated R for violence, assault and grown-up matters. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Brick’ Review: No Way Out?

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      In the overly constructed thriller from Germany, tenants are trapped in apartment building by a mysterious bulwark.“Brick” is built almost entirely of hints and twists. Even so, it feels spoiler-free to share that Liv, an architect who is trapped in an apartment building in Hamburg, Germany, concludes that the material composing the barricades is neither carbon fiber nor liquid granite.Liv (Ruby O. Fee) attempts to escape the apartment building with her video game-designing spouse, Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer). Tim is haunted by flashbacks of a family tragedy, one that provides the movie its iffy metaphorical mortar and moral. Hint: Like the building, Tim’s emotions are also entombed.The pair may be at an impasse, but skills-wise, they are well-suited for the task at hand. The couple are joined by Marvin (an amusing Frederick Lau) and Ana (Salber Lee Williams), who are drug-imbibing lovebirds, as well as the cagey veteran Oswalt (Axel Werner) and his bright granddaughter, Lea (Sira-Anna Faal). They also meet an outlier set on not escaping: Yuri (Murathan Muslu).But what, exactly, is the mysterious bulwark that transforms from a mosaic of smooth black bricks to undulating metal and back again? Does it have anything to do with the inky plume billowing near the harbor? Or is it, as Marvin frets, some sort of diabolical game ginned up by their short-term “super-host”? Or maybe it’s a high-tech fortress keeping them safe from a Deep State catastrophe, as Yuri fervidly claims. The writer and director Philip Koch teases these ideas up to the final image.Make sure to watch this thriller in its original German. Dubbed into English, it goes from mildly diverting to landing like a ton of, well ….BrickNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Daniela Forever’ Review: His Girlfriend’s Back

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      In this agreeably unpretentious science-fiction feature, Henry Golding plays a DJ who has lucid dreams about his dead girlfriend.Since his feature debut, “Timecrimes” (2008), the Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo has carved out a niche as a reliable purveyor of clever, science-fiction-tinged genre fare that makes few claims to be much more than that. His latest, the likable if plodding “Daniela Forever,” continues in that agreeably unpretentious vein.Alternating between a retro video format and glossy widescreen to differentiate two parallel realities, the film concerns Nicolas (Henry Golding), a British DJ living in Madrid. In the drab video segments, he is mourning his girlfriend, an Italian artist named Daniela (Beatrice Grannò), after she has been fatally struck by a car.A friend (Nathalie Poza) invites the grieving Nicolas to participate in a hush-hush clinical trial run by a group of Belgian scientists. They are testing a drug that enables takers to have lucid dreams. But rather than follow the researchers’ exercises, Nicolas uses his lucid dreams — portrayed in the widescreen sections — to resurrect Daniela. Around her, Nicolas builds a world that is superficially suited to her desires but even more suited to his own.This world unavoidably conjures memories of Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” and Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” antecedents from which Vigalondo does surprisingly little to deviate. (The emptied-out cityscapes look like lo-fi Nolan, and a motif in which Nicolas and Daniela cosplay as a vampire and a shark is pure Gondry.) The philosophical window dressing — would you rather your loved one live a better life if it meant living without you? — doesn’t play to Vigalondo’s strengths.Daniela ForeverRated R for a particularly narcissistic bedroom fantasy. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rosa la Rose: Fille Publique’ Review: Lady Liberty of the Streets

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      A new restoration of a 1986 drama by the filmmaker Paul Vecchiali melds a candy-colored vision of the world’s oldest profession with a grim take on neoliberalism.Halfway through Paul Vecchiali’s “Rosa la Rose, Fille Publique,” you might think you’re in a lush musical.The luminous Rosa (Marianne Basler), a prostitute, springs around the streets of Paris’s Les Halles district in a blue dress and cherry-red earrings, cheerily taking on new johns — sometimes in pairs — as a Greek chorus-like duo of elder call girls bemoan their own shrinking clientele. But after a first act that ends with a giddy dance number and a tableau vivant restaging of “The Last Supper,” Rosa’s rose-colored glasses come off. It’s her 20th birthday and her life may not be so charmed as it seems.Released in France in 1986 and now showing in a new restoration, “Rosa la Rose” was made by a filmmaker attentive to the queer and feminist rallying cries at the time.His breakout film, “The Strangler,” depicted prostitutes in solidarity, tough and practical. In “Rosa,” the mood is initially jovial, with Rosa enacting her sexual freedom in a startlingly natural way — neither willfully provocative nor limned with secret shame. Vecchiali’s camera elegantly glides around her stamping grounds, showing her close-knit network of clients, co-workers, and pimps with carnivalesque panache.But as the debonair pimp Gilbert (Jean Sorel) reminds her, a job is a job. Gilbert isn’t her boyfriend; he’s her boss. And the teenager who follows her around like a puppy isn’t in love with her; he’s just aroused. Rosa’s disenchantment with the ways of her world gestures at the harsh austerity policies of then-president François Mitterrand. Ultimately, Vecchiali tempers a romantic vision of the world’s oldest profession with hard truths about women’s agency under the auspices of the free market: “public” goods like Rosa are destined to be depleted.Rosa la Rose: Fille PubliqueNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Little, Big, and Far’ Review: Dwelling in the Cosmos

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      The experimental director Jem Cohen’s latest is an uncategorizable film about astronomers and humanity and love and the stars.Around halfway through Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Misérables,” the omniscient narrator is musing on the ways that the tiniest and grandest building blocks of life in our cosmos intersect. “Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins,” he writes. “Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision?”Good question. In Jem Cohen’s uncategorizable film “Little, Big, and Far,” an astronomer named Karl (Franz Schwartz) remarks that he was surprised as a child to learn that the stars were millions of miles apart, something he tells us while we’re seeing images of the night sky. From his point of view perched on Earth, those stars seemed crowded together, keeping one another company, all connected. This leads him to ruminate on how human relationships can contain vast distances, even when our bodies are in relative physical proximity. For instance, there’s the distance that’s grown between him and his wife of 40 years, Eleanor (Leslie Thornton), who’s also an astronomer, and who seems to be drifting away.That sense of echoes between celestial bodies, our bodies and the tiniest parts of the world — the ways things like uncertainty and harmony and connection and memory are embedded in the natural world, as well as the more metaphysical one — is the theme of “Little, Big, and Far.” But I am not quite sure how to tell you what the film is, other than achingly beautiful. Those who’ve seen Cohen’s previous films, including “Museum Hours,” will have a sense of what they’re in for; I’ve seen “Big, Little and Far” described as an “epistolary essayistic docu-fiction hybrid,” which is accurate but not all that illuminating.Epistolary, because most of the dialogue in the film is in the form of letters between Karl and a younger colleague, Sarah (Jessica Sarah Rinland), who is forming a relationship with Mateo (Mario Silva), also an astronomer. Karl and Sarah share their thoughts about their work, their relationships, their lives and the things that draw them to the stars. Often we’re hearing their letters while seeing images of a giant telescope, people on a town square, traffic whizzing by on the highway, the natural world, the lights in the night sky. We hear a little from Eleanor, too, who speaks about watching an eclipse from a mall parking lot and being just as fascinated by the way the other observers, mostly strangers to one another, form a little community for the moment.During this rumination and many others, most images we are seeing are of real people going about their real lives, whether it’s riding the light rail in Vienna or sitting on a folding chair and watching a solar eclipse. In one stretch of the film, Sarah’s voice reflects on whether museums, as she puts it, must be “places not only of knowledge, but of mourning” in an era in which species are disappearing from Earth at fearsome rates. As we listen, we watch people milling about a natural-history museum, looking at the displays, seemingly unaware of the presence of a camera.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Ne Zha 2,’ Blockbuster Chinese Animated Film, Will Get English Version

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      The English-language version will feature the voice of Michelle Yeoh and be released in the United States in August.An English-language version of the Chinese movie “Ne Zha 2,” which has surpassed “Inside Out 2” as the highest-grossing animated feature of all time, will be released in the United States next month.“Ne Zha 2,” which is based loosely on Chinese mythology and a famous 16th-century novel, has made $2.2 billion at the global box office, including $20 million in the United States and Canada, according to A24, which is distributing the English version. That is more than any other animated film when not accounting for inflation; “Inside Out 2” made $1.7 billion last year.The English version will open on Aug. 22 and feature the voice of Michelle Yeoh, the first Asian star to win best actress at the Academy Awards for her role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Yeoh will voice Nezha’s mother. The movie will also feature Aleks Le, Crystal Lee and Vincent Rodriguez III.In the original “Ne Zha,” which earned $726 million worldwide when it was released in 2019, Nezha is born as the reincarnation of a demon with supernatural powers who is destined to live only three years. He fights back against his fate and saves his village.In the sequel, written and directed by Yu Yang, Nezha challenges the political order and authority governing gods and demons, fighting the Dragon King of Four Seas and other creatures.The sequel was released in China in January and quickly became a smash hit, earning more than $1 billion in ticket sales in less than two weeks. “Ne Zha 2” was the first non-Hollywood film to reach that milestone.Yeoh, who also plays Madame Morrible in the “Wicked” movies, said in a statement that she was honored to be part of “Ne Zha 2,” calling it a “landmark in Chinese animation and a powerful reminder of how universal our stories can be.”“I can’t wait for everyone to experience the wonder, heart, spectacular artistry and magic of this film on the big screen,” she said.The success of “Ne Zha 2” has been good news for the Chinese film industry, which was struggling with poor ticket sales amid a weakening economy. The recent films to break through in China have not been the typical Hollywood blockbuster, but domestic features with patriotic themes or those that showcase traditional Chinese culture or folklore. More