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      ‘Marx Can Wait’ Review: A Director Digs Into His Brother’s Death

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      In a moving new documentary, the Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio gathers his fascinating, aging family members to make sense of their brother’s suicide.Sometime in the late 1960s, Camillo Bellocchio confided in his twin brother, Marco, that he was unhappy with the way his life was going. Marco, already a well-known filmmaker and a committed leftist, counseled Camillo, who was managing a gym, to throw himself into radical politics and seek solace in the “historical optimism” of the revolutionary proletariat. Camillo doubted that his anguish could be healed through political engagement. “Marx can wait,” he told his brother. Not long after, Camillo died by suicide. He was 29.A fictionalized version of that conversation occurs in Marco Bellocchio’s 1982 film “The Eyes, the Mouth.” The relevant clip, along with other fragments from the director’s oeuvre, is inserted into his new documentary, “Marx Can Wait,” a wrenching and tender film that will be essential viewing for Bellocchio fans. But even for those who aren’t familiar with the personal and national history he has explored in more than 20 films, “Marx Can Wait” can stand on its own. It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.Marco and Camillo were the youngest of eight children born into a bourgeois family in the small Northern Italian city of Piacenza. In 2016, Marco, one of five surviving siblings, gathered with his brothers and sisters and their spouses and children for a reunion in their hometown. Filmed over several years, “Marx Can Wait” starts with toasts and table-talk, and then gravitates toward the black hole of Camillo’s death, in the process illuminating the legacy of a difficult and fascinating family.That family was Bellocchio’s first great subject. His debut film, “Fists in the Pocket” (1965), shot in Piacenza, turns domestic dysfunction, generational frustration and sibling resentment into the stuff of gothic, scabrous comedy. Awarded a prize at the Locarno Film Festival, “Fists” and the ferocious political satire “China is Near” (1967) established Bellocchio, still in his 20s, as an enfant terrible in Italian cinema.The IFC Center in Manhattan is showing those movies alongside “Marx Can Wait,” bringing the young man of the ’60s into poignant dialogue with his older self. Bellocchio’s career, between then and now, can be seen partly as a chronicle of disillusionment, as revolutionary ardor gives way to irony, compromise and defeat. His many films about Italian public figures and institutions — Mussolini; the violent, far-left Red Brigades; the Roman Catholic Church; and the Mafia — are also family stories, attentive to intimate nuances of power and emotion.The reverse is also true. “Marx Can Wait” is entirely absorbed in the faces, voices and personalities of Bellocchio’s brothers and sisters, present and absent, but it also feels, by implication or osmosis, to be telling the story of Italy in the past half century. Camillo’s fate is linked to the expectation that a young man of his background would pursue stability and worldly success — family and career — or else rebel in a dramatic and consequential way. He seems never to have found a path, and to have despaired of finding one.But suicide isn’t a mystery that can be solved, perhaps least of all by those closest to its victim. Marco and his brothers and sisters dwell on details and speculate about causes, including the influence of a mentally ill older brother, Paolo, who shared a room with Camillo when they were children, and the volatile presence of their devout, emotionally demanding mother. Repressed memories bubble up, secrets are revealed, but nothing is resolved. Freud can wait, too.Old photographs and film clips do their usual documentary work, but the power of “Marx Can Wait” comes from the faces and the voices of people, now in their 80s, trying at once to evoke and to make sense of their younger selves. Marco’s brother Piergiorgio and his sister Letizia, who is deaf, are especially vital, spiky characters.That Faulknerian chestnut about the not-even-pastness of the past has rarely been illustrated with such vivid intimacy. The loss of Camillo is ongoing, wrapped around the family’s life like a vine, impossible to untangle or prune away. What makes this film tender as well as tragic is how that loss also makes the family blossom before our eyes.Marx Can WaitNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Monty Norman, Who Wrote 007’s Memorable Theme, Dies at 94

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      He composed the instantly recognizable melody for the first James Bond film, “Dr. No.” It has accompanied the agent on his adventures ever since.Monty Norman, who in the early 1960s reached into his back catalog, pulled out a song about a sneeze and transformed it into one of the most recognizable bits of music in movie history, the “James Bond Theme,” died on Monday in Slough, near London. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his family on his website.Mr. Norman began his career as a singer, but by the late 1950s he was making a name for himself writing for the musical theater, contributing to “Expresso Bongo,” “Irma la Douce” and other stage shows. A 1961 show for which he wrote the music, “Belle, or the Ballad of Dr. Crippen,” had among its producers Albert Broccoli, who had a long list of film producing credits.As Mr. Norman told the story, Mr. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had acquired the film rights to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels at about the same time. Mr. Broccoli asked if he’d like to write the score for the first of the films, “Dr. No.” He wasn’t particularly familiar with the books, he said, and was lukewarm about the idea — until Mr. Saltzman threw in an incentive: a free trip to Jamaica, where the movie was being shot, for him and his family.“That was the clincher for me,” Mr. Norman told the BBC’s “The One Show” in 2012. “I don’t know whether the James Bond film is going to be a flop or anything, but at least we’d have a sun, sea and sand holiday.”He was struggling to come up with the theme, he said, until he remembered a song called “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” from an unproduced musical version of the V.S. Naipaul novel “A House for Mr. Biswas” on which he and a frequent collaborator, Julian More, had worked.“I went to my bottom drawer, found this number that I’d always liked, and played it to myself,” he said. The original (which opened with the line “I was born with this unlucky sneeze”) had an Asian inflection and relied heavily on a sitar, but Mr. Norman “split the notes,” as he put it, to provide a more staccato feel for what became the theme song’s famous guitar riff.“And the moment I did ‘dum diddy dum dum dum,’ I thought, ‘My God, that’s it,’” he said. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes.”“Dr. No” premiered on Oct. 5, 1962, in London. Another piece of music was vying for public attention then — that same day the Beatles released their first single, “Love Me Do” — but the Bond theme caught the public imagination too. Luke Jones, a music producer and host of the podcast “Where is MY Hit Single?,” said the theme, which regularly turned up in various ways in subsequent Bond movies, was just right for “Dr. No” and for the franchise.“The Bond theme encapsulates many key aspects of the 007 brand in a very short space of time,” Mr. Jones said by email. “That iconic guitar riff perfectly accompanies footage of Bond doing just about anything.”“It’s such a simple melody,” he added, “that children can and have been singing it to each other in the playground for decades. Then, finally, an outrageously jazzy swing-era brass section that offers all the glamour of a Las Vegas casino.”A version of the theme recorded by the John Barry Seven was released as a single and made the pop charts in England. But there was controversy ahead.Mr. Barry, then early in what would be a long career of creating music for the movies, had orchestrated Mr. Norman’s theme, but in later years he was sometimes credited with writing it, and he didn’t discourage that notion.Mr. Norman in 2001. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes,” Mr. Norman said of his 007 theme.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Press Association, via Associated PressMr. Norman sued The Sunday Times of London over a 1997 article that gave Mr. Barry credit and played down his own contributions. The article, he told a jury when the case went to trial in 2001, “rubbished my whole career.” The jury found in his favor and awarded him 30,000 pounds. Mr. Barry died in 2011.Monty Noserovitch was born on April 4, 1928, in London to Abraham and Ann (Berlyn) Noserovitch. His father was a cabinet maker, and his mother sewed girls’ dresses.When he was 16 his mother bought him a guitar, and he once studied the instrument with Bert Weedon, whose manual “Play in a Day” would influence a later generation of rock guitarists. According to a biography on Mr. Norman’s website, Mr. Weedon once gave him a backhanded compliment by telling him, “As a guitarist, you’ll make a great singer.”By the early 1950s, Mr. Norman was singing with the big bands of Stanley Black and others, as well as appearing on radio and onstage in variety shows. Later in the decade he started writing songs, and that led to his work in musical theater. He was one of the collaborators on “Expresso Bongo,” a satirical look at the music business, staged in 1958 in England with Paul Scofield leading the cast.He, Mr. More and David Heneker collaborated on an English-language version of a long-running French stage show, “Irma la Douce,” which made Broadway in 1960 under the direction of Peter Brook, who died this month. The show was nominated for seven Tony Awards, including best musical.Mr. Norman’s lone other Broadway venture was less successful. It was a musical parody he wrote with Mr. More called “The Moony Shapiro Songbook,” and the Broadway cast included Jeff Goldblum and Judy Kaye. It opened on May 3, 1981, and closed the same day.Mr. Norman’s marriage to the actress Diana Coupland ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Rina (Caesari) Norman, whom he married in 2000; a daughter from his first marriage, Shoshana Kitchen; two stepdaughters, Clea Griffin and Livia Griffiths; and seven grandchildren. More

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      ‘Zombies 3’ Review: Take Me to Your Cheerleader

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      In the final installment of this Disney trilogy, the arrival of aliens alters our high school heroes’ quests for college — and social — acceptance.In “Zombies 3,” directed by Paul Hoen, an interspecies utopia faces an alien invasion. Like the franchise’s previous allegories for marginalized experiences — the zombies of “Zombies” and werewolves of “Zombies 2” share hardships with Black and Indigenous Americans, respectively — this one is dubious at best.Zed (Milo Manheim) hopes to become the first zombie to go to college, while his girlfriend, Addison (Meg Donnelly), is eager to lead her cheer squad to victory. But Zed’s college dreams and the cheer championship are thrown into chaos when aliens descend upon their peaceful town.“These aliens are here to take what’s ours,” laments Addison’s vapid cousin, Bucky (Trevor Tordjman). That’s right — the aliens represent undocumented immigrants! Having apparently learned nothing in the last two movies, the citizens must learn to accept another group of outsiders.This is not your mother’s Disney Channel, and thank god. All of the “Zombies” movies are brimming with camp delights, as though the crew watched “But I’m a Cheerleader” while dropping acid. This is particularly true for “Zombies 3.” The sets and costumes are awash in pastel pinks, blues and greens. One pivotal conversation ends with a woman ripping off her wig. RuPaul Charles even voices the aliens’ mother ship.But while “Zombies 3” offers a gonzo aesthetic and radio-ready pop songs, it clumsily tackles social issues. The movie features a nonbinary character, the alien A-Spen, played by Terry Hu. While it’s nice to finally see queer characters in this extremely flamboyant franchise, A-Spen’s introduction raises more questions than it answers. Why is the only character to claim a nonbinary identity an alien? Why would aliens have a gender binary in the first place?If you watch this with your favorite young people, be warned: There’s a lot more here than just 90 minutes of silliness.Zombies 3Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘From Where They Stood’ Review: Auschwitz, as Seen by Prisoners

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      Christophe Cognet’s documentary pores over photographs, some of them clandestine, taken by prisoners, inside the Nazi concentration camp.Christophe Cognet’s “From Where They Stood” scrutinizes an astonishing record of the Holocaust: photographs secretly taken by prisoners within Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps. Cognet’s analytical documentary adopts the stance of an investigating historian to explicate the pictures, which were made and smuggled out at mortal risk.Unlike many documentaries about the Holocaust, this film hinges on still images rather than archival footage or interviews with survivors. Cognet joins scholars to pore over these pictures and their silent testaments; in one clutch of images, women displaying wounds on their legs are revealed to be subjects of Nazi medical experiments. Other portraits catch people in eerily calm-looking repose.But the clandestine pictures known as the Sonderkommando photographs carry the gravest weight of all. These ghostly images depict nude women on the way to the gas chamber and, afterward, corpses left in the open air (both scenes overseen by the cremation prisoner workers known as the Sonderkommando). Shot from a significant distance, apparently through holes in the gas chambers, these figures are small and not greatly defined, but no less devastating.Cognet (who also made a documentary about artworks created in the camps) visits camp sites to re-create the precise positions and sightlines of the photographers and their subjects. His film can feel overly cerebral—a bit like being plunged into a seminar—and the text cards do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting. But Cognet’s forensic approach does insist on memorializing these events in an important, physically specific way and, intentionally or not, queasily anticipates a world without any living eyewitnesses to these horrors.From Where They StoodNot rated. In French, Polish and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down’ Review: A New Mission

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      This documentary from the directors of “RBG” offers a window into the life of the former Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords after she survived a bullet wound to the head.In 2011, Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic congresswoman, was hosting a public meet-and-greet outside a Safeway supermarket in Arizona when a gunman opened fire into the gathering, killing six people and wounding many more. Giffords suffered a bullet to the head that shattered her skull and wreaked havoc on the left side of her brain. She now struggles with aphasia, a condition that interferes with the expression of language.The documentary “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down” offers a sentimental tour of the former congresswoman’s recovery process and her efforts to prevent gun violence in the years following the shooting. The film also provides a window into Giffords’s marriage to Senator Mark Kelly, a former space shuttle pilot with NASA. Kelly was a pillar of support for Giffords during her rehabilitation, and in 2020 he picked up the thread of her work in politics when he won a special election to represent Arizona in the Senate.Gun control is an urgent issue, and the directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen (“RBG”) scored big time with a frank talking-head interview with former President Barack Obama, who discusses the nation’s need for gun safety laws. At the same time, the film is not shy about positioning Giffords’s advocacy work alongside an assessment of her views on firearms more broadly, including that she and her husband are gun owners.But by and large, this is a human interest story. We begin amid painful home video clips of Giffords in the hospital following the attack. We end with triumphant footage of her and Kelly giving speeches onstage. Even during more analytic or crusading sections, the documentary’s mood never strays from inspirational.Gabby Giffords Won’t Back DownRated PG-13. The horrors of gun violence. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Deer King’ Review: Medicine, Family and Empire

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      A series of Japanese fantasy novels is the basis for this tenderly wrought and brilliantly animated adventure movie.Based on a series of fantasy books by the Japanese author Nahoko Uehashi, the animated film “The Deer King” opens on a chain gang of enslaved people forced to labor in a salt mine. While they and their captors sleep, a pack of wolves enter the mine, biting hundreds and passing on a deadly disease. A pair of humans manage to get out alive: Van (Shinichi Tsutsumi), a former soldier, and Yuna (Hisui Kimura), an orphaned toddler. The two escape to the countryside, only to find themselves thrust into an effort to discover a cure for the disease that killed the others. The movie, directed by Masashi Ando and Masayuki Miyaji, follows Van’s tender relationship with Yuna and the lengths he will go to protect her, even as he finds nefarious forces stacked against him.The mysterious illness only infects and kills the Zol people, who a decade earlier invaded the nation of Aquafa, leading many to believe that the disease is the result of a curse that protects Aquafa. Concerned that his people’s hold in the region could slip should the disease spread, the Zol emperor sends Hohsalle (Ryoma Takeuchi), a medical doctor, to find a cure. Van, whose blood Hohsalle believes can help those infected, lands in the center of two seemingly opposing forces: spirituality and modern medicine.The film is tenderly wrought and brilliantly animated, with transitions that emphasize the communion between the land and the human body. Its final moments don’t quite stick the landing, but the characters all have clear motivations, and the political themes are distinctly woven in throughout but do not overpower the film; they become secondary to the depictions of the natural world and the characters’ relationships.The Deer KingRated R for violence. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      Kevin Spacey Pleads Not Guilty to Sexual Assault

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      The Oscar-winning actor will face a trial in June 2023 — a rare example of a celebrity #MeToo case reaching that stage in Britain.LONDON — Kevin Spacey, the Oscar and Tony Award-winning actor, pleaded not guilty to charges of sexual assault on Thursday, British prosecutors said.In a short hearing at the Old Bailey, one of London’s grandest courthouses, Mr. Spacey, 62, confirmed his name and address — he is appearing as Kevin Spacey Fowler — before pleading not guilty to all charges, according to the BBC and other news agencies.The actor’s appearance was largely procedural. During the hearing, the presiding judge scheduled a three-to-four week trial that will not start until June 6, 2023; the British judicial system is struggling to deal with a severe backlog.Mr. Spacey is facing four charges of sexual assault in the case, as well as one of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without their consent, which involved the penetration of a man’s mouth with a penis. The five offenses involve three male accusers, and are said to have occurred between March 2005 and April 2013, a time when Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London.Mr. Spacey was expected to plead not guilty to the charges, following an earlier court appearance in London. At that hearing last month, Patrick Gibbs, Mr. Spacey’s legal representative, said the actor denied all the charges and was determined to “establish his innocence.”Mr. Spacey, who won Academy Awards for his performances in “The Usual Suspects” and “American Beauty,” is free to work and travel before the trial, having been granted unconditional bail.Since the #MeToo movement spread worldwide in 2017, Mr. Spacey, who is also well known for having starred in the “House of Cards” series on Netflix, is one of the few high-profile celebrities accused of sexual assault to have faced a trial. More

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      ‘Earwig’ Review: Danse Macabre

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      The latest trip down the rabbit hole by the French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic follows a young girl with teeth made of ice and her cadaverous caretaker.Near the beginning of “Earwig,” the latest trip down the darkest of rabbit holes by the French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic, a 10-year-old girl admires a landscape painting, seated before it in an image similar to the famous scene from “Poltergeist.” Fascinated, she runs her fingers over the rough canvas and its vibrant colors; it’s a moment not unlike the experience of watching the film, which can feel like being hypnotized by disturbingly palpable still lifes from the unconscious realm.Set somewhere in midcentury Europe (though everything feels as if it were ripped out of a 19th-century Gothic novella), “Earwig” takes place mostly indoors, between the jaundiced, windowless walls of a near-empty dwelling. The girl, Mia (Romane Hemelaers), has teeth made of ice, which are melted down and remolded each day by Albert (Paul Hilton), a cadaverous man whose unseen and menacing overlords croak cryptic orders to him over the phone.Like in her past films, Hadzihalilovic explores the psychic tensions of a cloistered, ritualized existence — this time taking on the point of view of an adult (Albert) to create a loose drama around the event of Mia’s release. One day, the bosses tell Albert that he will no longer serve as the girl’s warden, upending his womblike routine and sending him into a macabre frenzy complete with visions of what may be his long-dead wife, broken-bottle bloodshed and a jarring suicide attempt at the lake. These events are woven together by a twinkling uncanny score and blurred lights that function like title cards.Hadzihalilovic is an expert conjurer of other worlds, and “Earwig” unearths a startlingly seductive array of visual and sonic textures that don’t quite add up to much more than a powerful mood. There’s no big revelatory payoff, even though there’s the semblance of (or the attempt at) one — best to let this one simply wash over you should you choose to sip the magic tea.EarwigNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More