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      ‘Beba’ Review: Learning From Ancestors

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      An Afro-Latina filmmaker explores her identity and generational trauma growing up in New York City and attending a predominantly white college.What’s most striking about the autobiographical documentary “Beba,” aside from the intimate lens and stunning cinematography, are its moments of vulnerability, which plunge the viewer into the Afro-Latina filmmaker’s familial and personal traumas, including heated arguments with her mother and her white friends.The film, written, directed and produced by Rebeca Huntt, traces her family’s migration to New York City, through her years at Bard College upstate, and then her move back to her parents’ place on Central Park West.“Beba,” which refers to Huntt’s childhood nickname, is not a glossed-over immigrant redemption story. Through poetry, narration — featuring the voices of writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde — and interviews with family and friends, Huntt, the daughter of a Black Dominican father and a Venezuelan mother, pieces together painful parts of her family and social history, extracting her own identity out of the remnants of her trauma. “Every one of us inherits the curses of our ancestors,” Huntt states. A focus is on her adversarial relationship with her mother and the tension that unfolds between them on and off camera. Huntt also interrogates her relationships to white friends amid rising racial and political tensions.Underexplored are the dynamics with and between the men in the family. Huntt’s father, who seems to be an idealized figure, is interviewed, but shies away from difficult questions. One gets the sense that he is let off the hook, perhaps because Huntt’s relationship with her mother takes up so much space. Though Huntt’s brother is a large part of the narrated story, the two are estranged, and his absence in the film is palpable. Still, “Beba” is profound. The filmmaker delves into all of who she is, including darker or more destructive aspects of her identity, pushing viewers to see Huntt’s complexity — and perhaps their own.BebaRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Vedette’ Review: A Cow’s Trouble in Paradise

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      In this documentary, two French filmmakers meet a formidable Swiss cow and, under her impassive gaze, ruminate on her Alpine life.Few places are lovelier for cows to ruminate in than the Valais in southern Switzerland. This alpine region’s most famous attraction is the Matterhorn, but it is also where you find a breed of cattle known as Hérens. There, on lush, steep slopes, these brown-black animals graze and graze some more, at times using their horns to plow into the dirt and one another.The title subject of the French documentary “Vedette” is a typically brawny specimen with a massive head and formidable bass-y moo. She looks so tough, so intimidating, though this may be fantasy; it is, after all, easy to imagine all sorts of nonsense about animals. That’s certainly one of the lessons of “Vedette,” which was directed by Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard, who are married, although it’s unclear if they entirely grasp their movie’s contradictory messages, its untapped complexities or its downright weirdness.Over a leisurely, sometimes slack hour and a half, the filmmakers tell an initially inviting and benign story of one cow and the sparsely populated area in which two- and four-legged creatures exist side by side, seemingly much like generations have done before. With Bories serving as the narrator and interviewer, and Chagnard handling the cinematography, the directors introduce a world that looks almost untouched by modernity, despite technologies like cellphones and portable milking machines. A lot of this seems genuine and true, even if there’s also a tourist-board quality to the upbeat tone and some of the hovering camerawork.Amid copious beauty shots of cows and land alike, the movie skitters from the personal to the lightly ethnographic and the quasi-sociological. One ritual that’s distinct to this region is cow fighting — “combats de reines” or “battle of queens” — bloodless, surprisingly watchable spectacles in which pairs of bovines push against each other’s heads. (Their horns have been dulled.) Each winner is then matched with another cow until a head-ramming champion is declared queen. She receives a little crown of flowers for her troubles; for their part, the proud owners earn bragging rights to owning a queen, a honor Vedette has long held.It’s not clear why, when or how this ritual emerged, which is typical of Bories and Chagnard’s frustratingly incurious approach. There’s much you never learn here, including fundamentals about dairy farming. Cows need to have calves to produce milk, and at one point, you see Vedette during a difficult birth. The calf needs to be pulled out using an obstetric chain, and right after it’s born, it disappears; like most dairy calves, it was probably sent to another farm or to slaughter. The possibility that Vedette’s calves were turned into veal chops might be a bummer for some viewers, but it would provide a true picture of life for most dairy cows.The movie loses its thread and interest midway through after Vedette loses a fight. As they do throughout, the owners speak about Vedette’s feelings — how it affects “her morale” — anthropomorphizing that Bories doesn’t question and repeatedly echoes. To spare Vedette’s ostensible shame, the owners move her alone to a barn next to the directors’ home, where Bories sings her a song and reads aloud passages from Descartes’s “Animals Are Machines.” I imagine the filmmakers thought this charming, though they’re also clearly fumbling toward some greater awareness about animals beyond the purely instrumental.“Vedette” joins a recent roster of documentaries about the uses and abuses of farm animals (others include “Cow” and “Gunda”). It’s disappointing that Bories and Chagnard fail to add anything to this environmentally urgent topic beyond their own surprise that these animals are more than indistinguishable milk factories. Vedette is a nice cow; she deserves more consideration than she receives. This shallowness is especially disappointing given the shocker ending, which throws everything that’s come before into a new, mind-bending light. I’ll say no more other than, as history teaches us, some queens lose more than their crowns.VedetteNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We (Nous)’ Review: This Is Us

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      Alice Diop’s observational documentary is a beautiful, loose-limned portrait of Paris’s suburbs.Alice Diop’s documentary “We,” a beautiful, loose-limned portrait of Paris’s “banlieues” or suburbs, brought to my mind the words of the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène. When asked if his films are understood in Europe, he replied, “Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts.”That same decolonial spirit animates “We.” Diop, the daughter of Senegalese immigrants, grew up in the banlieues among other working-class Black and Arab immigrants. Her film traces an idiosyncratic route along the RER B commuter rail line, the artery that connects the communities on the outskirts of Paris to the heart of the metropolis.But Diop challenges the notion of a center altogether. Her cartography of her city begins with herself: The “I” opens into the “we.”Early in the film, Diop observes as commuters board the train at a station in Seine-Saint-Denis in the light of dawn. Peering through a glass window flickering with reflections, her camera settles on the face of an older Black woman, only partly visible behind a seat. As if following the logic of a train, that great equalizer of things near and far, “We” makes seamless connections between disparate images. The passenger sparks Diop’s memories of her mother, who died 25 years ago. Diop’s voice-over guides us through smudgy, decades-old home videos that she scans for traces of her mother, who only appears fleetingly, at the edges. “I start thinking about all the things that weren’t filmed, recorded, archived,” Diop says wistfully.An acute awareness of the relationship between memory, whether personal or collective, and identity emerges as the engine of “We.” Necessarily arbitrary and selective, Diop’s cinematic tour — which includes a long moment with a mechanic as he calls his mother in Mali; visits with the aging patients of Diop’s sister, a nurse; a solemn service at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, where generations of French kings are entombed — points to the impossibility of portraiture itself, whether of a life, a people or a nation. The first-person plural is always a subjective construction, but its elasticity, Diop suggests, can be as liberating as it can be exclusionary.We (Nous)Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Olga’ Review: Tough Balancing Act for a Ukrainian Girl in Exile

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      Elie Grappe’s quietly poignant film about a young gymnast finds her torn between her passion and the violence gripping her country — in 2013.Completed in early 2021 and set the decade before, Elie Grappe’s confident first scripted feature, “Olga,” wasn’t meant to be about Russia’s continuing assault on Ukraine. It’s impossible today, however, to watch the film, about a tough but vulnerable young Ukrainian gymnast in exile, through another lens.Just as well: It matters little now whether Grappe meant to examine the consequences of Western complacency toward democracy’s enemies. Here we are, and here is this quietly poignant film, a heartbreaking reminder of the cost in individual lives and dreams.On the level that matters least, “Olga,” written by Grappe and Raphaëlle Desplechin, is a sports drama, propelled by some of that subgenre’s conventions. At 15, Olga (Anastasia Budiashkina) has the talent and single-mindedness to reach the Olympics. But like any Rocky or Rudy, she faces a steep path.Cue the montages, only this time, they’re news footage of political strife. Olga’s mother (Tanya Mikhina) is a journalist whose investigations into the corrupt, Russian-backed government have endangered her and Olga’s lives; half-Swiss, Olga flees to Switzerland to continue training. As the Maidan uprising of 2013-14 engulfs her loved ones in Kyiv, her family abroad is dismissive. Opposing loyalties tear her insides.For Olga, as for Ukraine, the stakes are clear: East or West, resignation or self-determination. Budiashkina, a Ukrainian gymnast in her acting debut, plays Olga beautifully as a guarded, stubborn teenager with the weight of exile on her shoulders, who refuses to quit but still needs her mother, who is stone-faced on the mat but still cries into a stuffed animal. Sadly, we know whatever resolution awaits, her troubles are far from over.OlgaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Trevor: The Musical’ Review: He’s Coming Out

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      A bullied eighth grader learns to shine in this filmed version of the stage musical streaming on Disney+.Trevor is a fictional boy with real world impact. In 1995, “Trevor,” a 23-minute film about the bullied eighth grader, won the Academy Award for live action short; three years later, its creators founded the Trevor Project, a crisis intervention organization for L.G.B.T.Q. youth, and recently allowed the story to be reworked by the stage director Marc Bruni into an adamantly chipper Off Broadway musical that ran last fall for eight weeks and lives on in Robin Abrams’s energetic and tonally discordant filmed recording.Set in 1981, the story is dated by design to evoke a less permissive, more inarticulate era. Trevor (Holden William Hagelberger) fumbles to explain his feelings for a football jock (Sammy Dell), even to himself. “It’s like, I’m like, I don’t know,” he croons. For help, the confused boy cries out to his goddess Diana (Yasmeen Sulieman) — Ross, not the Roman — who appears, sequined and shimmering, to belt out her biggest hits (which get louder applause than the show’s original songs).Adult performers are vastly outnumbered by a strong company of singing and dancing children, who in the school scenes form phalanxes and mazes, physically cornering Trevor into being isolated and judged. These classmates’ talent show intrigue and crossed crushes only exist to pad the thin plot. The book and lyrics writer Dan Collins is better at his insight into the young characters’ melodramatic point of view — none of them can imagine this rather rote story has ever happened to anyone else.In different times, the original short injected morbid comedy into Trevor’s habit of pretending to off himself for attention. Today, the suicide element has been softened, though one wonders if this generation’s more attuned and sensitive kids will find this staging of “Trevor” quaint, kitschy — or perhaps still universal.Trevor: The MusicalNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      Still Charming at 50: Luis Buñuel’s Greatest Hit

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      “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois” is a comedy of frustrations in which a sextet of super-civilized haute bourgeois repeatedly attempt and fail to sit down at dinner.Luis Buñuel is a filmmaker with few peers and a unique career trajectory. A hardcore Surrealist in 1920s Paris and a propagandist for Republican Spain during the Civil War, Buñuel found refuge in the Mexican film industry before making a triumphant, late-life return to France and the art cinema pantheon.“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois” was Buñuel’s greatest commercial and critical success, capped with the 1972 Oscar for best foreign film. Given a new 4K digital restoration, it has been revived for a two-week run at Film Forum.Buñuel, who died in 1983, intended “The Discreet Charm” as his last film (it was not), and it recapitulates certain career-long concerns. The movie is typically described as a comedy of frustration in which a sextet of well-heeled, super-civilized haute bourgeois (five French people and the ambassador from an imaginary South American country) repeatedly attempt and fail to sit down at dinner. As such, it elaborates on the thwarted desires that fuel two earlier masterpieces of his: “L’age d’Or,” made with Salvador Dalí in 1930, and Buñuel’s penultimate Mexican production, “The Exterminating Angel” (1962).The movie is suavely irrational, predicated on interlocking dreams (and dreams within dreams), as well as assorted terrorists, gangsters and army officers, along with an extremely obliging bishop (Julien Bertheau). It is also an avant-garde sitcom. The men are ruling-class criminals — although the ambassador (Fernando Rey) is far craftier than his French buddies (Paul Frankeur and Jean-Pierre Cassel). The two older women (Delphine Seyrig and Stéphane Audran) are ferociously poised fashion police; the group’s youngest member (Bulle Ogier) is a bit of a wild card. Much of the humor relies on their inane observations and absurd sang-froid in a succession of increasingly awkward social situations. (Imagine a smart tearoom running out of tea!)A few scenes of torture notwithstanding, American critics swooned for “The Discreet Charm.” Andrew Sarris called it “clearly the film of the year.” Vincent Canby’s New York Times review hailed it as “the unique creation of a director who, at 72, has never been more fully in control of his talents, as a filmmaker, a moralist, social critic and humorist.” While it is hard to disagree with this assessment, it’s possible to prefer Buñuel’s less digestible works — particularly “Viridiana” (1961), which sneaked past Spain’s fascist censors, and the low-budget Mexican films that were, of necessity, directed against the grain.“The Discreet Charm” is not without its pleasures. Seyrig, Audran, and Ogier are magnificent farceurs. Buñuel might be shooting fish in a barrel, but French manners have seldom been so expertly ridiculed. A few of the movie’s pranks (an inconvenient death disrupts one dinner) still shock; others (Ogier parading around in Napoleon’s hat) remain laugh-out-loud funny. It’s fascinating to see Buñuel’s engagement with the Godard of “La Chinoise” and “Weekend” and even, in the casting of Rey, “The French Connection.”And yet, while “The Discreet Charm” is not exactly complacent, neither is it unreconciled. For all its unpatriotic and anticlerical jibes, the movie is too expansively genial to be truly discomfiting. The Oscar is the tip-off, even if Buñuel did suggest that his producer had bribed the Academy to get it.The Discreet Charm of the BourgeoisieThrough July 7 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      ‘Flux Gourmet’ Review: Mastering the Art of Fringe Cooking

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      Peter Strickland’s latest film is a speculative comedy about art, desire and gastrointestinal discomfort.What if the primary sensory goal of cooking were to stimulate the ears? What if you experienced a movie through your nostrils and taste buds, or felt it in your gut? These bizarre, intriguing questions are part of the foundation, the spine — the sofrito — of “Flux Gourmet,” the fifth feature by the British writer-director Peter Strickland.The first, “Katalin Varga” (2009) was a revenge drama set in Transylvania. Since then, Strickland has departed both from genre conventions and from known geography, conjuring parallel realities organized around particular aesthetic and erotic obsessions: Italian horror and sound design in “Berberian Sound Studio” (2013); entomology and B.D.S.M. in “The Duke of Burgundy” (2015); high fashion and Italian horror again in “In Fabric” (2019); and now cuisine.Not the kind you eat — though there are some awkward dinner gatherings and episodes of surreptitious snacking. Food, in the world of this film, is the music of love. Culinary sound collectives are the equivalent of rock bands, building walls of expressive noise from the whine of blenders and the sizzle of vegetables dropped in hot oil.One such group, which can’t agree on a name, has been granted a residence at an “institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance” in a converted rural manor house. One narrative thread follows the simmering tensions between Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), who is in charge of the place, and Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed, a Strickland stalwart), the visionary, vegetarian leader of the troupe. Elle adamantly rejects the slightest hint of constructive criticism from Jan, who believes that her largess entitles her to be heard.This tension exacerbates the rivalry within the group. Elle may be the leader, but her bandmates, a floppy-haired emo kid (Asa Butterfield) and an angular avant-gardist (Ariane Labed) have nascent creative agendas of their own. There’s also an element of sexual intrigue, as often happens when aesthetic passions are inflamed. Meanwhile, a rejected band of culinary artists lurks in the shadows, threatening violence.All of this is chronicled — mostly in Greek voice-over with English subtitles — by a saturnine fellow named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou) who works as the institute’s “dossierge.” A writer by trade and a wallflower by temperament, he observes Elle and her colleagues, filming their meetings and performances, interviewing them together and taking notes on their squabbles.The poor man has troubles of his own. Digestive troubles, to be precise, which disrupt his sleep and sour his already gloomy mood. The resident doctor (Richard Bremmer) is a pompous boor, and Stones spends a lot of his time in the lavatory, the rest of it wearing the unmistakable grimace of a man holding back considerable gas.There is obvious comic potential in his predicament, but Strickland doesn’t exploit it in the obvious ways. This isn’t “Blazing Saddles”; audible flatulence is restricted to a single plaintive note, rather than a full symphony. But the unheard music of Stone’s lower intestinal tract is nonetheless a key structural element, organizing “Flux Gourmet” into an elegant fugue of contrapuntal themes: grossness and refinement; pleasure and disgust; appetite and discipline.The film isn’t so much an allegory or fantasy as a witty philosophical speculation on some elemental human issues. We are animals driven by lust, hunger and aggression, but also delicate creatures in love with beauty and abstraction. Those two sides of our nature collide in unexpected, infinitely variable ways.“Flux Gourmet” is Strickland’s funniest film to date, with more outright jokes than its predecessors, and a few sublime visual gags, many of them involving Jan’s outfits (they were designed by Giles Deacon, with hats by Steven Jones). It’s like a Restoration comedy run through a John Waters filter and sprinkled with Luis Buñuel itching powder.Maybe such comparisons are unfair. Certainly Elle insists on the absolute integrity and originality of her work, and even as “Flux Gourmet” mocks her self-seriousness it also defends her dignity. Mohamed, fully committed to the bit, allows you to believe that Elle is both a courageous genius and a complete nut. I’m inclined to think Strickland is more of the former than the latter. I’ve never encountered a flavor palette quite like the one he assembles here, and while this movie isn’t always easy to digest, it’s a taste very much worth acquiring.Flux GourmetNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More