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      ‘Costa Brava, Lebanon’ Review: Paradise Tossed

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      In Mounia Akl’s ambitious debut feature, a family’s attempts to escape the filth of Beirut go awry when the garbage follows them to their doorstep.As civic emergencies go, few possess the symbolic clarity of a garbage crisis. They’re ugly. They stink. They signify dysfunction, rot and toxicity in ways that need no sorting.They are also an effective shortcut to dramatic poignancy, as the Lebanese director Mounia Akl demonstrates in her ambitious first feature, “Costa Brava, Lebanon.” But if it sounds like a facile metaphor, blame history: Beirut has been choking on garbage for years — including, but hardly limited to, the kind you put in bags.Situated in a dystopian near future indistinguishable from the present, the film’s setting is less a space for imagination than for cynicism: The more things change, the more they stay the same. The trash is still a problem. The leaders are still corrupt.Perhaps things could be different in the countryside, where one family struggles to maintain an off-grid Eden. Years before, Souraya (Nadine Labaki), a famous singer, escaped there to build a family with her husband, Walid (Saleh Bakri), a disillusioned and damaged former activist. But after a government land seizure brings the garbage literally to their door, the fragility of their little ecosystem becomes apparent.Souraya wonders whether Beirut was really so bad. Their teenage daughter (Nadia Charbel) dreams of boys and a bigger world. Their other daughter (Ceana and Geana Restom) is too young to give up on her daddy, but she has also absorbed his trauma, harassed by the obsessive-compulsive delusion that by counting she can control the surrounding chaos.The paradise these characters seek might as well be the Spanish coast of the title, elusive as it is. If a fuller sense of their humanity is sometimes lost to the ideas they serve, Akl has nonetheless produced a smart and sensitive film.Costa Brava, LebanonNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Anonymous Club’ Review: The Joy of Creation

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      The Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett goes on a world tour in this music documentary, and finds that a change is needed.The singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett started out as a DIY artist, home-recording energetic songs communicating knotty feelings. Early in this documentary, written and directed by Danny Cohen, a cheery interviewer leads into a question by saying that it’s not too common to hear artists “singing about panic attacks.” This reflects more on the limited listening experience of the interviewer than anything else, but you get the idea.The images in “Anonymous Club” are pretty conventional for a music documentary, particularly at the start. Barnett’s work blew up commercially after the 2015 release of her album “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.” World tours with a backing band followed: We see trucks being unloaded at stadiums, lighting rigs going up, and electric guitars rocking out with post-punk clamor.At Cohen’s request, Barnett kept an audio diary over several years. In it, she speaks about how the repetition of touring is giving her emotional state a beating. Barnett muses on the contradiction of how, in one performance, she might be “vivid and alive” and in the next “distant,” even though she’s going through the same motions with each show.Because Barnett is shy by nature, and prone to depression and anxiety, touring gets to be a special kind of drag. In public she’s a sport: When a glib German interviewer quotes her lyric “I’m not your mother/I’m not your bitch” and then asks with a grin “who are you mad at?” she doesn’t take the bait.Back at her home in Melbourne, she sits with her depression. Clearly a change is needed. A stripped-down tour with no backing band — and a musical collaboration with the drummer Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint — get Barnett back to the joy of creating. Perhaps not surprisingly, she achieves it in a setting not too different from the one in which she began.Anonymous ClubNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Don’t Make Me Go’ Review: Sharp Curves Ahead for Next 2,000 Miles

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      John Cho and Mia Isaac play a father and daughter on a road trip in this twisty drama, which explores the gulf between familiarity and intimacy.“You’re not going to like the way this story ends,” Wally (Mia Isaac), 15, warns the audience at the start of “Don’t Make Me Go,” a father-daughter drama of startling honesty and humor. Max (John Cho), Wally’s protective single dad, has learned that his headaches aren’t just from the struggle of parenting his restless teenager. A cancer diagnosis gives him one year to live — and instead of coming clean about his condition, Max packs up their wood-paneled Jeep for a road trip with an ulterior motive: To take a surprise detour to introduce Wally to her mother (Jen Van Epps), who ran away with Max’s best friend (Jemaine Clement) when the girl was an infant.The setup is like a hazard sign reading “Caution: Treacle Ahead.” Yet the director Hannah Marks and the screenwriter Vera Herbert veer from predictability. Life is unpredictable, and the film gambles big to make that point. In one jolting scene, they set an emotional showdown on a nude beach — but neither character finds the gratuitous flaccidity funny. (Thankfully, the film’s editor, Paul Frank, does.)Cho and Isaac’s stellar performances expose the gulf between familiarity and intimacy. The two flinty characters are more likely to expose their own vulnerable bellies to outsiders than to each other. Herbert’s droll, scrupulously realistic dialogue captures the journey of a parent and a child learning to see each other as flawed people. As Cho’s buttoned-up Max attempts to deliver decades’s worth of advice during the drive, he reveals that he was once a musician before he settled into the role of a risk-averse accountant. Max denies Wally’s accusation that he quashed his passions for her sake, yet the film is wise (and brutal) enough to side with her when she’s right — as she certainly is in her early warning about the movie’s polarizing finale.Don’t Make Me GoRated R for teenage drinking and abundant adult nudity. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      ‘Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris’ Review: High Fashion for the Humble

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      This inspirational comedy starring Leslie Manville and Isabelle Huppert trades in a similar kind of British coziness as the “Paddington” movies, though it’s not nearly as effective.In “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” Lesley Manville returns to the world of high fashion in a reversal of her Oscar-nominated role in “Phantom Thread.” Her deliciously frigid character in that film — the forbidding manager of a British fashion house and foe to Vicky Krieps’s lowborn muse — would go catatonic were Manville’s Mrs. Ada Harris to waltz into the fitting room, asking for a “frock” with her cockney drawl.Unsurprisingly, the formidable Manville pulls off the switcheroo, instilling her role as the genial cleaning lady with a tenderness and grace that far surpasses the feel-good pish-posh that is the film around her.Directed by Anthony Fabian, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” trades in a similar kind of British coziness as the “Paddington” movies, though it’s not as zany or funny.Mrs. Harris, a widow toiling away in the service of the postwar London elite, has her eyes set on a custom Dior gown and, after a series of fortunate events, heads to Paris to retrieve the garment of her dreams. Despite having found the cash, our heroine must contend with the menacing Madame Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) and the snooty mores of the biz and its patrons.For the other world-weary employees — the kindly, philosophizing model Natasha (Alba Baptista), the lovesick accountant André (Lucas Bravo) — Mrs. Harris proves single-handedly that the rules of society aren’t necessarily ironclad. If a humble maid can get her hands on a dress that costs 600 pounds, what’s stopping Natasha from pursuing an intellectual life, or André from revolutionizing the company to appeal to women from all walks of life?The trope of the laughably frumpy worker bee, filled with optimism and quiet wisdom, is demeaning, and Mrs. Harris’s iteration is no exception. Despite its gleeful showcasing of beautiful clothes and vibrant midcentury Parisian sights, the film is caught between its fantasies and its principles, landing somewhere more annoyingly clueless — and dull — than it ought to be.Mrs. Harris Goes to ParisRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘She Will’ Review: Payback Is a Witch

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      A traumatized star is supernaturally primed for vengeance in this gorgeously ghostly thriller.The first name we see onscreen in “She Will” belongs not to its director (Charlotte Colbert) or its star (Alice Krige), but to one of its executive producers, the horror maestro Dario Argento. And it doesn’t take long to recognize the ways in which the plot of this confident first feature (written by Colbert and Kitty Percy) might have appealed to Argento: The emphasis on dreams, the sly humor and — perhaps most of all — the despoilment of female beauty.What’s notable here is Colbert’s restraint, so much so that I hesitate to describe “She Will,” which is virtually bloodless, as a horror movie. Certainly, horrible things have happened to Veronica Ghent (Krige), an aging star recovering from a double mastectomy, but they’re seen mostly through the veils of memory and suggestion. And when she arrives at a remote healing retreat in Scotland with her warmhearted nurse, Desi (an excellent Kota Eberhardt), Veronica appears less a damaged celebrity than an imperious misanthrope with a dry, dark wit.“Scout camp, with a touch of Guantánamo,” she declares their destination, appalled by the unexpected presence of a gaggle of pyramid-worshiping spiritualists. Retreating to a cottage deep in the woods and the comfort of her pain medication, Veronica hopes to find rest and solitude; instead, her dreams are filled with bonfires and shackled women and a ghastly, imploring, helmeted figure. The retreat might be located on the site of 18th-century witch burnings, but it’s a far more recent injury that begins to invade Veronica’s sleep, one involving her 13-year-old self and Eric Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell), the director of her first film.Blending sensuous imagery with jabs of feminist wit — at one point, a vibrator is weaponized against a male intruder — Colbert sends her heroine on a transformative journey of revenge and renewal. As Veronica absorbs the forest’s damp foliage and sucking peat, her pain eases and she discards her prosthetics. Old wounds, both physical and psychological, are being dug up and aired out, the confrontation of the past becoming a means to accepting her ruined beauty. Makeup, she tells us, has always offered a ritual of preservation; now her slash of carmine lipstick is an act of defiance.Assembled for atmosphere rather than shocks, “She Will” artfully devises paranormal consequences for male violence. Jamie D. Ramsay’s cinematography casts a sullen thundercloud over exterior and interior shots alike, a child’s party balloons in one early scene appearing filled not with helium but with foreboding. When you’re about to embark on a witch hunt, that’s exactly the ambience you want.She WillNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 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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      ‘Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank’ Review: A Tail of Two Samurai

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      Michael Cera and Samuel L. Jackson lend their voices to this unlikely animated adaptation of Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles.”Michael Cera stars as an anthropomorphic dog, who is in training to be a samurai, and Samuel L. Jackson plays his washed-up feline mentor in Paramount’s latest animated family flick, “Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank.” The film sounds like standard CGI family fare, until you learn that the movie, originally titled “Blazing Samurai,” is a PG adaptation of Mel Brooks’s 1974 satire of Western films and race relations, “Blazing Saddles.”Sure enough, the basic story elements of “Blazing Saddles” are all here — only now, rather than an evil railroad baron employing an unwitting Black prisoner to be the sheriff of a racist town, a conniving cat (Ricky Gervais) convinces Hank, a lost beagle, to become the samurai for a village with a prejudice against canines. (Brooks even reprises his “Blazing Saddles” role as the Governor, now reimagined as a geriatric shogun.) Many of the same slapstick jokes and gags from Brooks’s film are referenced, too, though they have been retooled to remove any outdated references or obscenity. Some quips, however, still slip under the radar: At one point, Jackson’s character, the retired samurai Jimbo, refers to a group of village invaders as “N.W.A. — Ninjas With Attitude.”Despite its risqué origins, “Paws of Fury” manages to dish out lighthearted fun, swashbuckling action and surface-level messaging about following your dreams, though not every joke lands. The anachronistic sight gags in “Blazing Saddles” don’t work as well in the hyperreal world of a children’s cartoon, where the sight of a dog and a cat in kimonos attending a bottle-service nightclub circa 2009 isn’t as absurd as it would be in live action. Still, if watching those same characters sword-fight around the bowl of an enormous jade toilet sounds like fun to you or your children, this may be the movie of the summer for you.Paws of Fury: The Legend of HankRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Killer’ Review: Stylistic Action Without the Heart

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      In this South Korean film, a teenage girl kidnapped by human traffickers brings an assassin out of retirement to save her.It was only days ago that the retired assassin Ui-gang (Jang Hyuk) was enjoying a happy life with his wife (Bang Eun-jung). Now, after the kidnapping of a girl in the director Choi Jae-hoon’s muscular action flick “The Killer,” Ui-gang is facing down a barrage of goons in a narrow hallway to rescue her. He doesn’t flinch when an ax whizzes past his ear. Instead, with unblinking precision, he tears through two would-be killers while a shocked group of tough guys watch in fear from an elevator.Choi spends the first half of the film building back to this moment: Ui-Gang’s wife wants to take a trip with her friend, who has a teenage daughter, Yoon-ji (Lee Seo-young). An unamused Ui-gang is charged with babysitting the girl while the pair go on vacation. Soon after they leave, the 17-year-old is kidnapped by a sex-trafficking ring with Russian ties. Whoever is pulling the strings specifically wants Yoon-ji and Ui-gang needs to kill that person to save the girl.While the tightly choreographed action scenes in “The Killer” take their cue from “John Wick” and “The Man From Nowhere,” the film lacks heart.Adapted from the novel “The Girl Who Deserves to Die” by Bang Jin-ho, the screenwriter Nam Ji-woong’s undercooked script leaves the interpersonal dynamics between Ui-gang and his wife underwritten. While the nimble Jang holds together the robust action sequences — bloody freakouts often captured in slow motion — no one else grounds any of the scenes with any emotion. Consequently, “The Killer” fails to land a real knockout blow.The KillerNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Name Is Sara’ Review: Keeping Secrets in Close Quarters

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      In this intermittently powerful if somewhat stiff-jointed Holocaust drama, a Jewish girl poses as a gentile and works as a nanny for a Ukrainian farmer and his wife.In the Holocaust drama “My Name Is Sara,” a Jewish girl hides out with a Ukrainian farming family and works as a nanny in exchange for food and shelter. Posing as a gentile, Sara (Zuzanna Surowy), tells the farmer, Pavlo (Eryk Lubos), and his wife, Nadya (Michalina Olszanska), that her name is Manya and that she has run away from a troubled home life.Pavlo and especially Nadya appear to harbor suspicions about her story and lack of papers. Nadya repeatedly tests Sara. She asks her to cross herself, feeds her pork and summons her to help the boys with Christian prayers — something that Sara, for reasons revealed later on, does with relative ease. But even if the household mildly warms to Sara, the danger of discovery does not abate for nearly two years.The film is sharp at illustrating how Sara is never totally safe, and how survival requires improvising again and again. Anti-Semitism is all around her even apart from the occupying Nazis. When she discovers that Nadya is having an affair, the balance of leverage and loyalties grows even more complicated.Directed by Steven Oritt and written by David Himmelstein, the movie dramatizes some of the real wartime experiences of Sara Shapiro, born Sara Goralnik, who died in 2018. While the suspense and power of her story come through, the film can be clunkily expository and, with regard to tensions between Sara and Pavlo, frustratingly vague. Furthermore, having the Ukrainians mostly speak English with one another — despite the presence of Polish, Russian and German elsewhere in the movie — distracts from the verisimilitude.My Name Is SaraNot rated. In English, Polish, German and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More