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      ‘The Human Trial’ Review: The Race for a Diabetes Cure

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      The married documentarians Lisa Hepner and Guy Mossman follow people with diabetes who put themselves forward as test subjects for a potential solution.Imagine what a world without diabetes would look like. A vast reduction in pain, suffering, needless death. And, as a bonus, a significant drop in pharmaceutical ads, probably.The goal is far away, but not as remote as you may imagine. The married documentarians Lisa Hepner and Guy Mossman spent more than five years making “The Human Trial,” a movie chronicling one research company’s quest for a cure and following two people with diabetes who put themselves forward as test subjects.The movie opens with footage of Hepner taking a blood sugar reading. As someone with Type 1 diabetes, she is personally invested in this subject. Her narration tells of her 2014 discovery of a San Diego company, ViaCyte, which is developing a treatment by which insulin-making stem cells can be implanted in patients. (This is admittedly a simplistic description of what the treatment is meant to do; the movie goes into more detail, with clarity and patience.)Over the course of several years, the moviemakers keep tabs on two diabetes patients, Mason and Gregory, who allow themselves to have modules that release stem cells implanted in them. One finds his blood-sugar levels getting lower. But is this a placebo effect? The movie is blunt in presenting the patients’ emotional ups and downs, and shows the sometimes weary realism of the researchers. It also offers another kind of weariness: ViaCyte is in constant need of new funding.Shot largely in hospital waiting areas, offices and conference rooms, “The Human Trial” is not a visually dynamic movie. But it builds a good head of steam in the narrative intrigue department before resolving on a low-key note of hope.The Human TrialNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Wildhood’ Review: On the Road, Sorting Out Growing Up

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      Three young men explore their Indigenous heritage and questions about their gender and sexual identity in this film.In the tender coming-of-age tale “Wildhood,” Link (Phillip Lewitski) is a young man of Mi’kmaq heritage who journeys across rural areas in search of the mother he hardly knew. The movie was written and directed by the Nova Scotian filmmaker Bretten Hannam, who is Two-Spirit and nonbinary, and their camera intimately observes Link as he slowly casts off the protective shield he once needed to survive.Laconic with a stiff upper lip, Link seems at first like a familiar character. He is tough and stubborn, and fumes at the world around him. His only ally is his little brother, Travis (Avery Winters-Anthony), and together they scavenge for food, explore the outdoors and endure beatings by their brutal father — until an unexpected discovery inspires Link to flee his trailer park home with Travis in tow.The rest of the story unspools on the road, as the brothers and their new friend, Pasmay (Joshua Odjick), trek through lens-flare-speckled forests in the hope of locating Link’s Mi’kmaq mother. There are a few scenes of weepy sentimentality, and many more exuberant montages. Throughout, hazy hand-held camerawork and a synth-heavy score encourage a drifty, lyrical mood.These tactics are well-worn. But Hannam is sensitive in using his craft to soften the rugged young men at the center of “Wildhood.” The quiet candor with which Hannam addresses issues of masculinity, and how it intersects with an Indigenous and queer identity, elevates this otherwise conventional story.WildhoodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Apples’ Review: Forget Me Not

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      Amnesia strikes individuals at random in this absurdist dramedy from Greece, which may be too deadpan for its own good.Firmly in the tradition of the “Greek Weird Wave” that most viewers associate with the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, “Apples” is a deadpan dramedy with an eerily familiar dystopian premise.Amnesia spreads like a sickness, striking at random and forcing the unluckiest individuals to complete in a bizarre program that equips patients with a new identity. Such is the case with Aris (Aris Servetalis), a middle-aged, droopy-eyed wretch who, one afternoon, literally takes a bus ride to nowhere. By the time he reaches the end of the line, he has no idea who he is.Written and directed by Christos Nikou, “Apples” follows Aris on the ostensible road to recovery, drifting through a depopulated Athens where the stilted, phantom-like people that do enter the frame beg the (existential) question: are these the infected? Or is everyone, in their own way, just as lost?Initially, watching Aris commit to the training program has its charms. Every day, he listens to cassette tapes that instruct him to create specific memories — riding a bike, getting a lap dance, attending a costume party. But our hero, a kind of mute and wide-eyed space alien, makes these totally ordinary activities feel absurd. That the program obliges him to take a Polaroid each time he completes a task adds to the gloomy, if chuckle-inducing, artificiality.These listless proceedings are shaken up when Aris meets Anna (Sofia Georgovasili), a chirpy fellow amnesiac. Anna’s intentions are fittingly obscure, but the development of an actual, recognizably human relationship between the two gives the film a pulse where there was once only blank-faced dark comedy. Still, the movie never manages to hit above a dim emotional pitch, and a final-act awakening lands with a shrug. You can rest assured, at least, that Aris does eventually stir out of his zombified state — and that apples actually do play a starring role.ApplesNot rated. In Greek, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Black Phone’ Review: The Dead Have Your Number

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      Ethan Hawke plays the big bad in this 1970s-set child-abduction thriller.More touching than terrifying, Scott Derrickson’s “Black Phone” is less a horror movie than a coming-of-age ghost story. In place of gouting gore and surging fright, this enjoyable adaptation of Joe Hill’s 2005 short story has an almost contemplative tone, one that drains its familiar horror tropes — a masked psychopath, communications from beyond the grave — of much of their chill.The movie’s low goose bump count, though, is far from ruinous. Set in small-town Colorado in the 1970s, the story centers on 13-year-old Finney (Mason Thames), an ace baseball pitcher burdened by a dead mother, school bullies and an abusive, alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies). An early lecture from a new friend (a charismatic Miguel Cazarez Mora) about fighting back will prove prescient when Finney becomes the latest victim of The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), a clownish magician and the abductor of several neighborhood boys.While light on scares and short on specifics (The Grabber is a generic, somewhat comic villain with an unexplored psychopathology), “The Black Phone” is more successful as a celebration of youthful resilience. As Finney languishes in a soundproofed cement dungeon, his spunky little sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw, a standout), is using the psychic gifts she inherited from her mother to find him. Finney also has help from the killer’s previous victims, who call him on the ancient rotary phone on the wall above his bed, undeterred by the fact that it has long been disconnected.Revisiting elements of his own childhood and adolescence, Derrickson (who wrote the screenplay with C. Robert Cargill) evokes a time when Ted Bundy was on the news and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was at the drive-in. The movie’s images have a mellow, antique glaze that strengthens the nostalgic mood while softening the dread. (Compare, for instance, Finney’s kidnapping with Georgie’s abduction in the 2017 chiller “It”: both feature balloons and a masked monster, but only one is terrifying.) It doesn’t help that Hawke is stranded in a character whose torture repertoire consists mainly of elaborate hand gestures.Leaning heavily into the familiar narrative obsessions of Hill’s father, Stephen King — plucky kids, feckless parents, creepy clowns and their accessories — “The Black Phone” feels unavoidably derivative. But the young actors are appealing, the setting is fondly imagined and the anxieties of adolescence are front and center. For most of us, those worries were more than enough to conjure the shivers.The Black PhoneRated R for bloody apparitions and blasphemous words. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love & Gelato’ Review: A Young Girl, Transfigured by Italy

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      A mother’s final wish leads her daughter to retrace her Roman holiday in this lighthearted coming-of-age story.For many American teenagers, college is the great undiscovered country. But in the romantic comedy, “Love & Gelato,” Lina (Susanna Skaggs) has just lost her beloved mother to cancer. Before she matriculates to her first year of university at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she is obligated to live out her mother’s final wish for her. Her mother had a transformative trip to Italy in her youth, and her request is that Lina should follow in her footsteps. Cautious Lina can find a way to worry about anything, but magnanimously, she agrees to spend her summer in Rome.Lina inevitably finds herself moved by the beauty of the city — its food, its vistas and most of all, its prettily entreating boys. She becomes infatuated with Alessandro (Saul Nanni), a blue-eyed social butterfly bound for a Boston fall. And lest Alessandro prove too good to be true, a warm and welcoming chef, Lorenzo (Tobia De Angelis), takes an interest in her fish-out-of-water charms. With her mother’s old friends and Lorenzo as her guides, Lina finds purpose in Italy, even daring to search for her Italian father, the man her mother left behind.This is a story where the characters woo each other with artless naïveté, and the movie is shot in a similarly unassuming fashion. The writer and director Brandon Camp opts for a cheerily overlit, comedic tone. It’s the kind of film that is more interested in the appeal of a good Italian accent than it is in finding novel, or even particularly beautiful, ways to shoot and see Rome. The conscious callowness is agreeable, but it lacks freshness, like a midnight pasta reheated in the microwave.Love & GelatoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes’ Review: Excavating Images From the Fallout

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      This archival documentary uses footage from the former Soviet Union to reconstruct the nuclear disaster from the perspectives of people who were present.Drawing on archival visual material from the former Soviet Union and a mix of old and contemporary interviews, the tense documentary “Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes” reconstructs the 1986 nuclear disaster from the perspectives of people present during its devastation.We hear from Lyudmila Ihnatenko (the inspiration for Jessie Buckley’s character on the HBO dramatized mini-series), a resident of the area who was pregnant when the catastrophe occurred, and whose husband, a firefighter, went to the plant after the initial explosion. Oleksiy Breus, an engineer at Chernobyl, speaks of going to work the next day not even knowing what had happened. It is chilling to hear about the slowness of the evacuation — there is mention of children going to playgrounds instead of sheltering indoors — or to see flashes in the imagery that we’re told came from the film itself registering radiation.Some of the most powerful footage involves the “liquidators,” men charged with containment and cleanup in the months after the accident. One dismisses talk of radiation as nonsense. Soon after, the movie shows flabbergasting video of them shoveling debris while presumably absorbing lethal doses.Although it’s mentioned at the beginning that the Soviets documented the accident’s aftermath, hoping to propagandize the story of a heroic rescue, you might wonder who would possibly be holding a video camera at that moment. But “Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes,” directed by James Jones, does not extensively explore the history of its components. It’s less concerned with the tapes themselves than with the act of bearing witness.Chernobyl: The Lost TapesNot rated. In Ukrainian, Russian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      ‘The Story Won’t Die’ Review: Art in a Time of Crisis

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      This documentary about Syrian refugee artists explores the role of art in the face of war and displacement.In 1949, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared that to write poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric.” The question underpinning his statement remains ever relevant: In the face of wars, genocides and other atrocities, does art-making serve any purpose? David Henry Gerson’s documentary, “The Story Won’t Die,” answers with a resounding yes. The Syrian refugee artists profiled in the film — men and women who’ve suffered one of the most brutal displacements of our time — make a case not just for art’s survival but for art as a means of survival.Weaving together interviews with a number of Syrian singers, rappers, dancers and visual artists now based in Europe, Gerson probes the ways in which artistic expression emerges both because and in spite of repression. For some, like the post-rock musician Anas Maghrebi, who brought his three drum kits on the boat across the Atlantic, their vocation is a spiritual life jacket of sorts. For others, like the photographer Omar Imam, the experience of migration has provided a furious impetus: His “Syrialism” series attempts to redefine stereotypical depictions of refugees.Threading the needle between individual tales and a broader historical portrait is as much a challenge for Gerson as it is for his subjects. While the artists are eager to represent their experiences in their work, they want to be seen as more than “a laboratory rat for people to show documentaries about,” says Bahila Hijazi, a member of an all-female Syrian rock band. If Gerson’s brisk supercut style can feel frustratingly cursory at times, he chooses wisely to concede the stage to the artists — rousing scenes from concerts and recitals are the film’s highlights — rather than turn them into data points for an exhaustive account of the refugee crisis.The Story Won’t DieNot rated. In Arabic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Granada Nights’ Review: Growing Abroad

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      This drama tells the hackneyed story of a lovelorn expatriate pulling himself together and dragging us around with him.It doesn’t take long in “Granada Nights” before someone is sagely explaining the difference between a tourist and a traveler. A peevish university grad, Ben (Antonio Aakeel), is on the receiving end of this hoary conversation-starter, but he’s a bit distracted. He has journeyed from London to Granada, Spain, to surprise his girlfriend at her doorstep — something that people in movies should really avoid doing. When he realizes it’s over, what follows is a hackneyed story of a tedious, lovelorn expatriate, pulling himself together and dragging us around with him.Ben falls in with an apparently wealthy crowd of European students who advise him on getting girls and appreciating Granada. Their pseudo-wisdom and party-on spirit elbow him to stop moping, take Spanish classes and flirt mechanically. But it’s grating to watch because of banal performances and a screenplay that’s like the dialogue equivalent of a temp track, as if the film is still awaiting an original perspective on this world to be filled in. (The travel/tourist acquaintance, incidentally, is played by up-and-comer Quintessa Swindell, but her character moves on quickly.)Granada, a well-touristed city, sometimes makes for a picturesque backdrop, especially in a faded-looking opening montage that promises an elegance that the film doesn’t deliver. Over the course of the story, the writer and director, Abid Khan, also widens the film’s aspect ratio (starting with a trim, square frame). Maybe it’s meant to symbolize Ben’s broadening of understanding, but his journey largely feels so dull that you might want to take a different route.Granada NightsNot rated. In English, Spanish, Swedish and Urdu, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Vudu, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More