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      ‘Cop Secret’ Review: Bang Bang, Kiss Kiss

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      In this Icelandic spoof of Hollywood action movies, two rival police officers make a love connection.The big reveal in “Cop Secret” is out from the moment the unkempt Bussi (Audunn Blondal), Iceland’s toughest police officer, is forcibly partnered with Hordur (Egill Einarsson), his suave rival from a neighboring precinct. As Hordur strolls toward Bussi in swoony slow-motion, impeccable jacket slung roguishly over one bulging shoulder, Bussi’s stubbled jaw softens. The two may be vying for top dog, but it’s clear that — grooming discrepancies aside — copulation will soon take precedence over competition.Before Bussi’s ultramacho veneer can crack, though, this unruly send-up of Hollywood action movies, gleefully directed by Hannes Thor Halldorsson, hammers every genre cliché into wearying submission. The plot — a silly hodgepodge of explosions, bank heists and sexual repression — charges forward, its dialogue and setups merrily spoofing the buddy-cop canon. Familiarity might be the point, but a screenplay this coarse leaves the actors little wiggle room, reducing them to mouthpieces for recycled jokes.So we have a disfigured villain (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) who shaves with what appears to be a serrated bowie knife; a hard-nosed female police chief (Steinunn Olina Thorsteinsdottir, whom fans of Nordic noir may recognize from the gripping TV series “Trapped”); and an anxious male sidekick, Klemenz (Sverrir Thor Sverrisson), whose chief purpose is to remind us repeatedly of Bussi’s contempt for proper police procedure.“You have no respect for the rules!,” Klemenz moans during the car chase that opens the movie and allows the cinematographer, Elli Cassata, to show off a bit. The sequence is goofy fun; less so is the transformation of a rather sweet gay romance into a cheap comic device.Cop SecretNot rated. In Icelandic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘This Much I Know to Be True’ Review: Nick Cave Prepares for the Stage

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      A new music documentary by Andrew Dominik explores the collaboration of Cave and Warren Ellis.The singer-songwriter (and novelist and screenwriter) Nick Cave is a longtime chronicler of dread, erotic obsession, morality and mortality. The director Andrew Dominik, not exactly a screwball comedy guy himself (“Killing Them Softly”), proved an apt collaborator with Cave on the 2016 documentary “One More Time With Feeling.”That film was a tricky proposition, undertaken in the wake of the 2015 death of Cave’s teenage son Arthur. It documented the making of “Skeleton Tree,” one of Cave and his band the Bad Seeds’ most moving records.The new “This Much I Know to Be True,” shot in spring 2021 before a tour, and largely devoted to presenting songs from the recent albums “Ghosteen” and “Carnage,” is a lighter affair. It opens with Cave speaking about how he handled the pandemic: “I took the government’s advice,” he says, pausing to chuckle, “and retrained as a ceramicist.” He then shows off sculptures depicting a history of the devil.Cave’s partner in music, the multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, is the other main presence here. (Marianne Faithfull, a stalwart friend of Cave’s, pops in for a memorable scene.) Cave waxes droll on their collaboration: “He took a subordinate role of embellishing what was going on,” he says of Ellis, adding, “And slowly, one by one, taking out each member of the Bad Seeds. I know I’m the next to go.” More seriously, he talks about the Red Hand Files, his newsletter, a sort of metaphysical advice column, in which he exercises a compassion that he admits “doesn’t come naturally.”Dominik shows off his own inventive playfulness here. He shifts aspect ratios from shot to shot. He lays bare cinematic contrivances by showing dolly tracks in a shot, only then to fake out the viewer with a lighting trick. A rather fun Nick Cave movie might not have been on your 2022 bingo card, but here we are.This Much I Know to Be TrueNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Both Sides of the Blade’ Review: Who Do You Love?

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      In the latest film from Claire Denis, Juliette Binoche plays a Parisian radio journalist in a romantic quandary.When we first meet Sara and Jean, they are enjoying a vacation. To be precise, they‘re making out in the waters of a sun-dappled lagoon, the very picture of midlife romantic fulfillment. The fact that Sara and Jean are played by Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon, two of most charismatic actors of a certain age in modern cinema, makes their apparent bliss look all the more enviable.But the pictures only tell part of the story. The couple’s smiles and caresses are accompanied by brooding, cello-heavy music — the kind that lets even the most inattentive or tone-deaf viewer know that something bad is going to happen. Even when the sound brightens and Jean and Sara return to their tidy Paris apartment, you can’t quite shake the feeling of dread.“Both Sides of the Blade” is a Claire Denis movie, which is to say that it can be expected to confound expectations, including those it seems to set up for itself. Sex, politics, vampires, science fiction, Herman Melville — nothing is alien to this restless and resourceful filmmaker.Here, the plot occasionally gravitates toward romantic comedy, as Sara finds herself torn between Jean and François (Grégoire Colin), a former lover who is also an old friend and potential business partner of Jean’s. But the mood hovers in the neighborhood of melodrama, thriller, even horror. Sara’s passion for François seems almost like a form of possession, and allusions to Jean’s status as an ex-convict contribute to a free-floating sense of danger.The dissonance between the film’s structure and its tone is potentially interesting, and the off-balance intensity of the performances means that “Both Sides of the Blade” is never dull. As they did in “Let the Sunshine In,” Binoche and Denis trace the disruptive effects of desire on a woman who is neither heroine nor victim. The impulses that lead Sara to destabilize her own domestic life are mysterious even to her, and the audience may wonder why she appears to prefer François, who is pouty and petulant (even in bed), to the stoical, sad-eyed Jean.Bad choices often make good stories, but there is something thin and tentative about this one, which Denis wrote with Christine Angot. Sara is the host of a public-affairs radio broadcast, a job that allows the film to glance occasionally at the wider world. Guests talk about the crisis in Lebanon and the pervasiveness of racism in Western society, and their presence in the movie is a puzzle. Maybe we are supposed to see that Sara cares about such matters, or that Denis does, or to be reminded that we should. Or maybe Denis is pointing out the gulf between public concerns and private experience.The larger problem is that the main characters and their situation seem weightless, their nonromantic lives sketched in hastily and without much conviction. Jean sometimes travels to the suburbs to visit his mother, Nelly (Bulle Ogier), who is caring for his teenage son, Marcus (Issa Perica). The young man, whose mother is out of the picture, is biracial, and becomes a too-convenient symbol for social problems the film otherwise ignores. He steals Nelly’s credit card and does badly in school, and because we know almost nothing else about him as a character, he seems like a stereotype.Marcus’s behavior provokes a rant from his father against “the prevailing discourse” that emphasizes identity over individuality. Like the segments from Sara’s radio program, this diatribe against le wokisme waves in the direction of contemporary reality without engaging it.Meanwhile, the Sara-Jean-François love triangle, as it grows louder and more tearful, loses momentum as a source of drama. Its resolution is — and I mean this as a literal description — a bad joke. How strange that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and fearless as Denis has made such a generic, tentative film.Both Sides of the BladeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel’ Review: Bohemia’s Holdouts

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      This documentary offers an immersion in the lives of residents who keep the building’s spirit as a home for artists alive through a protracted renovation.Early in “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel,” a construction worker says that the famed building has “a lot of ghosts.”A home for untold authors, artists and musicians since it opened in the Gilded Age — and probably the only dwelling anywhere that housed, at different times, Mark Twain and superstars from Andy Warhol’s Factory — the Chelsea Hotel, as seen in this documentary from Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, appears haunted even by its current residents, who wander halls that have been filled with plastic sheeting.Shot beginning in 2019, while the hotel ground through a contentious and protracted renovation, the film offers an evocative, melancholy immersion in the lives of a handful of holdouts who have maintained the building’s bohemian spirit even as their apartments have been cut up, almost as if they themselves were part of the architecture. The occupant of Janis Joplin’s former suite displays the soap dish he kept from a gutted bathroom. (“She probably didn’t use the soap, from what I know about Janis Joplin,” he says.)A wire sculptor, a dancer and the head of the tenants’ association (who yearns for construction to finally finish, though other residents disagree) are among the eccentric figures who catch the directors’ eyes. The artist Bettina Grossman, who died in November at 94, says she’s the oldest person in the building and that, unlike her neighbors, she was never offered money to leave.The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea HotelNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 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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      A Feminist, Neorealist, Communist Film, and a Plain Great Movie

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      “One Way or Another,” from 1974, is a class-conscious love story involving a macho worker and a well-to-do schoolteacher in Cuba.Dialectical from opening title to final image, “One Way or Another” — the first and only feature by the Afro-Cuban director Sara Gómez — introduces itself as “a film about real people, and some fictitious ones.” That’s one way to describe this deft mixture of cinéma vérité, ethnographic documentary, feminist social realism and class-conscious revolutionary romance.“One Way or Another” opens Friday for a weeklong run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Restored from its original 16-millimeter, the film looks terrific, and, despite its nostalgia for the ideals of the Cuban revolution, it feels as relevant today as it did in 1974.While “One Way or Another” never had a formal release in the United States, it has surfaced periodically in film series, including one at BAM five years ago that was devoted to Black women’s cinema. (Reviewing this series, to which “One Way or Another” lent its name, the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it “a still-exciting mixture of documentary and narrative fiction.”)“One Way or Another” could be described as a love story involving two photogenic young people — a macho worker, Mario (Mario Balmaseda, who was a professional actor), and a schoolteacher, Yolande (Yolanda Cuéllar, who was not). But it has more on its mind.Mario, a mulatto laborer, grew up on the mean streets of Havana’s Miraflores district; Yolanda, who is white, educated and middle class, has been assigned to teach in a Miraflores primary school. Both have workplace issues. Mario is implicated in a buddy’s misconduct; Yolanda is repeatedly advised to be more diplomatic in dealing with her pupils’ impoverished parents.Given their backgrounds, the lovers often misunderstand each other. Context is all. Their most intimate conversation is in the “neutral” territory of a tiny posada, or hotel; their story is interspersed with interludes concerning the history and legacy of slavery — including the African religion Santería and the all-male secret society Abakuá.Shots of slums and slum clearance provide a metaphor for the creation of a new society and a new consciousness. That the principles come together and drift apart amid a constant interplay of destruction and construction suggests that their relationship — like the Cuban Revolution — is a perpetual work in progress. Didactic as it is, “One Way or Another” can be taken for socialist realism, but if so, it is a highly original and even critical variant. (The “positive hero,” an axiom of the mode, is an Afro-Cuban musician and former boxer, Guillermo Diaz, who supplies a song demystifying traditional gender roles.)Trained as a musician, Gómez made a score of short documentaries. (She also served as an assistant director on Agnès Varda’s 1963 documentary “Salut les Cubains” and can be seen dancing the cha-cha at the movie’s conclusion.) “One Way or Another” is so brimming with life and ideas that it is shattering to learn that Gómez died, at just 31, while editing it — she succumbed to a severe asthma attack amid complications giving birth to her third child.The postproduction was completed by her colleagues, and the movie was not shown until 1977. Since then, it has been recognized as a landmark of feminist, neorealist, Communist, Cuban, Latinx, Third World and simply world cinema.One Way or AnotherJuly 8-14 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      ‘Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between’ Review: Break Cute?

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      In this adaptation of Jennifer E. Smith’s young adult novel, two high school seniors agree to split up in a year. Will they honor their pact?Early in the teenage-targeted romantic comedy “Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between” — based on Jennifer E. Smith’s young adult novel — a senior, Aidan (Jordan Fisher), performs a Ferris Bueller-like rendition of “Twist and Shout” at a house party to the amusement of a new classmate, Clare (Talia Ryder). Before the evening ends, the two have shared a kiss and make a pact to dissolve whatever relationship might follow in a year’s time. (Having seen the downside of her divorced parents’ high school romance, Clare insists and Aidan signs on.)The two met cute enough. But will they be able to break up as cutely? For those viewers aged out of the movie’s intended demographic, that quandary isn’t as compelling as the evidence of its lead actors’ talents, as well as that of the nimble actors who play their besties, Stella (Ayo Edebiri) and Scotty (Nico Hiraga).Fisher was the first Black actor to portray the anxiety-tormented protagonist of “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway. Ryder shined in “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” about two friends who travel to New York for an abortion. “Hello,” directed by Michael Lewen, is decidedly lighter fare.In Clare and Aidan’s neatly circumscribed sphere, there is not much worldly or familial drama. Their parents are solidly loving, though neither kid wants to tread in their footsteps. When the couple embark on their exit date, their pact gets tested in surprising ways, and their love’s cracks finally start to show.In the movie’s early nod to the director John Hughes, “Hello, Goodbye and Everything In Between” set a high bar, one it has the talent but not the boldness to clear.Hello, Goodbye and Everything in BetweenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      The Academy Museum Names Jacqueline Stewart as New Leader

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      The film historian and preservationist specializes in Black cinema and silent movies. She had been serving as the institution’s chief artistic and programming officer.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Wednesday named Jacqueline Stewart, a film scholar who worked to make the long-delayed project a reality, as its new director and president.The museum’s former leader, Bill Kramer, was appointed chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that oversees the Oscars, last month. As the museum’s chief artistic and programming officer, Stewart worked closely with Kramer to bring the institution over the finish line amid pandemic challenges, and bring it up to date with social movements, like #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo, that exposed inequities in the film industry.Stewart, a film historian and preservationist with a specialty in Black cinema and silent films, is a professor in the cinema and media studies department at the University of Chicago. In 2019, she became the first Black host on the cable channel Turner Classic Movies when she stepped in to introduce the programming series Silent Sunday Nights. She is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, which advises the Librarian of Congress on the National Film Registry, and founded an organization on Chicago’s South Side that preserves and screens footage of everyday life there.At the museum, which opened in Los Angeles last year, Stewart has helped steer exhibitions, screenings and workshops; she has also hosted a new podcast under the museum’s banner that delved into key social and cultural moments in Oscars history.In a news release announcing the appointment, Stewart said she looked forward to working with the museum board and staff and with the academy itself:“Our ambition in opening the Academy Museum was to give Los Angeles and the world an unprecedented institution for understanding and appreciating the history and culture of cinema, in all its artistic glory and all its power to influence and reflect society,” she said in the release. “I feel deeply honored to have been chosen for this new role.” More

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      They Loved Volcanoes and Each Other

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      In “Fire of Love,” the voice-over quotes Maurice and Katia Krafft’s feelings about the risks in their line of work: exploring and filming volcanoes. “I prefer an intense and short life to a monotonous, long one,” Maurice wrote. Katia acknowledged the danger but said that in the moment, she didn’t care at all.The Kraffts, married French volcanologists, were killed on June 3, 1991, observing an eruption of Mount Unzen in Japan. But the stunning 16-millimeter footage they shot throughout their careers — full of gushing lava, flying rocks and giant clouds of smoke — lives on in the new “Fire of Love,” an all-archival documentary compiled from roughly 200 hours of their material along with 50 hours of TV appearances and other clips.“I have so many questions that I wish I could have asked them personally, and one of them is what reels didn’t make it,” Sara Dosa, the documentary’s director, said during an interview in Tribeca last month. After all, visiting volcanoes is fraught with hazards. The film tells of Maurice scalding his leg in boiling mud and shows him playfully testing Katia’s helmet by throwing a rock at her head. Dosa said they didn’t use “a fun shot we had of Maurice taking his melted boot and throwing it into a lava flow.” It’s safe to assume that not all of the couple’s film equipment survived, either.The Kraffs’ relationship is also the subject of the new documentary.Image’EstBut “Fire of Love” is not just about the Kraffts’ time in the field; it’s also about their lives and their marriage. Dosa, who learned about the couple while doing research for a previous documentary, has described her film as a love triangle involving Maurice, Katia and the volcanoes.The movie tries to stay true to them — “we always wanted to start with Katia and Maurice, first and foremost,” Dosa said — while maintaining some critical distance. A voice-over from Miranda July expands on and at times complicates the Kraffts’ descriptions, countering Maurice’s claim, for instance, that he was “not a filmmaker,” but merely “a wandering volcanologist forced to make films in order to wander.” The couple — short-haired, bespectacled Katia; bushy-maned, garrulous Maurice — toured the world giving lectures and holding screenings. Even today, in part thanks to their many books and TV appearances, they enjoy a measure of global fame.“We wanted to kind of explore how they were crafting their own image as well,” Dosa said. “They seemed to understand that their public image helped them to continue to live the lives that they wanted to lead. They performed versions of themselves, not in a way that was inauthentic at all — it seemed to be almost this higher truth of who Katia and Maurice were.”Bertrand Krafft, Maurice’s older brother, now 82, maintained the footage after the couple’s deaths. “My parents didn’t know anything about photography and cinema, and Katia’s parents didn’t either,” he said, speaking by phone through an interpreter. “Somebody had to take charge to manage the assets that Maurice and Katia left behind, and I was the only person who was available to do that.”Katia Krafft said that she was mindful of the dangers of her work but that in the moment, she didn’t care at all.Image’EstThe grey gas and smoke of a pyroclastic flow, the kind that killed the Kraffts.Image’EstBertrand has granted permission for Maurice and Katia’s images to be used in other documentaries. Indeed, another feature that makes use of the Kraffts’ material, “The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft,” directed by Werner Herzog, had its premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest in Britain on June 26. But Bertrand said that the film he participated in the most over the years has been Dosa’s. “Her ideas, her approach to the project seemed excellent to me,” he said. “That’s why I did anything I could to be able to help her.”Inside the World of Werner HerzogIn his decades-long career, the filmmaker has come to seem more and more like one of the existentially inclined dreamers who populate his work.First Novel: Werner Herzog made a late-career foray into fiction with his new book, “The Twilight World.” He feels he has finally found his medium.Review: The book vividly reconstructs the personal war of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer who stayed in the Philippine jungle for years after World War II ended.In the Family: The filmmaker narrated “Last Exit: Space,” a documentary on the feasibility of off-world colonization by his son Rudolph.Interview: At the start of the pandemic, Herzog spoke of apocalyptic themes in his work, the universe’s indifference and the meaning of life.The footage included fully finished movies and working materials both edited and not, according to Mathieu Rousseau of Image’Est, the French archive that had been storing the Krafft collection of 800 reels of film and 300,000 slides. (Bertrand Krafft sold the material to a Geneva-based company, Titan Film, after the documentary was underway.)“What was complicated in the beginning, and also when we had to digitize everything to be able to allow Sara to be able to make her movie, was that we needed to figure out what Maurice had done,” Rousseau said through an interpreter during a video call. Maurice, he noted, “did the editing himself. He had his own logic.”Maurice Krafft on top of an active and hardening lava flow. “I prefer an intense and short life to a monotonous, long one,” he wrote. Image’EstDosa and her editors also had to make sense of the hundreds of hours of footage. Jocelyne Chaput, one of the editors of “Fire of Love,” said that on some reels, “I got the impression that someone had swept the cutting-room floor of Maurice’s house and then respliced it all together, and that was that reel.” Erin Casper, the other editor, said that making sure they were staying accurate — with footage that was loosely arranged geographically but not necessarily chronologically — was difficult as well.Furthermore, none of the Kraffts’ 16-millimeter footage had sound; all the audio of churning lava, for example, had to be added. The finished version of “Fire of Love” draws on a mix of Foley effects and a library of field recordings that the sound designer, Patrice LeBlanc, said had been accumulated over 30 years. Using sound wouldn’t have been alien to Katia or Maurice, Chaput and Casper suggested: Some of the Kraffts’ films used sound effects or voice-over, or would run while Maurice was lecturing over them.Ken Hon, the scientist in charge at the United States Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, knew the Kraffts beginning in the late 1980s, and remembers that filming volcanoes then was unusual.“There wasn’t a lot of footage of volcanic eruptions at that time, and certainly not stuff that was up close,” he said. “You had to be a volcanologist to film like they did because you had to be able to point the camera at the correct thing to understand the process that’s going on.” Today, such footage is much more common thanks to lighter and cheaper equipment. Maurice, he said, “would be so in love with drones right now.”When the Kraffts traveled through Hawaii, Hon recalled, he sometimes accompanied them into closed areas, like the town of Kalapana when it was overrun by lava in 1990.Filming “was just like second nature to them,” he said. “They’re setting up cameras and continuing to chat,” never pausing to say, “Stop, I have to focus, I have to concentrate.” Hon had some appreciation for the challenges the Kraffts faced: He helped his wife and fellow volcanologist, Cheryl Gansecki, make videos for about 20 years.Lava flowing at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, as seen in “Fire of Love.”Image’EstKatia and Maurice Krafft in aluminized suits at the edge of the Kilauea crater in Hawaii.Image’Est“High temperatures, it’s usually wet and there’s the acidic gas coming out of the volcanoes, right?” he said. “The combination of those things are exactly what they tell you not to immerse your electronic item into.”Steven Brantley, a volcanologist who retired after 37 years with the Geological Survey but has returned part-time, said that even when the Kraffts’ footage might make it appear that they were in harm’s way, they positioned the camera “in such a way that they could walk in front of it and live to tell the tale, over and over and over,” he said. “So in that sense I think they were very careful, even though it may not look like they were.”Hon also didn’t think of the Kraffts as incautious. “The kind of eruption that got them at Unzen, the dome-forming eruptions with collapses and small explosions and things, those are the most dangerous kinds of eruptions because they’re so unpredictable,” he said.The New York Times reported at the time that the couple and another volcanologist, Harry Glicken, who died with them, “had no chance to escape when the pyroclastic flow from the main crater, two miles away, plunged down the slope at a speed estimated at 100 to 125 m.p.h.”Brantley never worked with the Kraffts in the field but did collaborate with Maurice on a video about volcanic hazards that was nearly complete when Maurice died. Sections of it were screened in time to warn Philippine residents of the eruptions at Mount Pinatubo that occurred less than two weeks later. Brantley emphasized that educating the public about volcanoes was as much a part of the Kraffts’s legacy as their striking footage.Herzog, through a representative, said shortly before the premiere of his own Krafft film that he had not yet seen “Fire of Love” but that he hoped to “in a theater within the next weeks.”The potential confluence of two Krafft movies reminded Hon of the overlapping releases of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” in 1997. This must just be the way it is with volcano movies, he suggested. “We don’t do them at once,” he said. “We always do a pair.” More