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      ‘The Tsugua Diaries’ Review: Finding Togetherness in a Pandemic

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      This film possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical prowess of a veteran’s opus.The Tsugua in “The Tsugua Diaries” is the month of August spelled backward. And for good reason: The co-directors Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes tell the film’s story in reverse chronological order starting on Day 21. But instead of presenting a stream of reverse motion shots — think Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” or Lee Chang Dong’s “Peppermint Candy”— the filmmakers let the days themselves unfold chronologically. Shot on 16-millimeter, the movie plays like a series of stand-alone shorts, all buttressed by splashes of light and sharp editing choices. The result: a work that possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical vibrancy of a veteran’s opus.Set on a farm in an unnamed Portuguese seaside town, the movie plods at first as we watch the trio of friends — Crista (Crista Alfaiate), Carloto (Carloto Cotta) and João (João Nunes Monteiro) build a butterfly house. It’s not until the fourth wall is broken, a third of the way in, does the film find its wings.But “The Tsugua Diaries” doesn’t just break the fourth wall, it demolishes it. The film expands to become a story that includes the crew, producers, screenwriters, directors and even the cooks.Shot well into the coronavirus pandemic that has shaken up what is normal, Fazendeiro and Gomes, a couple directing together for the first time, are not interested in pretending nothing has changed, even when it comes to maintaining proverbial movie magic. Rather, the aim here is that the entire filmmaking team functions as one cinematic organism where individual instincts add up to a truly collective work. And remarkably, it succeeds, demonstrating how to transmute the constraints of pandemic-era moviemaking into a film with humor and, during a time marred by isolation, a sense of real togetherness.The Tsugua DiariesNot rated. In Portuguese and Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Zero Contact’ Review: A Token of the Times

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      Rick Dugdale’s thriller, shot over Zoom early in the pandemic, stars Anthony Hopkins as an eccentric tech genius. It was previously released as an NFT.It seems that innovation is everything to the director Rick Dugdale. In May 2020, while many people were still learning to bake sourdough, Dugdale began to shoot the techno-thriller “Zero Contact” over Zoom. Last year, the director released the movie, a modestly amusing flick, as a nonfungible token, or NFT. “Zero Contact” stars Anthony Hopkins as Finley Hart, an enigmatic engineer and genius whose death is reported in the opening credits. Hart leaves behind hours of recorded video logs filled with twisty, seemingly half-improvised monologues, which give the impression that his tongue can’t keep up with his brain.While Hart was alive, he spent decades developing teleportation technology. Bad things will happen if the machine he left behind implodes. The conceit is to make this familiar ticking-time-bomb plot take place on computer screens. An unseen spy watches Hart’s estranged son (Chris Brochu) and feisty former employees panic during an emergency virtual meeting, and taps into their cellphone and security cameras. Every few seconds, the image glitches, apparently for added realism.Hopkins’s character is a routine riff on the aloof tycoon. “I lost touch with my humanity,” he quips, “boohoo.”There’s a vicarious pleasure to be found in watching Hopkins, the octogenarian actor, getting the hang of technology that allows him to film himself without the usual hovering crew. Indeed, the behind-the-scenes footage that plays over the movie’s end credits is as engaging as its plot. “Who’s that on the left?” Hopkins asks, pointing at a corner of his video-call frame. Told that it’s the screenwriter Cam Cannon, Hopkins beams. “Hey, I’m sorry,” he says, “I hope I didn’t take too much liberty with your writing!”Zero ContactRated R for a grisly moment of violence. Running time: 1 hour 37 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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      ‘Look at Me: XXXTentacion’ Review: A Life Cut Short

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      A documentary about a rap sensation who was a troubled and incendiary figure.About a half-hour into this documentary, Cleopatra Bernard, the mother of the rapper XXXTentacion, lists the occasions on which her son got a beating from his father. They are numerous. “But,” Bernard concludes, the father “wasn’t abusive.”Such moments make watching “Look at Me: XXXTentacion” — directed by Sabaah Folayan and executive-produced by Bernard — both fascinating and exasperating.XXXTentacion, born Jahseh Onfroy, was a Florida rapper whose brief life and career were ended in a 2018 shooting. Before that, his emotive music, incendiary persona and criminal notoriety earned him a fan base of America’s most disaffected children — and multiplatinum record sales.He learned he had bipolar disorder in his early adolescence, and he was making rap recordings before he turned 15. One such track in the film sounds like a cry for help that went unanswered.A frenetic and sometimes proudly violent person whose brutal beatings of his girlfriend Geneva Ayala are here chronicled in harrowing detail, XXXTentacion used one of his mug shots as the cover for his breakthrough single “Look at Me.”The film features home video footage of a celebration of his release from jail, at which he accepts platitudes offered by family and management (“do the right thing,” “one day at a time”). After which he flat-out lies about his abusive actions. “She was bruised already,” he says of Ayala.The musician’s life — and those of many around him — became a terrifying and toxic mix of street culture, mental illness and social media. Speaking of the world outside his circle, Bass Santana, a member of XXXTentacion’s crew, observes, “All these people want to see is us destroy each other.” He seems not wholly cognizant of the larger truth of what he’s saying, and that’s heartbreaking.Look at Me: XXXTentacionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Fanny: The Right to Rock’ Review: Still Kicking

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      Started by two Filipino American sisters in California, the influential band is claiming its rightful rank in rock ’n’ roll history.Jean and June Millington, Filipino American sisters and lifelong bandmates best known for their 1970s rock band Fanny, have over 50 years of history in the music industry to reflect on in the documentary “Fanny: The Right To Rock.”When Fanny was signed to a recording contract in 1970, there was no one in rock music quite like them. Though the group’s lineup has had several iterations, all its members have been women, and two — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians. Their musical chops earned them gigs at venues like Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, where they won the respect of musicians like David Bowie, Bonnie Raitt, Alice Bag and Cherie Currie of the Runaways.The group disbanded in 1975, but three original members — the sisters June and Jean (Millington) Adamian, and Brie Darling — reunited for an album, “Fanny Walked the Earth,” released in 2018. The thought of the group’s struggles brings a smile to Jean’s face in the movie. “We dealt with the prejudice against girls and feminism, and June says, now we’re bucking ageism!”The director Bobbi Jo Hart decided to show the group’s story through a combination of archival footage and present-day interviews with band members and their famous fans. The film’s most novel sequences come when Hart joins the band for recording sessions for their 2018 album, and finds that even if the voices warble a bit more than they did in the screaming days of youth, Fanny’s sound remains heavy. But the conventional vérité footage doesn’t add new depth to the guitar licks and improvisations, the signals of musicianship that make Fanny feel artistically vital as white-haired rockers. What the movie showcases best from its subjects, then, is the humor and ease of women who have survived a lifetime of setbacks and strife. Fanny has already proven itself — what’s left is for us to enjoy its growing catalog.Fanny: The Right to RockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Review: ‘There Are No Saints.’ Neither Are There New Plots.

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      A B-movie that took a decade to get to the screen follows a well-worn trail of cross-border revenge.“There Are No Saints” is an odd case. Directed by Alfonso Pineda Ulloa, from a screenplay by Paul Schrader, the movie entered preproduction in the fall of 2012, under the title “The Jesuit” and finished shooting the following year. It’s been gathering dust on a studio shelf ever since. The delay has lent the project an air of mystery amplified by the involvement of Schrader, who has been enjoying one of the most fertile periods of his career.Nearly a decade later, the final product is here, and it is neither a colossal train wreck nor a misunderstood masterpiece. Rather it’s a bland, unoriginal action thriller about an entirely predictable quest for revenge. When a local drug kingpin, Vincent (Neal McDonough), kidnaps the son of a reformed hitman known as the Jesuit (José María Yazpik), the father must steal across the border into Mexico in pursuit. On the way he lays gruesome waste to hordes of gun-toting cartel heavies in various neon-lit bars and strip clubs.It can be difficult to take genre movies that are this clichéd seriously, and doubly so when they insist on regurgitating tropes in a humorless register. The director, Ulloa, tries to mask the derivative story by embellishing the violence, cutting to closeups of flesh wounds and bullet holes as a distraction from the routine plot and hardboiled dialogue — he seems to be aiming for stark and gritty, but his tough-talking assassins, crime lords and arms dealers bring the whole thing closer to unintentional camp.But I more often found myself thinking of “Detective Crashmore,” the uproarious action-film spoof on Tim Robinson’s “I Think You Should Leave.” Winkingly described as “a cosmic gumbo” that combines “the action of the 90s … with the exploitation films of the 70s, but with modern touches,” it’s a dead-on (if completely accidental) imitation of “There Are No Saints.” But frankly, “Crashmore” was a lot more fun.There Are No SaintsRated R for language, sexuality and extreme graphic violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘A Taste of Whale’ Review: Blood in the Water

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      This documentary offers a refreshingly multidimensional take on the practice of whale hunting in the Faroe Islands.The documentary filmmaker Vincent Kelner’s latest project “A Taste of Whale” opens in darkness, broken by the sounds of loud splashes, men yelling and the high-pitched clicks and whistles of an aquatic mammal in distress. A prodding quote attributed to Paul McCartney appears onscreen: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”Provocative as it may be at first glance, “A Taste of Whale,” in theaters and on demand, offers a refreshingly multidimensional take on the controversy around whale hunting in the Faroe Islands, a tradition that dates back to the 9th century. Central to it is the hunting season that is referred to as the grind, in which large pods of pilot whales are herded into shallow bays by Faroese whalers and slaughtered en masse for food. (Any meat not eaten immediately by the islanders is preserved through salt-curing.) While pilot whales are not considered to be a threatened species, the hunts have drawn international criticism from animal welfare groups such as the Sea Shepherd, who liken the grind to murder and argue that the practice is unnecessarily cruel.Kelner clearly harbors his own reservations about the hunt, or at least its optics; if there’s any explicit messaging to be found here, it’s that the Faroese killing of whales is no more gruesome than what one may find by peeking inside any slaughterhouse around the world. Indeed, the Faroese villagers interviewed for the film say just as much. Kelner highlights the locals fishing in the bay and dispatching shorebirds with their bare hands, showcasing a desire to play a direct role in where their meat comes from rather than leave it up to an opaque global food system. Yet he’s equally sympathetic to the Sea Shepherd leaders who argue that meat shouldn’t be eaten at all, and not just out of compassion for the animals. By the third act, Kelner throws a whole new wrench into the debate with the appearance of a local environmentalist, who explains how there are more sinister things polluting the Faroese waters than whale’s blood.A Taste of WhaleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Playlist’ Review: A Broken Record of Trials

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      In this brisk comedy set in Paris, an aspiring cartoonist stumbles through a series of romantic, professional and medical misadventures.Taking cues from shambolic big-city indies like “Frances Ha,” “Playlist,” the debut feature by the French graphic novelist and illustrator Nine Antico, is a brisk comedy about a chaotic woman in her late twenties who can’t seem to catch a break.Oddly enough, it is the second French import of 2022 to capture the love lives of young Parisians using a monochrome palette. Jacques Audiard’s tripartite romance, “Paris, 13th District” was released in April, and it, too, draws from the world of animation — the film was based on stories by the cartoonist Adrian Tomine.“Playlist,” instead, takes a mocking look at France’s comic book industry. Sophie (a charismatic Sara Forestier) is a wannabe cartoonist who lands a secretarial gig at an elite publishing firm run by self-proclaimed jerk Jean-Luc (Grégoire Colin). It’s better than her job as a waitress — no more dealing with the flaky cook, her sometimes-boyfriend — but the opportunity doesn’t exactly put her art on the map.With each new man Sophie encounters, a scribbled text appears with his name. It’s an annoyingly quirky indicator of the connection between her lovelorn fixations and her creative processes.A music lover (the corny-yearning soundtrack is heavy on American folk musician Daniel Johnston), Sophie also deals with an abortion, a bed bug infestation, an intimidating roommate and a hematoma that stops a hookup dead in its tracks.The film’s adrift-and-artsy-girl hangups don’t make for a terribly original premise, but the script by Antico (with the collaboration of Marc Syrigas) is peppered with amusing zingers and absurd, yet relatable situations. (“I take my pasta seriously,” exclaims Jean-Luc when Sophie procures the wrong brand of Parmesan.) There are no particularly moving insights, and it falls short of a proper character study, but “Playlist” does intrigue with its droll individual parts — if not the sum of them.PlaylistNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dinner in America’ Review: A Punk-Rock Love Story

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      A rage-fueled rock singer on the run from the police meets and falls in love with a gullible young woman eager to escape her circumstances.Rage is at the center of “Dinner in America,” a film by Adam Rehmeier in which the central characters are at odds with the police, bank tellers, their parents, two-timing bosses and bullying jocks. Fleeing from the cops, Simon (Kyle Gallner) is a punk rocker who leads with anger and violence. Patty (Emily Skeggs) is a naïve 20-year-old eager to break out of her mundane existence, using rock music as an escape. They help each other find their way in a community where both are outcasts.The fault lines in their relationships with their families and those around them are most apparent at the family dinners they attend, where they clash with strait-laced siblings and parents — like Patty’s father, who can’t handle the spiciness of cumin. The film is an ode to the punk-rock scene of the 1990s Midwest, a space where Simon and Patty both find relief from the dullness of the world around them.“Dinner in America” delivers on surprise and explosiveness, but much of its offensive language, both racist and homophobic, feels gratuitous in a film that might have otherwise landed as an offbeat love story. There is, perhaps, an argument to be made for representing a time and place truthfully, but because the film does not critically engage with the uglier elements of the society it portrays, these become a distraction. And a viewer might find it difficult to get sucked into the love and music story at its center.Dinner in AmericaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More