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      ‘Benediction’ Review: A Poet’s Life, in Love and War

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      Terence Davies’s latest film is a biography of Siegfried Sassoon, whose writing about World War I changed British literature.Since his first feature, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” in 1988, the British writer and director Terence Davies has made a handful of films that can be described — owing to their emotional subtlety and formal precision — as poetic. Recently, he has been making films about poets, which isn’t quite the same thing.“Biopic” is a clumsy word for a prosaic genre, and screen biographies of writers are more apt to be literal than lyrical. I thought “A Quiet Passion,” Davies’s 2017 rendering of the life of Emily Dickinson, was an exception, as attentive to its subject’s inner weather as to the details of her time and place. Some of Dickinson’s admirers felt otherwise, but I still insist that the movie and Cynthia Nixon’s central performance brought the poet’s idiosyncratic, indelible genius to life.“Benediction,” which is about the British poet Siegfried Sassoon, is in some ways a more conventional affair. Sassoon, whose life stretched from the late Victorian era into the 1960s, is primarily remembered as one of the War Poets. Their experience in the trenches of World War I inspired verse that changed the diction and direction of English literature, and Davies powerfully begins the film with archival images of slaughter accompanied by Sassoon’s unsparing words, drawn from poems, prose memoirs and letters.Similar words and images recur at various points in a narrative that occasionally jumps forward in time but that mostly recounts the chronology of Sassoon’s postwar life. He is played in his 30s and 40s by Jack Lowden and as an older, unhappier man by Peter Capaldi, whose resemblance to late photographs of Sassoon is uncanny.Having already acquired some fame as a writer while the war is still going on, Sassoon circulates a scathing antiwar statement in which he refuses further service on the grounds that “the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.” Expecting a court-martial and prepared, at least in principle, to face a firing squad, he is instead called before a medical board, thanks to the intervention of a well-placed older friend named Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale). His pacifism is classified as a psychological disorder, and he is sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, where he discloses his homosexuality to a sympathetic doctor (Julian Sands) and befriends Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), a younger poet who will be killed in action a short time before the Armistice.Sassoon’s subsequent social and romantic activities occupy much of the second half of “Benediction,” which means that his writing fades into the background. The portrait of an anguished artist becomes a somewhat familiar tableau of Britain between the wars, with Bright Young Things coming and going and speaking in beautifully turned, terribly cruel phrases. (“That was perhaps a bit too acerbic,” Sassoon is told by the victim of one of his barbs. “Mordant would be a more accurate word,” Sassoon replies.) Winston Churchill is mentioned as a chap one knows. Edith Sitwell, Lady Ottoline Morrell and T.E. Lawrence all make brief appearances.Davies provides an unhurried tour of the privileged, educated gay circles that helped set the tone of the time. I realize that “gay” is a bit of an anachronism here, but many of Sassoon’s friends and lovers — including Ross, the composer and matinee idol Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) and the legendary dilettante Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch) — are conscious of belonging to a tradition that entwines sexuality with cultural attitudes and artistic pursuits. Oscar Wilde is invoked both as an idol and, because of his prosecution in the 1890s, as a cautionary figure.Sassoon and his cohort are committed to discretion, irony and the occasional strategic compromise with heterosexuality. Sassoon’s marriage to Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips, and then Gemma Jones) is affectionate and without illusions, producing a son named George (Richard Goulding), who endures the cranky conservatism of his father’s old age.Sassoon’s complaints about rock ’n’ roll and his conversion to Roman Catholicism feel more like duly noted biographical facts than expressions of character. Even the more intimate passages in “Benediction” — the affairs with Novello and Tennant, and the heartache that follows the end of each one — are more restrained than passionate. In part, this is a reflection of Sassoon’s own temperament, which he tells the doctor at Craiglockhart is marked by circumspection and detachment. But the film never quite conjures a link between the life and the work.Except for an extraordinary pair of scenes involving not Sassoon’s work, but Wilfred Owen’s. Sassoon confesses to looking down on Owen when they first met, for reasons of class as well as age, but comes to regard him as “the greater poet.” History has mostly upheld this judgment, and Davies brings it home with astonishing force.In the hospital, Owen asks Sassoon for his opinion of a poem called “Disabled,” which Sassoon pronounces brilliant after reading it silently. The audience will not hear Owen’s words until the final scene of the film, when the poem’s wrenching account of a young man maimed in battle is impressionistically depicted onscreen. Up until that moment, we’ve thought about the war, heard it rendered in poetry and caught glimpses of its brutality. And then, through the filter of Sassoon’s tormented memory, we feel it.BenedictionRated PG-13. Running time: 2 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘18½’ Review: Watergate, Through a Fog

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      This political thriller creates a fictional account of a lost Watergate tape by a White House typist.On June 20, 1972, three days after the arrests at the Watergate offices, President Richard Nixon held a meeting with his then chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. Nixon recorded his meetings, and the recording from that day became infamous when the White House informed federal judges that an 18 ½ minute tape had been erased. In the fictionalized and foggy political thriller “18 ½,” a typist in the Nixon White House, Connie (Willa Fitzgerald), discovers a rerecording of the missing tape, and she attempts to ferry the recording to a reporter, Paul (John Magaro).
      Concerned for her career, Connie insists Paul remain with her when he listens to the tape. It’s a plot contrivance that sends the characters through a heady maze of 1970s stereotypes as they pursue both a reel-to-reel record player and privacy to listen. They’re directed by a group of hippie types to a motel, where they masquerade as a couple to convince the fast-talking manager, Jack (Richard Kind), to book a room. The pair then track down a record player through their bossa nova-playing neighbors, a swinging couple who take a greater interest in Connie and Paul than the two might have hoped.The director, Dan Mirvish, makes visual references to ‘70s thrillers like “The Conversation,” which used long-distance zooms to suggest the era’s paranoia. But this isn’t quite a reverent recreation of past glories. The light seems to blur the image, leaving the film’s period appropriate wood paneling and flannel details in a haze. This cloudy cinematography, along with the taste for period kitsch, give the impression of a stoner’s memory of ‘70s cinema. The film’s referential pleasures feel insubstantial, diminished by the direct comparison to more meaningful works of the period.18½Rated PG-13 for brief violence and sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hollywood Stargirl’ Review: Starting Anew in La La Land

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      Julia Hart’s bubbly sequel picks up the story in summertime and reframes around Stargirl, a character who in the first movie was auxiliary by design.After I read Jerry Spinelli’s best-selling Y.A. book “Stargirl,” titled for a quirky free spirit who spices up life for a diffident boy, I privately logged the name as a shorthand for stock female characters conjured to make men feel alive.Julia Hart’s movie adaptation of “Stargirl” reproduced the novel’s more noxious clichés by locking us inside the male protagonist’s point of view and according Stargirl (Grace VanderWaal), a do-gooder ukulelist in suspenders, all the interiority of a decorative urn.Loyal fans may then be startled to see that Hart’s sequel, “Hollywood Stargirl” (on Disney+), takes a hard left turn into the carefree young lady’s world. The movie picks up during the summer before Stargirl’s senior year, when her costume designer mother (Judy Greer) relocates them to Los Angeles. Scarcely a day passes in the new city before the flower child meets the wholesome Evan (Elijah Richardson), an aspiring filmmaker who casts her as his co-star in a low-budget musical.“Hollywood Stargirl” could be seen as a filmmaking exercise. How do you build a story around a character who was auxiliary by design? Hart’s solutions are manifold, but her most effective one is to quash the grating altruism that drove Stargirl in the first movie. In its place is a more balanced, authentic charisma. Numerous breathy pop song performances — including one where Stargirl duets with a washed-up musician played by Uma Thurman — leave little time for emotional development, but then again, when you’re starting out as a stargirl, how much personal growth do you need?Hollywood StargirlRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘Fire Island’ Review: Oh, the Summer Nights

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      The quips are almost as hot as the sexual tension in Andrew Ahn and Joel Kim Booster’s loosely paced but endearing romantic comedy.The fairly banal title, which refers to the famously hedonistic New York gay haven, reflects the degree of originality deployed by Andrew Ahn’s “Fire Island.” This, after all, is a rom-com that deploys not one but three genre staples — a party game (here a session of Heads Up!), a karaoke outing (Britney, naturally) and a dance scene — and where every plot development feels preordained.Yet it’s also impossible to resist a movie that uses “Legally Blonde” as a verb and in which two men adorably bond over Alice Munro short stories. Noah (Joel Kim Booster, who also wrote the screenplay and has a Netflix special due June 21) and his similarly underfunded buddies have descended on the Pines for a last week of summer fun before their host (Margaret Cho) sells her house. Noah is busy playing wingman for his friend Howie (“SNL” cast member Bowen Yang), a hopeless romantic who fears he will never find a boyfriend, while himself steering clear of emotional attachments — until he develops a suspiciously intense antipathy for the uptight, taciturn lawyer Will (the fetching Conrad Ricamora, from “How to Get Away With Murder”).The movie lightly recasts Jane Austen tropes, with Noah as the reluctant anchor of friends fumbling to form attachments beyond their own cozy circle, while the social commentary is updated to barbs at Fire Island’s racial, financial and sexual stratification. The pace is slacker than it should be, but still, “Fire Island” fits neatly alongside Kristen Stewart’s lesbian Christmas movie “Happiest Season” on Hulu’s rom-com shelf.Fire IslandRated R for sexual shenanigans. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Miracle’ Review: A Spiritual Investigation

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      In this drama set in Romania, when an incident occurs with a novice from a rural convent, a detective seeks answers.The new movie “Miracle,” set in Romania, is technically a sequel, part of a planned trilogy from the writer-director Bogdan George Apetri. The first feature, “Unidentified,” also a police story, was shot simultaneously and still hasn’t opened in the United States. In a device that owes something to serialized literature and TV, and to filmmakers like Krzysztof Kieslowski, the principal characters of “Unidentified” turn up in walk-ons in “Miracle” and vice versa, and certain motifs (a ticking clock) recur.The first 45 minutes or so of “Miracle” follow Cristina Tofan (Ioana Bugarin), a novice from a rural convent, who in one of many smoothly executed long takes furtively exits the convent and hops into a cab. The driver, Albu (Valeriu Andriuta), is the brother of a nun who has arranged Cristina’s transportation to a hospital. But the return trip goes violently wrong, in another sequence that the filmmaker captures in an uninterrupted take, with particularly horrifying attention to sound.Like “Unidentified,” which broadly concerns a reprobate detective’s efforts to frame a Roma security guard, “Miracle” sometimes suggests a low-boil version of Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant.” In its second hour, an ethically flexible inspector, Marius Preda (Emanuel Parvu), investigates the incident that caps the first part and grows steadily more enraged at his impotence in securing justice.The film continually invokes tensions between secular and religious elements in Romania, and the concept of miracles turns up in a few contexts. Framed by scenes of weeping, the narrative does not entirely pull itself into a satisfying arc, but the film nevertheless unfolds with dexterity and suspense.MiracleNot rated. In Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Maika: The Girl From Another Galaxy’ Review: Boy Meets Alien

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      This children’s adventure movie from Vietnam is like “E.T.”—but sloppier and more eccentric.“Maika: The Girl from Another Galaxy,” by the Vietnamese director Ham Tran, is a children’s adventure movie about a lonely boy, Hung (Phu Truong Lai), who meets a chirpy alien (Diep Anh Chu) and promptly gets into trouble. It’s essentially “E.T.” with a sloppier, zanier touch, and it’s set in urban Vietnam as opposed to a sleepy California neighborhood.It hasn’t really got much for the adults to chew on, either. “Maika” is an aggressively kids-only affair — the farting and scream-acting make sure of this.The story goes as you’d expect: there’s a weepy prologue involving a tragically deceased parent; a best friend whisked away to another town by her parents; a fateful extraterrestrial encounter that quickly develops into a touching friendship; twitchy cronies on a mission to abduct the creature, Maika — who is no bug-eyed puppet, but (thanks to a bit of space magic) a regular-looking little girl.With its fluorescent purple computer-generated flourishes, the movie looks dated even if a number of scenes involve pointedly modern phenomenon, like a zippy drone chase and a group of kids playing with VR headsets.The coastal Vietnamese setting provides a welcome variation on the boy-meets-alien formula, as does the cultural milieu, with wealthy types living in glossy high-rises and humbler families right below them struggling to keep up with society’s technological developments. (Hung’s father owns a repair shop, but he hasn’t yet pivoted to the more lucrative business of repairing tablets and phones.)But mostly, “Maika” stands out for its moments of weird eccentricity. Bad guys get slapped by gobs of kimchi and Hung and Maika float around in a bubble, zooming past airplanes. Sure, it’s all very loud and cartoonish, but at least we’re not stuck in the suburbs.Maika: The Girl From Another GalaxyNot rated. In Vietnamese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Eiffel’ Review: Paris is for Lovers

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      Gustave Eiffel, the man behind France’s most well-known landmark, is a passionate lover first, and an engineer second in this tedious 19th century romance.“Eiffel” is as much of a history lesson as “Titanic” is — in other words, it’s basically not one. It’s more like historical fiction, with the real-life 19th century figure Gustave Eiffel, the man responsible for masterminding France’s most iconic landmark, portrayed as a passionate lover first, and an engineer second.Played by Romain Duris, Gustave contends with naysayers, striking workers and financial setbacks as he commandeers the grand effort to construct the Eiffel Tower. The director Martin Bourboulon intermittently takes us to the construction site, where men toil away, the metal monolith gets progressively taller and Gustave pores over architectural blueprints with a furrowed brow.But the main intrigue involves his romance with Adrienne (Emma Mackey), a married woman with whom he shares an emotional past. Flashbacks from both Gustave and Adrienne’s perspectives show the star-crossed lovers 20 years back, indulging their carnal desires against fireplace backdrops and Parisian sunsets before Adrienne’s disapproving parents step in. Her unexpected return as Gustave deals with various obstacles to the tower’s completion fuels his creativity and commitment.The film’s shrugging disregard for historical context would be negligible were the romance not so tedious and clichéd. The tower was originally perceived as a foolhardy venture, which provoked national debates and class tensions. But these forces are only vaguely touched upon — too bad considering that tale’s dramatic potential relative to the humdrum love story whipped up here instead. And one can’t help but wonder if “Eiffel” is merely a lame fantasy or a particularly spineless form of mythmaking, whittling down as it does one nation’s politically loaded event to the equivalent of an Eiffel Tower key chain with an inscription reading “city of love.”EiffelRated R for sex scenes, brief nudity and a suicide attempt. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Johnny Depp Jury Finds That Amber Heard Defamed Him in Op-Ed

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      The jury in Virginia found that Ms. Heard had damaged her ex-husband’s reputation with an op-ed in which she identified herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”For six weeks, the defamation case that the actor Johnny Depp filed against his ex-wife Amber Heard transfixed the nation, offering a rare instance of high-profile #MeToo charges and countercharges, including lurid accusations of physical abuse, being hashed out in the public spotlight of a courtroom.On Wednesday, the seven-person jury in Fairfax, Va., found that Mr. Depp had been defamed by Ms. Heard when she described herself in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Mr. Depp was awarded more than $10 million in damages.During the trial Mr. Depp had fiercely denied Ms. Heard’s accusations that he had subjected her to repeated physical abuse that included punching and head-butting and several instances of sexual assault. In a statement after the verdict Mr. Depp thanked the jury, saying that it “gave me my life back.”Ms. Heard, who was in the courtroom as the verdict was read, said in a statement afterward that she was disappointed “beyond words” by their finding.“I’m heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence, and sway of my ex-husband,” she said.Ms. Heard did not seem buoyed by the fact that the jury also awarded her $2 million in damages, agreeing that she had been defamed in one instance by a lawyer for Mr. Depp. A spokeswoman for Ms. Heard, Alafair Hall, said she planned to appeal.A jury found that Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard were both defamed.Craig Hudson/Associated PressSuch cases are often settled out of court, in part to avoid public scrutiny. The bitter charges and embarrassing details in this case were aired not only in open court, but also before cameras that beamed every accusation onto televisions and livestreams, where they were turned into memes and debated on social media.The 2018 op-ed that Ms. Heard wrote never mentioned Mr. Depp by name, but he argued that it clearly referred to their marriage, which began in 2015 and fell apart just over a year later, and that it was false. (Early drafts of it were prepared by the American Civil Liberties Union, where Ms. Heard was an ambassador with a focus on women’s rights and gender-based violence.)The jury agreed, and found that it contained several statements that were false, and were made with actual malice.Ms. Heard countersued, claiming that she had been defamed in 2020 when one of Mr. Depp’s lawyers at the time had dismissed her accusations as a “hoax” in statements to a British tabloid. The jury found that Mr. Depp had defamed Ms. Heard in one instance, when the lawyer accused her of damaging the couple’s penthouse and blaming it on Mr. Depp.The verdict came as a surprise to several legal observers, who noted that a judge in Britain had ruled two years ago that there was evidence that Mr. Depp had repeatedly assaulted Ms. Heard. That ruling came in a libel suit that Mr. Depp had filed after The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, called him a “wife beater” in a headline. The judge in that case had ruled that the defendants had shown that what they published was “substantially true.”Ms. Heard, 36, maintained throughout the trial that everything written in the op-ed was true.Amber Heard leaves the courthouse in Virginia after the jury’s verdict in the libel case brought by her ex-husband.Tom Brenner/ReutersThe combination of star power, sensational details and cameras in the courtroom turned the trial into an internet obsession. Memes and posts attacking Ms. Heard, some created by superfans of Mr. Depp, proliferated online. Ms. Heard testified that she had received thousands of death threats since the start of the trial and called the online mockery “agonizing.”Sometimes breaking into sobs on the stand, Ms. Heard testified about more than a dozen times that, she said, Mr. Depp was violent toward her. In a key incident in Australia in 2015, Ms. Heard said, Mr. Depp became “belligerent” after taking the drug MDMA and attacked her, grabbing her by the neck and, at one point, sexually assaulting her with an object that Ms. Heard later determined to be a bottle.“I’m looking in his eyes and I don’t see him anymore,” Ms. Heard testified. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”Mackenna White, a lawyer who counsels people as to the risks of publishing potentially contested accusations of sexual misconduct, said she worried that the online mockery of Ms. Heard would make some less likely to come forward.“The absolute destruction of Amber Heard is going to have an impact,” Ms. White said. “If you’re someone who’s worried about what could happen if you speak out, this could have the same chilling effect that we’ve been trying to reverse all these years.”Others saw the online reaction as a harbinger of what the jury would decide.“You have now millions of Americans weighing in as evidence unfolds in court — you can take that as an indication of how the case is going,” said Imran Ansari, a lawyer representing Alan Dershowitz in defamation suits involving Virginia Giuffre, who said she was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation and accused Mr. Dershowitz of being part of it, which he denies.Spectators outside the Virginia courthouse, many of them fans of Mr. Depp, reacted after the verdict was announced.Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Depp, 58, gave a vastly different account of their relationship — and of the trip to Australia — in which Ms. Heard was the aggressor. Ms. Heard, he testified, had once been a girlfriend who seemed “too good to be true,” but turned into a partner who would taunt him, call him demeaning names, punch him and throw objects at him.In Australia, he testified, she threw a handle of vodka that exploded on his hand and severed his finger. (She denies throwing the bottle at him and said she only ever hit him in self-defense or in defense of her sister.)Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More