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      ‘My Name Is Pauli Murray’ Review: Ahead of the Times

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      The pioneering legal thinker influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But this documentary by the filmmakers behind “RBG” misses the mark.“My Name Is Pauli Murray,” the plainly pedagogical documentary by the filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, hinges on the audience not knowing who Murray was: an activist, writer, attorney and priest. The easier to wow us with the onslaught of information, which rightfully situates Murray — a Black, gender nonconforming intellectual who died in 1985 — as a thinker ahead of the times.As the first African American student to receive a doctorate from Yale Law School, Murray was a civil rights trailblazer, and an early architect of the idea that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment should guarantee not just racial but gender equality. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the film’s many talking heads, explicitly cites Murray in one of her related Supreme Court opinions. Also touted is Murray’s refusal to sit at the back of the bus 15 years before Rosa Parks captured national attention by doing the same.Indeed, Murray’s story is a remarkable — and extensive — one that the filmmakers stuff into an hour and a half that feels like a dull and disorganized PowerPoint lecture.Murray was also a prolific writer who left behind troves of letters, diaries, poems and manuscripts detailing personal struggles with institutional rejection on the basis of gender or race (or often both) as well as romantic relationships with women. West and Cohen attempt to humanize their subject via these documents, but the effect feels cheesy and hollow, in no small part because of the overabundance of material. Along with audio recordings of Murray, the sound of a clacking typewriter is prominent and Murray’s cursive handwriting often floats across the screen.In “My Name is Pauli,” the filmmakers touch on more compelling themes than in their Ginsburg hagiography, “RBG,” by singling out a figure whose life and work reminds us that more complex and fluid understandings of race and gender are not strictly modern phenomena. But the result feels an awful lot like an illustrated textbook.My Name Is Pauli MurrayRated PG-13. 20th-century cruelty. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Mad Women’s Ball’ Review: A Shock Within the System

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      The French actor-director Mélanie Laurent delivers a feminist melodrama about the abuses of a Paris hospital in the 19th century.In its opening moments, “The Mad Women’s Ball” slowly focuses on the nape of a woman’s neck and the swirl of her hair pinned in a bun. It is an image that may recall Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Here it confirms that the director Mélanie Laurent’s drama — set in Paris in the late 1800s and based on a novel by Victoria Mas — will indeed touch on horrors.The daughter of a status-driven father, Eugénie (Lou de Laâge) appears haunted by spirits. Talking with her grandmother or readying for bed, she’ll begin rapidly breathing, trembling, staring at something that no one else sees. She also tends to speak her mind. To the heartbreak of her loving brother (Benjamin Voisin), Eugénie is committed by her father to the asylum where a diagnosis of hysteria has become all the rage. The soiree of the title was an actual event thrown at the Salpêtrière hospital during the tenure of the famed neurologist, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot.Depicted here, the gathering is as grotesque as one might fear. It is also a high point in the patients’ comradeship. Eugénie becomes a catalyst, nudging the head nurse, Geneviève (portrayed by Laurent), toward doubts about the ethics of her beloved institution.Laurent has made an elegant if overheated melodrama that amplifies the villainy of Charcot and his colleagues (one proves particularly appalling) to underscore how male-centered the medical establishment was — and is. A feminist work, “The Mad Women’s Ball” grapples, too, with the ways women can be complicit. Emmanuelle Bercot does chilly work as Jeanne, the nurse Charcot calls on to manage Eugénie’s solitary confinement. Move over, Nurse Ratched.The Mad Women’s BallNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      ‘The Nowhere Inn’ Review: Personalities, Disordered

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      This meta exercise, starring and written by St. Vincent and Carrie Brownstein, proves its point by not having a point.A hall of mirrors reflecting not terribly much, “The Nowhere Inn,” directed by Bill Benz, is an in-joke perpetrated by the singer Annie Clark, who performs as St. Vincent, and her friend and fellow musician Carrie Brownstein. The pair wrote it together and star as versions of themselves.After a prologue in which Clark’s limo driver obnoxiously professes ignorance of who Clark is (“Don’t worry, we’ll find out who you are,” he promises), the bulk of “The Nowhere Inn” unfolds as a drama about the making of a documentary, apparently never completed.Brownstein is directing a backstage portrait with the aim of depicting Clark as she really is. But Brownstein isn’t a seasoned documentarian (she does an internet search for “best documentaries”), and Clark’s offstage remarks (“I don’t even like to dress a salad, you know? I’m like, I want to taste the vegetables”) are completely uninteresting.Brownstein encourages Clark to “heighten” her camera presence, which causes Clark to bring on a girlfriend (Dakota Johnson, likewise playing herself or “herself”). When Clark becomes increasingly mean, and her efforts to control the documentary more assertive, Brownstein strives to make her relatable again.Formally lively, “The Nowhere Inn” is a true meta exercise in the sense that the more derivative and self-conscious its conceptual gambits seem (stick around: The reflexivity continues after the end credits), the more it proves its ostensible point: that Clark, or her constructed persona, is less intriguing than her music and how she performs it. Fittingly, the movie most comes to life when she’s shown singing.The Nowhere InnNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 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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      ‘Prisoners of the Ghostland’ Review: Going Nuclear

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      If the combination of Nicolas Cage and the director Sion Sono suggests a special kind of lunacy, this sunbaked samurai western more than delivers.With hindsight, we should have known that a collaboration between Nicolas Cage and the dashingly eccentric Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono was only a matter of time. Yet now that “Prisoners of the Ghostland” is here, it seems equally apparent that doubling the weirdness can, for the audience, produce ten times the head-scratching.The partnership should have been sublime. And maybe if Sono had written the script himself (as he often does, perhaps most movingly in his 2011 treatise on upskirt photography, “Love Exposure”), this sunbaked samurai western might have made a lick of sense. As it is, Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai’s story is so busily demented that Cage seems at times uncharacteristically muffled. To play Hero, a reprobate tasked by a white-suited warlord (Bill Moseley) to retrieve the warlord’s missing granddaughter (a persuasive Sofia Boutella), Cage spends most of the movie in a leather suit studded with strategically placed explosives. Should Hero harbor impure thoughts toward his quarry, his gonads will be goners.Crammed with mugging extras and chanting geishas, scrabbling mutants and ambulant mannequins, “Prisoners” can slide in an instant from haunting (a disfiguring mask slowly peeling from a woman’s face) to circuslike. Sono’s visuals, sizzlingly realized by the cinematographer Sohei Tanikawa, lack neither brio nor imagination. But the ludicrousness of the plot severs any emotional connection to a story whose apocalyptic stylings (the Ghostland of the title is a nuclear wasteland) gesture toward Japan and America’s painful history. In light of which, Hero’s eventual sacrifice of a single testicle seems an entirely negligible forfeit.Prisoners of the GhostlandNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 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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      ‘Los Últimos Frikis’ Review: Keep On Rocking in Cuba

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      The hook of this documentary is the spectacle of a revolutionary government that can’t abide the rebellion of rock without bureaucratic oversight.In the 1990s Diony Arce, lead singer of the Cuban heavy metal group Zeus, was jailed for six years. That act of repression raises the stakes in Nicholas Brennan’s scrappy film “Los Últimos Frikis” and makes it more than your average documentary about middle-aged rockers attempting a comeback.Treated differently, the movie could be straight-faced satire. Zeus formed in the 1980s when rockers like Arce were persecuted as dissenters supporting a capitalist musical form, but today the Cuban Ministry of Culture has an Agency of Rock that keeps bands on the payroll and tours them around the island. Brennan joins Arce and his bandmates as they thrash to small moshing crowds across the nation (assuming the stage setup isn’t in shambles when they arrive) and rage against the hegemony of corporate reggaeton.Home sequences with the five band members’ families indulge my soft spot for seeing loved ones doting on their pet rockers. Most of these “frikis” (freaks) seem well-adjusted, taking on other work to pay the bills. But the film’s enduring hook is the spectacle of a self-proclaimed revolutionary government that can’t abide the rebellion of rock without bureaucratic oversight.Produced over several years, Brennan’s movie required some fancy footwork to complete as the relationship between the United States and Cuba continued to evolve. There’s definitely pathos to a heavy metal band that once spoke truth to power and now lacks a major influx of younger fans. But there’s also a punchline here: At the end we learn that Arce has been appointed director of the Agency of Rock.Los Últimos FrikisNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. Watch on Topic. More

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      ‘Cry Macho’ Review: The Good, the Bad and the Poultry

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      In his latest film, Clint Eastwood drives across Mexico with a troubled young man and a combative rooster.Mike Milo is a former rodeo rider and horse trainer — an ornery old cuss with a complicated past and a soft spot for children and animals. He’s a grouch but also a professional, with a deep knowledge of his craft and a flinty sense of honor. To put it in simpler terms, he’s played by Clint Eastwood.Eastwood also directed “Cry Macho,” in a stripped-down, laid-back style that perfectly suits Mike’s approach to life. Sometimes in Eastwood’s films — going all the way back to “Play Misty for Me” — there’s daylight separating filmmaker and star, a palpable, if often subtle difference of perspective between the laconic, narrow-eyed man onscreen and the sly, adventurous artist behind the camera. This time, maybe not so much. Which is just fine.Mike has a risky job to do but, but he approaches his duties with no particular urgency, preferring to drive slowly and take in the scenery. Eastwood, notionally committed to doing something in the angry-dad revenge-rescue genre, uses the plot (supplied by Nick Schenk and N. Richard Nash’s script, based on a novel by Nash) as an excuse for a leisurely excursion through a picturesque landscape. Mike is on a mission, yes, racing the clock and pursued by dangerous hombres on both sides of the law. But that doesn’t prevent him from rolling into a quiet Mexican hamlet and remarking to his companions: “This looks like an interesting town. Let’s check it out.”Those companions are a 13-year-old boy named Rafo (Eduardo Minett), and Rafo’s prized fighting rooster, Macho, a noble bird who gives the film its title and its theme. Rafo, abandoned by his Texan father and abused by his Mexican mother, is attached both to Macho and to an ideal of tough, strutting masculinity. One of Mike’s tasks is to offer, by precept and example, an alternative way of being a man. Nothing too soft, mind you — this is still Clint Eastwood we’re talking about — but a more patient, less furious approach to life.“This macho thing is overrated,” Mike says. “You think you have all the answers, but then you get older and realize you don’t have any. By the time you figure it out, it’s too late.” What that amounts to is a benign form of fatalism, a humility that the rest of the movie upholds. The button-pushing and liberal-baiting that flared in “The Mule” and “Richard Jewell” aren’t much in evidence here, and the canonical Eastwood persona — the avenger of innocence who dwells in legal and moral gray zones — is in a state of semiretirement. There is evil in the universe, but it might not be entirely his problem.The opening scenes suggest otherwise. Rafo’s father, Howard (Dwight Yoakam), a big shot Texas rancher and Mike’s former boss, dispatches Mike to Mexico to collect the boy. Though Mike doesn’t much like Howard, he feels a sense of obligation, since Howard helped him get back on his feet after a series of personal tragedies.Once across the Rio Grande, Mike finds Howard’s “nutcase” ex-wife in her bedroom, and their son at a cockfighting ring. It’s 1980, by the way. The existence of GPS, cellphones and heavy security on the United States-Mexican border would spoil the atmosphere. Mike, Rafo and Macho light out in a series of Detroit junkers — mostly stolen, though nobody seems to mind — pursued by mom’s nasty boyfriend and the occasional federales.Now and then, Mike calls Howard from a pay phone. The whole project turns out to be more complicated than it seemed at first. “Don’t trust anyone” is Rafo’s mantra. That may be too sweeping, but “don’t trust anyone played by Dwight Yoakam” is a pretty good rule of thumb. As the old man, the boy and the chicken make their way down the highway, you can anticipate the turns the story will take.But not quite. The twists arrive, but not with the impact you might expect. What started as a thriller takes a long detour into the pastoral, as car trouble strands our travelers in a quiet village with a sweet cantina run by a widow named Marta (Natalia Traven). She and Mike get up to some heavy “Bridges of Madison County”-style flirting, while Rafo spends time with one of her granddaughters. There are some wild horses that need breaking, and other animals to look at, and whatever else needs to be dealt with can just wait awhile.Maybe this will make you restless. Maybe you want car chases, gunfights, quotable catchphrases and somber meditations on violence, justice and the American West. If so, there is a whole Clint Eastwood filmography to peruse. This one is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say, with a pleasing score (by Mark Mancina) and some lovely desert scenery (shot by Ben Davis). If the old man’s driving, my advice is to get in and enjoy the ride.Cry MachoRated PG-13. Rough language and behavior. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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      ‘Wife of a Spy’ Review: Trust or Fear in Love and War?

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      In this latest work by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a Japanese couple’s relationship is shaped by the forces of churning nationalism that surround it.There are a lot of commonplace story elements in “Wife of a Spy.” Childhood friends divided by the beating of war drums. A glib, secretive husband and a distrustful wife. And so on. Combined with its period setting — the movie begins in 1940, at a silk inspection center in Kobe where a British fellow is picked up for questioning — viewers might therefore expect a fairly conventional dramatic thriller.But the director and co-writer here is Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose approaches to story and genre are always unusual. Soon into its machinations, “Wife of a Spy” begins to thrum with unusual intensity.The husband, Yusaku (Issey Takahashi), who is in the import-export business and had dealings with the Briton, gets a visit from the military as a result. As it happens, the officer, Taiji (Masahiro Higashide), was a childhood friend of both Yusaku and his wife. While Taiji is initially friendly, at a time when Japanese nationalism is swelling, he is also suspicious and disapproving, telling his old friend that he’s too familiar with Westerners, and is rather suspiciously westernized himself.Yusaku is a camera buff, and soon we see him filming a 16-millimeter amateur movie. It’s a heist picture, in poetic noir style, starring his wife, Satoko (Yu Aoi), and his nephew and employee Fumio (Ryota Bando). But his enthusiasm for shooting isn’t purely aesthetic.On a business trip to Manchuria, Yusaku and Fumio surreptitiously film the pages of a notebook filled with details of atrocities committed there, mostly on captive Chinese subjects, by the Imperial Japanese Army: experiments on human subjects, vivisection and more.Satoko learns, piecemeal, of her husband’s activities on the trip. At this point Kurosawa’s movie starts nodding to Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” albeit understatedly. Adding to her anxiety is her knowledge that a woman came back from Manchuria with Yusaku and Fumio and that she later turned up dead in the harbor.Initially Satoko believes her husband to be a traitor. But once she understands his heart and his aims, she assists him, and they begin living as a truly committed couple for the first time.While Kurosawa’s last film, “To the Ends of the Earth,” was a slow-brewing journey to a young woman’s epiphany, “Wife of a Spy” is something like linear narrative perfection, with every scene perfectly calibrated. As the couple’s best-laid plans hit increasingly hair-raising and heart-sinking setbacks, the movie’s denunciation of war, and its implicit condemnation of contemporary Japan’s blind-eye attitude toward its wartime crimes, becomes more bracing. And the movie’s finale is a masterful evocation of catastrophe that has a low-key echo of Kurosawa’s 2001 horror masterpiece “Pulse.”Wife of a SpyNot rated. In Japanese and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Blue Bayou’ Review: No Direction Home

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      Justin Chon’s immigration melodrama counters its soggy storytelling with deeply felt performances.“Blue Bayou” opens on a close-up of Antonio LeBlanc (played by the writer and director, Justin Chon) interviewing for a job. Born in South Korea and raised from a child by adoptive parents in Louisiana, Antonio needs to supplement his income as a tattoo artist to support his wife (Alicia Vikander), his stepdaughter, Jessie (Sydney Kowalske), and an imminent new baby. It is immediately clear, though, that the unseen interviewer is less concerned with Antonio’s felony convictions than his origins.In its unsubtle way, “Blue Bayou” strives to draw attention to the precarious limbo inhabited by foreign-born adoptees whose citizenship was never finalized. When an innocent argument in a supermarket lands Antonio on the wrong side of two police officers — one of whom (Mark O’Brien) is Jessie’s biological father and the other (Emory Cohen) no more than a bundle of boorish clichés — the incident heralds a series of escalating threats to a life that’s already far from secure.These give the film a slow, sad drip of inevitability that’s lightened by the warmth and naturalism of Chon’s performance. Beautifully relaxed family scenes help us forgive the ponderous direction, as does a wonderfully low-key Linh-Dan Pham as an ailing Vietnamese American who befriends Antonio and tugs at his Asian identity. In these moments, we see a man with one foot on land and the other on water, his memory haunted by the image of his birth mother and a far-off lagoon. And as the faces and fates of real-life adoptees scroll past in a moving coda, Chon forces us to acknowledge how easily those who believe themselves settled can become in an instant displaced and dispossessed.Blue BayouRated R for racist language and violent law enforcement. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters. More