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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

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      Film on Expulsion of Kashmir’s Hindus Is Polarizing and Popular in India

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      Called propaganda by critics and essential viewing by fans, “The Kashmir Files,” an unexpected blockbuster, has drawn the support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.SIKAR, India — A group of boys are playing cricket on a snowy field in Kashmir, a war-scarred, Muslim-majority region contested between India and Pakistan.As the boys play, they’re listening in the background to radio commentary about a professional cricket match between the archrivals India and Pakistan. When one of the boys, a Hindu named Shiva, cheers on the famed Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, he is beaten for doing so, and his abusers force him to chant, “Long live Pakistan, down with Hindustan!”This opening scene sets the tone for “The Kashmir Files,” a film that has become an unexpected blockbuster, drawing millions of moviegoers across India and the support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.The film, released in March, is largely set in the late 1980s and the early 1990s when a group of militant Islamists forcibly expelled Kashmiri Pandits, upper-caste Hindus, from the region. It has been seized on by the B.J.P. as a tool to advance its narrative of Hindu persecution in India, at a time of increasing calls for violence against India’s minority Muslims.Bharatiya Janata Party workers are encouraging members and supporters to attend, the cast and crew are doing photo ops with Mr. Modi and some states governed by the party have been offering tax breaks on ticket sales and days off from work to spur attendance.People waiting in line for a showing of “The Kashmir Files“ in Mumbai in March.Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters“Those who have not watched it must watch the movie to learn how atrocities and terror gripped Kashmir during Congress rule,” said Amit Shah, India’s home minister, referring to one of India’s major political parties and a rival of the B.J.P.From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Kashmir was in the grip of an insurgency led by militants seeking independence or union with neighboring Pakistan. About 65,000 families, mostly Pandits, left the region in the early 1990s, according to a government report.The region remained restive in the decades that followed, and in 2019, the Modi government stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its long-held semiautonomous status, splitting it into two federal territories administered by New Delhi and deploying a heavy security presence amid a clampdown on free speech.While the Indian government has insisted that its decision to take away Kashmir’s special status was intended to improve governance there, and to cut down on militancy, the region has experienced unrest and violence, sometimes deadly, since then, with the killings by both militants and security forces.The film’s critics, including opposition politicians and left-leaning intellectuals and historians, have called it “divisive” and “propaganda,” an attempt to sensationalize the killing of Kashmiri Pandits while avoiding the depiction of any violence against Muslims. In 1990, the peak year of the Pandits’ exodus, hundreds of both Hindus and Muslims were killed by militants.Critics also say the film has given the B.J.P. ammunition to widen the wedge between Hindus and Muslims.A.S. Dulat, a former head of India’s intelligence agency and the author of a book on Kashmir, said there was no doubt that Pandits were targeted by Islamist radicals. But he refused to watch the movie, finding its message unhelpful and poorly timed.“This movie is made to unnecessarily polarize the nation, and Kashmir can do without it,” he said.Many on the political right say that dismissing the film is tantamount to shooting the messenger.“This movie is special because before now, the actual cruelty suffered by Kashmiri Pandits had never been told in this unadulterated manner,” said Gaurav Tiwari, a Bharatiya Janata Party member who has arranged free tickets for moviegoers.Bharatiya Janata Party leaders pushed in March in New Delhi for a lifting of taxes on tickets to the movie.Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times, via Getty ImagesMohit Bhan, a Pandit whose ancestral home was burned during the expulsion in 1993, said many in his community saw the film as a long-overdue exploration of the period.“Now that the Pandits have come to believe that justice is hard to come by at the hands of successive governments, they think this movie is it,” said Mr. Bhan, whose party, the People’s Democratic Party, led Jammu and Kashmir in an alliance with Mr. Modi’s B.J.P. before the state was changed into a federal territory.While the response to the film has been deeply divided along political and sectarian lines, its commercial success is beyond dispute: Despite having no song-and-dance numbers — a staple feature of Bollywood movies — “The Kashmir Files” was an instant hit, grossing more than $40 million so far, making it one of the top earners this year. It cost about $2 million to make. Sandeep Yadav, a businessman in his early 30s, was waiting to watch the movie on a recent Sunday at a mall in Sikar, a quiet farm town in the Indian state of Rajasthan.Mr. Yadav said that he had previously learned about what happened to the Pandits on television, and that he rarely went to the movies, relying instead on his cellphone for a daily dose of entertainment.But this movie was a special occasion, he said before the screening at a theater which had completely sold out for “The Kashmir Files” in the first few weeks of its release.“I had heard that Pandits were driven out from their homes in the middle of the night,” he said. “I was curious about the topic and wanted to watch this movie, especially for that.”Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, the director, said he made “The Kashmir Files” after taking close to 700 video testimonies from people who had directly suffered during that period. He declined to say how many of those were Hindus or Muslims.Vivek Agnihotri, director of “The Kashmir Files,” at a news conference in New Delhi, in May.Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times, via Getty ImagesIn an interview, Mr. Agnihotri said his goal with the film was to expose what he called the “genocide” inflicted on Pandits and his contention that leftist-leaning academics, intellectuals and writers were complicit in covering up that history.“All I am saying is acknowledge that genocide happened so that nobody repeats it against Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists or Christians,” he said.In both a 2018 book and in interviews, Mr. Agnihotri has railed against left-wing student activists and intellectuals for supporting the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in India, calling these so-called urban Naxalites “worse than terrorists.” He has also voiced his support for Yogi Adityanath, the firebrand Hindu monk who recently won re-election as the chief minister of India’s most populous state.Some of Bollywood’s elite have praised the film. Ram Gopal Varma, a director and producer, posted on Twitter that it “will inspire a new breed of revolutionary film makers.”But some of the film’s critics have disparaged the movie for having more violence than nuance.In one scene, an aging teacher, played by the acclaimed Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, is forced to leave his home with his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren after his Muslim student-turned-militant shoots his son. His daughter-in-law is forced to eat rice mixed with her husband’s blood and then, in a later scene, she is sawed to death by militants.In Sikar, the moviegoers sat stunned by the movie’s final scene, which critics say essentially ensures that audiences exit enraged.In it, terrorists storm a Pandit refugee camp camouflaged in Indian Army uniforms, then line up refugees and shoot them dead at point-blank range.In the theater, Mr. Yadav moved to the edge of his seat as bodies slumped over onscreen. He winced when the last refugee, the young boy, Shiva, is fatally shot.“This movie makes me so very angry,” he said after the screening. “This is what will stay with me,” he added, “the pain of the Hindu Pandits and the gruesomeness of the Muslim terrorists.”Critics of the blockbuster denounced it in New Delhi after its opening.Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times, via Getty ImagesWhile the movie has been widely seen across India, it hasn’t been screened in the Kashmir Valley, where theaters have been shuttered since the 1990s, so Kashmiris haven’t been able to assess it themselves. Just this month it was added to a streaming service that will enable some Kashmiris to view it.Mohammad Ayub Chapri, a taxi driver in Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city, said that while he had not been able to see the film, he had gathered through social media that it cast his community in a negative light.“It makes me sad to know this,” Mr. Chapri said. “We Muslims have shared meals with the Pandits, eating from the same plate. Even Muslims were killed by the radicals, but the movie seems to paint all Muslims here with the same brush.” More

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      Cannes 2022: ‘Elvis’ Iss Remixed by Baz Luhrmann

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      The super-splashy biopic presents the story of the King as told by a (fake) colonel, a narratively curious choice.CANNES, France — Close to the start of “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann’s hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged highlight reel of the life and times of Elvis Presley, I wondered what I was watching. I kept wondering as Luhrmann split the screen, chopped it to bits, slowed the motion, splashed the color and turned Elvis not just into a king, but also a savior, a martyr and a transformational American civil-rights figure who — through his innocence, decency, music and gyrating hips — helped heal a nation.In conventional terms, “Elvis,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, can be classed as a biographical portrait, a cradle-to-grave (more or less) story of a little boy from Tupelo, Miss., who became a pop-culture sensation and sad cautionary tale — played as an adult by the appealing, hard-working Austin Butler — despite the evil man, a.k.a. Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who groomed him. But Luhrmann — whose films include “Moulin Rouge” and “The Great Gatsby” and, um, “Australia” — doesn’t do simple or ordinary. A visual maximalist, he likes to go big and then bigger, and he likes to go super-splashy. Most filmmakers just want to get the shot; the great ones strive for perfection. Luhrmann wants to bedazzle it.The movie’s narrative axis and, strangely, its most vividly realized character is Colonel Parker, whom Hanks embodies with an enormous, obviously false belly, flamboyant jowls, a nose that juts like the prow of a ship and a baffling accent. I would have loved to have listened in on Luhrmann and Hank’s conversations about their ideas for the character; if nothing else, it might have explained what in the world they were after here. I honestly haven’t a clue, although the image of Sydney Greenstreet looming menacingly in “The Maltese Falcon” repeatedly came to mind, with a dash of “Hogan’s Heroes.”Written by Luhrmann and several others, the movie traces Elvis’s trajectory through Parker, a curious choice given that the colonel is the villain of the piece. They meet when Elvis is a young unknown and still under the protective wing of his mother and father. As soon as the colonel sees Elvis perform — or rather, witnesses the euphoric reactions of the shrieking female audiences — he realizes that this kid is a gold mine. The colonel swoops in, seduces Elvis and puts him under his exploitative sway. The rest is history, one that Luhrmann tracks from obscurity to Graceland and finally Las Vegas.Even non-Elvis-ologists should recognize the outlines of this story, as it shifts from the beautiful boy to the sensational talent and the fallen idol. That said, those who don’t know much about the ugliness of Elvis’s life may be surprised by some of the ideas Luhrmann advances, particularly when it comes to the civil rights movement. A white musician who performed and helped popularize Black music for white America, Elvis was unquestionably a critically important crossover figure. What’s discomforting is the outsized role that Luhrmann gives Elvis in America’s excruciating racial history.In the gospel of Elvis that Luhrmann preaches here, the titular performer isn’t only an admirer or interpreter (much less exploiter) of Black music. He is instead a prophetic figure of change who — because of the time he spends in the Black church, Black juke joints and Black music clubs — will be able to bridge the divide between the races or at least make white people shake, rattle and roll. As a child, Elvis feels the spirit in the pulpit and beyond; later, he becomes an instrument for change by copying Black ecstasy and pumping his slim hips at white audiences, sending them into sexualized frenzy.As Elvis ascends and the colonel schemes, Luhrmann keeps the many parts whirring, pushing the story into overdrive. The 1950s give way to the ’60s and ’70s amid songs, pricey toys, assassinations, personal tragedies and the usual rest, though I don’t remember hearing the words Vietnam War. Family members enter and exit, tears are spilled, pills popped. There are significant gaps (no Ann-Margret or Richard M. Nixon), and, outside a nice scene in which the Las Vegas Elvis arranges a large ensemble of musicians, there’s also little about how Elvis actually made music. He listens to Black music and, almost by osmosis and sheer niceness, becomes the King of Rock ’n’ RollWhile Butler pouts, smolders and sweats, he has been tasked with what seems an impossible role. Elvis’s ravishing beauty, which remained intact even as his body turned to bloat, is one hurdle, and so too was his charisma and talent. Butler’s performance gains in power as Elvis ages, particularly when he hits Las Vegas. One insurmountable problem, though, is that Luhrmann never allows a single scene or song to play out without somehow fussing with it — cutting into it, tarting it up, turning the camera this way and that, pushing in and out — a frustrating, at times maddening habit that means he’s forever drawing attention to him him him and away from Butler, even when his willing young star is doing his very hardest to burn down the house. More