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    ‘In Front of Your Face’ Review: Clumsy Interactions, Pensive Revelations

    This film is a minor addition to the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s continuing investigation of human embarrassment.It often seems as though the most devoted fans of the prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo regard him as incapable of making an inessential work. Because his films play with theme and variation, the logic goes, they are best viewed in tandem, as installments in a continually refined investigation of the clumsy, painful, droll ways that people, often booze-slicked, interact. A current series of Hong’s features at Film at Lincoln Center presents most of the titles on double bills.But if Hong is consistent in his material and his style, down to his signature zooms, his features are uneven in quality. For every “Hotel by the River” (2019), he makes a quickie that seems to have leaped straight from inspiration to screen. With its limited settings and characters, noodled synthesizer score (composed by Hong himself) and long takes that court cringe comedy but also look like they were simply practical, “In Front of Your Face,” one of two Hong movies from last year’s New York Film Festival, falls into the minor camp.Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung) is a former actress visiting South Korea from her home in the United States. Her sister, Jeongok (Cho Yunhee), remarks that there’s a lot they don’t know about each other anymore. Sangok has a meeting with Jaewon (Kwon Haehyo), a Hong-like filmmaker — she compares his movies to short stories — who wants to cast her.A stain on an outfit from an impulsive meal, a changed meeting spot and the absence of food at the new location pose obstacles before Sangok confides in Jaewon, in a revelation that contains the film’s point. The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.In Front of Your FaceNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Wayne Wang Still Isn’t Satisfied

    On the 40th anniversary of his breakthrough drama, “Chan Is Missing,” the auteur says a new generation of Asian American filmmakers must make more challenging work.Sitting in a booth in a dive bar in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the same one where he shot scenes for his 1985 gem, “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart,” Wayne Wang was still frustrated. We had spoken five years earlier, when he expressed dismay at how little had changed in Hollywood and the indie scene since the 1982 release of “Chan Is Missing,” his seminal neo-noir that was the first Asian American film in modern cinema to gain widespread distribution.Now, things are a little different — for Wang’s own legacy, for a new generation of Asian American filmmakers, for the state of movies. And yet, the elder auteur, whose journey since that breakthrough took him across art-house avenues into Hollywood studios and back out, is still unsatisfied. When it comes to Asian American directors, “none of the filmmakers have really dug in to say these are our own stories and these stories are on one level universal, another level, very specific to our culture,” he said.On the 40th anniversary of “Chan Is Missing,” Wang, sharply dressed and sprightly at 73, is experiencing a belated moment of wider recognition. He’s celebrating two retrospectives, in Berkeley and Los Angeles, a restored director’s cut of his audaciously experimental “Life Is Cheap … But Toilet Paper Is Expensive” (1989), and the Criterion Collection releases of “Chan” and “Dim Sum.”One would be hard-pressed to find any filmmaker who not only daringly chronicled Chinese life in a time when it was unthinkable in American cinema, but also parlayed all that into one of the more eclectic careers in Hollywood, that includes two entries (“Chan” and “The Joy Luck Club”) on the National Film Registry. There are the Hong Kong films (“Chinese Box”) and the New York films (“Smoke”); the near career-ending erotic picture (“The Center of the World”); the pure Hollywood period (“Maid in Manhattan”); and the return to his culturally specific indie roots (“Coming Home Again”).“It comes from the fact that I was born and brought up a mess,” Wang said, explaining the zigzagging. After immigrating to the Bay Area from Hong Kong in 1967 at 18, he was suddenly enmeshed in an America of Quaker families, counterculture figures, the Black Panthers, and urgently political-minded folks in San Francisco’s Chinatown.Wang, who is working on an adaptation of a short story by Yiyun Li and a small-screen series about a Chinese American family, spoke about his career, going to Francis Ford Coppola for advice, and working with Jennifer Lopez. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Victor Wong in “Life Is Cheap … But Toilet Paper is Expensive.” a 1989 Wang film that has been restored. Forever Profits ProductionsPeter Wang in “Chan Is Missing,” which largely used its actors’ feelings about Chinese American identity.Nancy Wong/Wayne Wang ProductionsForty years later, “Chan Is Missing” still feels timeless in how it reckons with Chinese American identity politics. Did you intend to make a film that put a stamp on Chinese American identity?I didn’t think like that. I just wanted to make an interesting, complex film. More what the Chinese and the Chinese American community is, which includes the new immigrants. It was more that than identity. Because mainstream America had no idea who we were.And yet the film is adamant about not trying to offer a neat depiction of who or what the community is. It feels unencumbered by the idea of making a political statement.Because everybody around me who was Asian or Chinese or Japanese wanted to make a film about how badly we were treated. There was always a message. That gave me a clear picture of where I didn’t want to go. I wanted to do something a little more complicated, a little more questioning rather than saying, “We were really badly treated on Angel Island” [the immigration station in California].I only had a script for the structure of the film. Most of the time, what people are saying came from themselves. I would maybe ask them, What do you think Americans really think of the Chinese? [The lead actor] Mark Hayashi always said, “Oh God, this identity [expletive] is old news, man.” I said, “Then put it in the movie!”You then made a string of films about the Chinese diaspora that eventually led to “The Joy Luck Club.” Did you want to bring your sensibilities to the mainstream?It was a pretty conscious step.It was a studio film with an all-Asian cast in 1993. Did it feel like a breakthrough at the time?Absolutely. People were calling from Hollywood, and I knew I had to grab that energy pretty quickly. And that energy wasn’t so much “Chinese American films are really going to do well for us.” But that was also when I said, between “Chan,” “Dim Sum,” “Eat a Bowl of Tea,” “Joy Luck Club,” I’ve got to do something else. Otherwise I’m going to get locked into this one box. I’d been working on a script with Paul Auster, “Smoke.” Miramax said, “What do you want to do next? We’ll just give you the money.”It’s striking that with your success, you did a small movie. You didn’t seem to be trying to climb the ladder.I wasn’t trying to climb the ladder. I just saw Francis Ford Coppola in [an interview], talk about how the thing that drove him was basically fear and not knowing what he was doing. I was kind of functioning in that same way. I wanted to get into a film that I don’t completely understand.You and Coppola were both San Francisco-based filmmakers. Were you friends?My office was in his building, and we would run into each other and have little talks. When I shot “Smoke,” I was working with Harvey Keitel and Bill Hurt. I went to him [Coppola] and asked, how do you work with actors? I hadn’t worked with big Hollywood stars, and I was freaked out by it. Francis basically said, if you find the right person, you give them something to do, and they’ll be fine.I really respect [Hurt], but he’s a nut case in some ways. Throughout the first half of the shoot, we got to be pretty good friends. Then we had three days off, and he came back and had a football helmet on. I went to put my hands on his shoulders, and he said, “What are you doing? Are you trying to push me down the stairs?” So he turned like that. And the football helmet, he said, “I need to protect myself today, you’re going to hit me.” [Laughs] But he [was] one of the greatest actors, so subtle and so sensitive to everything.What led you to eventually do a full-on studio film like “Maid in Manhattan”?“Center of the World” got such bad reviews and everybody hated what I did that I couldn’t get a meeting in Hollywood. One bad film, especially an edgy sex film, you get written off. And the producers of “Maid in Manhattan” came calling. It was probably the most difficult thing I ever did. First day, the executives said, [Ralph Fiennes is] losing his hair in the front — it’s not very good. What can we do? They were more concerned about Ralph Fiennes’s hair.Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes in “Maid in Manhattan,” which Wang shot at the height of the paparazzi frenzy over the actress’s initial relationship with Ben Affleck. Barry Wetcher/Columbia PicturesHow was it working with Jennifer Lopez?It was difficult. She went out on dates every night with Ben Affleck. And in New York [where filming took place], there’s a law where the paparazzi could be in your face shooting stills. The only time they could not do it is when we’re doing a real take. So during rehearsals, they were literally right here, and there were a lot of them.During this period, were you at peace with doing purely studio films?There’s always that question. I knew in the back of my head, I could always leave and go back to what I did before. It just got a little difficult to get off that Ferris wheel.As you’ve returned to indie films, the landscape for marginalized voices like yours has changed.I don’t disagree, but not to the degree that I feel they should be. There’s a lot more Asian American films. I mean, anything from Ali Wong to “The Farewell” [from Lulu Wang].Did you like “The Farewell?”I like it better than the other films, maybe only because it’s more similar to mine. I’m prejudiced that way. It’s about family. But I don’t see anybody trying to do something in a more brave way. They’re still trying to please executives and then to please an audience more, rather than going out there with whatever budget they have to do something that’s challenging.The director and actor Justin Chon was in your most recent film, “Coming Home Again.” What do you think of his films?I think “Gook” was the most challenging film out there. Justin has got it in his heart to do it. And I feel the pain every time I talk to him working on something. Because the producers want a certain thing, and it’s really hard for him.But do you empathize with Asian American filmmakers trying to appease studios or audiences to break through?I talked to [the “Fast and Furious” franchise director] Justin Lin about this. He said, every year the studios make maximum 15 films [each] or something, and if one is made by an Asian American, that is progress. I tend to agree. But at the same time, was there another film completely outside the system that’s challenging the system or doing something really different? No.Not just Asian Americans, it’s across the board. Formally interesting and challenging films are just not being made. All the films are dumbed down to what I would call a Disney level. [Laughs] That’s all dangerous in the long run.The way “Chan Is Missing” happened — made for less than $25,000 on weekends by a crew with day jobs — could a film like that be made now and find an audience?If you get a grant or an independent investor, I think it could still happen again. When you are dealing with interesting characters and a certain kind of humanity, and it’s written well, you can get there. I have a strong belief in that. I have to. Otherwise I would probably just cut meat or something and be a butcher. [Laughs] More

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    ‘Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar Icon’ Review: Beyond ‘Crazy Train’

    Forty years after Rhoads’s death, small rock venues across the nation still host tribute shows honoring him. This new documentary explains why.As those of a certain generation (OK, boomer) are well aware, a sobering number of rock greats met their ends in aviation catastrophes. The documentary “Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar Icon” delves into the 1982 plane crash that took Rhoads’s life. Just 25, and still the relatively new guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, Rhoads didn’t much like flying. But, wanting to take some aerial photos to send his mom, he accepted a ride in a private plane piloted by a guy who thought it was funny to fly dangerously close over the tour bus in which Osbourne and crew were sleeping.It’s a sad end to a story that, as told in this movie directed by Andre Relis, is weirdly lopsided. Rhoads made both his name and arguably his best music over a period of only two years or so, with Osbourne on the albums “Blizzard of Ozz” and “Diary of a Madman.” Before that, he had been a founding member of the band Quiet Riot. Relis’s movie spends a lot of time on the pre-superstardom Riot years, which are replete with tales of internecine weirdness and elusive record deals redolent of “This Is Spinal Tap.”While his eclectic, sometimes classically inflected approach is heard to memorable effect on the Osbourne records — his riff for the song “Crazy Train” is one for the ages — attempts here to pin down what made Rhoads great vary. One friend marvels that he could play “fast,” “slow,” “crunchy” and “blues.” A guitar tech, Brian Reason, on the other hand, gives a nicely wonky breakdown of Rhoads’s showstopping solo style, with insights into his use of effects and the volume control.Rhoads comes off as a pleasant guy (never a big partyer; he tried to counsel Osbourne on his excessive drinking) and a genuine ax savant who died with a lot more music in him.Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar IconNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    ‘The Sanctity of Space’ Review: Such Great Heights

    In this mountaineering documentary, climbers chronicle their obsessive quest for alpine glory.The Tooth Traverse is a five-mile alpine route across the skyline of the Mooses Tooth massif in the Central Alaskan Range. Wind-whipped and sun-beaten, its rocky peaks brushed with sheets of ice and snow, the traverse is highly technical and profoundly forbidding. For the filmmaker-mountaineers Renan Ozturk and Freddie Wilkinson, it’s also an obsession.The documentary “The Sanctity of Space” covers how the pair spend the better part of a decade endeavoring to become the first to complete the Tooth Traverse — even in the face of accidents, injuries and the kinds of close calls that could easily have been fatal. At one point, Ozturk explains that his romantic partner has left him because she could no longer stand his dangerous vocation. In the very next scene — a title card reads “One Week Later” — we find Ozturk in a gurney, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, flitting in and out of consciousness. These are risks, the filmmakers suggest, inherent to the lives they lead.Ozturk and Wilkinson devote some of the film’s running time to the biography of one of their mountaineering heroes, the explorer and photographer Bradford Washburn. Though Washburn’s life was certainly interesting, these sections feel digressive and not well integrated.“It is belief as much as anything that allows one to cling to a wall,” James Salter wrote in his mountaineering novel “Solo Faces.” “The Sanctity of Space” is at its best when conveying the power of that belief — when a helmet-mounted GoPro captures the sheer expanse of a pitch mid-ascent, say, or when an aerial shot from a circling helicopter makes a climber appear minuscule against the vast face of a daunting peak. It’s this glory that the climbers were dedicated to pursuing, and through their eyes we can well understand the beauty of the quest.The Sanctity of SpaceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Sheryl’ Review: The High Highs and Low Lows of Pop Stardom

    This documentary about Sheryl Crow depicts a musician whose work ethic did not allow a lot of time for frivolity.The early trajectory of Sheryl Crow’s career is not entirely unfamiliar. Born and raised in the Missouri Bootheel, she grew up loving and learning music. After a fortuitous break — a vocal in a McDonald’s ad — she lit out for more showbiz-friendly environs and got an instant dose of reality. Crow’s tale of finding a boot on her parked car and being unable to pay the ticket seems inevitable.In time she found a place in Michael Jackson’s band and its attendant glitz, glam and eccentricity. And, later, experienced sexual harassment at the hands of Jackson’s manager Frank DiLeo. Crow drops this bombshell with what some may consider surprising equanimity. It’s not the only dark story she tells here.Eventually, of course, Sheryl Crow became Sheryl Crow — the multiplatinum-selling singer-songwriter with a hefty set of radio hits. This documentary, directed by Amy Scott, is assembled in the semi-standard slick method of our day — you know, where they make the vintage footage look really vintage by digitally inserting a sprocket hole on the left side of the frame. Oy.Still: Crow herself is a more than interesting subject. She’s a musician whose Rock-with-a-capital-R cred — her guitar playing is ace, her voice is soulful and her ear for a hook is unimpeachable — is sometimes overlooked in favor of her pop appeal. And her story has a lot of twists. (Remember when she was engaged to Lance Armstrong?)Here she’s an engaging, unpretentious and consistently frank docent of her own career, which she assures the viewer is still ongoing, despite the fact that she’s not making albums right now. Friends including Laura Dern, Keith Richards and Brandi Carlile kick in words of admiration.SherylNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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    ‘Shepherd’ Review: Solitary Assignment

    An island of ghosts and an ocean of guilt plague a grief-stricken widower in this moody horror movie.With “Shepherd,” the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss. Callum Donaldson’s marvelously icy soundscape might be doing much of the heavy lifting, but it’s Owen’s slow and steady directing style — favoring patient reveals over swift scares — that keeps this ominous horror tale firmly on track.The setup is simplicity itself. Eric (Tom Hughes, perfectly pallid and pained), a brooding widower haunted by vivid nightmares after his wife’s death, takes a job as a shepherd on a desolate Scottish island. When not huddling in a creaking, tumbledown cottage with unreliable phone service, Eric and his collie, Baxter, tend to a scattered herd of horned sheep. In a silence broken only by the howling wind and the clanging bell of a nearby lighthouse, Eric’s macabre hallucinations intensify. When, one morning, his estranged mother (Greta Scacchi) appears in his kitchen, ranting against the “ungodly woman” who was his wife, Eric fears he may be losing his mind.The creepy ferry operator with the milky eye (Kate Dickie) seems to know a thing or two about Eric’s past, but — like the larger narrative — she refuses to share. This withholding may irritate some viewers, but Owen, drawing from several Welsh ghost stories (including the inspiration for Robert Eggers’s 2019 fantasy, “The Lighthouse”) remains unapologetically enigmatic. Coaxing us to a surprisingly satisfying conclusion on the strength of Hughes’ potent central performance and the moldy richness of Richard Stoddard’s cinematography, the director displays an assuredness with Gothic tone that steadily strums our nerves.“Run, Mr. Black,” a chapter heading advises near the end of the movie. I was way ahead of it.ShepherdRated R for mental distress and mutilated animals. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Human Factors’ Review: Paranoia is the Family Business

    This thriller, about the invasion of a fractured home, is elevated by a talented cast but hampered by a stubbornly intellectual tone.“Human Factors,” from the writer-director Ronny Trocker, is a chilly, airless home-invasion drama in which the threat is out of sight, like termites chewing at floorboards. The members of a disengaged German family — two parents, Jan (Mark Waschke) and Nina (Sabine Timoteo), their teenage daughter, Emma (Jule Hermann), and young son, Max (Wanja Valentin Kube) — are settling into their vacation house when strangers burst from an upstairs bedroom and escape out of the front door. Nothing is stolen and nobody is seriously hurt. But the film repeatedly relives the incident through each character’s point of view, piecing together the mystery and its aftershocks and exposing calamitous emotional fractures within the family.Paranoia is the point. Paranoia is also the family business. Jan and Nina own a marketing company whose new client is a politician who wants to campaign on provocation and fear. Wherever Trocker’s camera goes, it finds characters who seem to be afraid of all the wrong things. The lens skulks like a voyeur and does what it can to frazzle us, too. (Klemens Hufnagl is the director of photography.) A drunken brawl might be an assault or a prank. A locked door looks safe, but adds to the sorrow. At one point, Jan and Nina’s office windows are pelted by mysterious goo. Why? And by whom? Trocker refuses to answer, sustaining the unease until it becomes ennui.The tone is too rigidly intellectual for the movie to succeed as a tense thriller. But the actors are up to the challenge of not so much sharing scenes as coexisting within them, particularly Timoteo as the embittered wife who roils like a teakettle that has been welded shut. The most cleareyed observer, however, turns out to be a pet rat — evidence that this family, a microcosm of modern anxieties, is more imperiled by its silent dysfunction than by outside enemies.Human FactorsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘In a New York Minute’ Review: Love or Freedom?

    This drama from Ximan Li teases time in telling the stories of three Chinese women living in a city that tempts promise but delivers frustration.The promising first-time feature filmmaker Ximan Li embraces the twists of immigrant experiences in the drama “In a New York Minute.” Based on a short story by Yi Nan that Li adapted, the director braids the saga of three women living in New York City. While their situations are very different, the malaise dogging each of them overlaps. Visual intersectional hints and an errant at-home pregnancy test link the women in ways intriguing if occasionally, forced.The food writer Amy Chen (Amy Chang) continues to suffer a violent reaction to meals a year after a breakup. Her co-worker Peter (Jae Shin) plies her with eats and her mother (Cheng Pei Pei) pesters her about marriage. A blink-and-you-might-miss-it mention of Amy’s former “roommate” seems a little coy for this day and age but also may explain why the foodie’s story feels undercooked.The actress Angel Li (Yi Liu) can’t seem to get a break, even as the career of the writer (Ludi Lin) she is having an affair with is on the rise. Nina (a charismatic Celia Au) returns from her nighttime gig at a karaoke lounge — where customers retreat to private rooms for singing and more transactional pleasures — with designer bags and cash. She stashes them in her bedroom above the family restaurant in a move toward independence. At the same time, a food truck cook (Roger Yeh) courts Nina with a gentle clarity that confuses her.One character sums up the movie’s underlying quandary: “Which would you choose, love or freedom?” Time will tell whether this is the right question, or one based on a wrongheaded premise.In a New York MinuteNot rated. In English and Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More