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      ‘CODA’ Review: A Voice of Her Own

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      An openhearted embrace of deaf culture elevates this otherwise conventional tale of a talented teenager caught between ambition and loyalty.The template of “CODA” — the title is also a term used to describe the hearing children of deaf adults — might be wearyingly familiar, but this warmhearted drama from Sian Heder opens up space for concerns that feel fresh.Ruby (Emilia Jones, delightful), a shy 17-year-old in Gloucester, Mass., is the lone hearing member of her rambunctious family. Between interpreting for her parents (Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur), and helping run the family’s fishing boat with her father and older brother (Daniel Durant) each morning before school, Ruby is exhausted. Since childhood, she has been her family’s bridge to the hearing world; now, her newly awakened desire to sing is perhaps the one thing they will struggle most to understand.Weighed down by a groaningly predictable plot — which includes a cute-boy crush, a colorful music teacher (Eugenio Derbez) and a climactic singing audition — “CODA” relishes the opportunity to showcase the expressiveness of sign language. (The film is extensively subtitled.) The actors work together seamlessly, the blue-collar coastal setting is richly realized and the family’s cohesiveness solidly established. And if some interactions move to the clichéd beats of a sitcom, Ruby’s efforts to share her musical talent (notably in one lovely scene with her father) are remarkably affecting.More than once, Heder effectively flips the film’s viewpoint to that of her deaf characters (who are all played by deaf actors). At a school concert, the camera watches Ruby’s family in the audience as the soundtrack abruptly cuts out, allowing us to glimpse the sometimes blanketing isolation of a silent world. In moments like this, when the quippy dialogue subsides and the story relaxes, we see the ghost of a more fruitful movie, one that would rather surprise its viewers than feed them a formula they have come to expect.CODARated PG-13 for unrestrained flatulence and a bawdy mime. In English and American Sign Language with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. Watch on Apple +. More

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      ‘White as Snow’ Review: The Fairest of Them All

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      The director Anne Fontaine spins the Snow White fairy tale into a thriller, with Isabelle Huppert as the jealous stepmother.Whatever rehabilitation wicked stepmothers have undergone of late encounters a setback in “White as Snow.” Isabelle Huppert brings a frost to her role as Maud in the director Anne Fontaine’s darkly playful gloss on the Snow White saga. Lou de Laâge portrays the hotelier’s shy, impossibly lovely stepdaughter and rival, Claire.This is fairy tale as comedically aware thriller. There are red apples; red, red dresses; and long, self-appraising glances into the mirror on Maud’s part. Of course, her jealousy is misdirected. Her husband, Bernard (Charles Berling), is a besotted fool, trying to assuage his own anxieties about aging. But the die is cast, nonetheless.Once Claire finds herself deep in the woods, conveyed there by a hired killer and saved by a hunter with a twin back at a large stone farmhouse, nature gets its redolent due, with farmland and forest providing a backdrop to sexual congress. Claire’s brush with death frees her of any erotic inhibitions but never represses her ample decency and kindness. (How many men does Claire encounter? Seven, naturally.)Quite a few of the film’s pleasures come by way of its fluid tango with the source material. Fontaine and her co-writer, Pascal Bonitzer, manage several didn’t-see-that-coming zags. Nods to Hitchcock abound with the aid of the cinematographer Yves Angelo’s tracking shots and the composer Bruno Coulais’s low foreboding notes.As satisfying as Huppert is, the movie dances on the pinpoint of de Laâge’s performance. The name Claire signifies light and clarity, and there’s a transparency to de Laâge’s portrayal of this innocent who remains thus while discovering a lavish sensuality.White as SnowNot rated. In French with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Watch Ryan Reynolds Power Up in ‘Free Guy’

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      The director Shawn Levy narrates a sequence where the character Guy discovers something new about the world he’s been living in.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.New revelations come quickly and colorfully to Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who transforms from a supporting character in a video game character to its biggest star.In this scene, Guy, a bank teller whose work day plays out predictably, down to a daily bank robbery, this time turns the tables. He takes down a robber, including the special glasses he wears. When Guy puts them on, he sees an entirely new graphical layer of his town that he has been missing before.Discussing the scene, the director Shawn Levy said that he wanted to unlock this secret part of the video game world using a lively visual motif, with bursts of color and action all around.“I wanted this sequence, frankly, to be a little bit overwhelming to the audience,” Levy said, “like there’s too much to take in because that’s exactly what Ryan’s character is experiencing.”Levy said that he played a lot of video games when researching the movie, and he kept noticing how the camera moved in less of a human-operated way, and instead was “almost robotic in its speed and fluidity,” he said. For this scene, he and his team sought to mimic that by mounting the camera on a robotic arm. They then programmed the arm to move around Guy as he sees things through his glasses. Because the movement were locked in by code, Levy said, Reynolds had to be precise with his blocking to avoid being injured by the camera.Read the “Free Guy” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Free Guy’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      ‘Not Going Quietly’ Review: Into the Long Fight

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      This documentary follows the activist Ady Barkan, who toured the U.S. to help demonstrators draw attention to public health policies after his diagnosis with a fatal neurological disease.In 2016, Ady Barkan was working as an advocate for economic justice when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., a neurological disease that deteriorates motor function. Doctors told him he had only three or four years to live. The documentary “Not Going Quietly” begins shortly after this grim diagnosis, as Ady embarks on a new political campaign, this time focused on public health policy.In the film, Ady leaves the comfort of home and family to travel across the United States on a speaking tour as part of his “Be a Hero” campaign. He leads rallies in Congressional districts where politicians support what Ady deems inhumane health policies. In Washington, his push for health care access leads Ady to protest Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court appointment. Through this fight, his illness progresses, limiting his ability to move and speak.The most intriguing scenes in the documentary are focused on the mechanics of Ady’s activism. The director Nicholas Bruckman captures Ady and a team of organizers as they host a training for demonstrators who intend to film themselves disrupting politicians during routine campaign stops with questions about health care. This training represents one of the few occasions that Bruckman treats Ady’s success as a result of organizing, rather than a feat achieved through sheer force of personality.Ady’s vitality has been central to his accomplishments. But Bruckman elides the significant amount of planning that it has taken for Ady and his team to build a national movement. This lack of practical detail means this documentary plays as a human-interest story, built from predictable beats of adversity and triumph. It is a warm and generous portrait, but the film lacks its central organizer’s propulsive shrewdness.Not Going QuietlyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Searching for Mr. Rugoff’ Review: Man Behind the Movies

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      A documentary looks at an influential distributor and theater owner who went after visionary films, including “Scenes From a Marriage” and “Putney Swope.”Not every documentary features its director calling his subject “kind of a terrible person.” But Ira Deutchman’s “Searching for Mr. Rugoff” happily looks at the man in full: Donald S. Rugoff, the influential distributor, New York City theater impresario and certifiable “piece of work” (to quote one testimonial).During a blazing run in the 1960s and 1970s, Rugoff went after visionary movies that made audiences sit up and take notice: “Z,” “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Scenes From a Marriage,” “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “Harlan County USA,” “Nothing but a Man,” “Putney Swope,” “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” and, yes, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”As a former employee and later a distributor and producer, Deutchman brings firsthand insights into the indefatigable Mr. Rugoff (who died in 1989). He assembles an amused and bemused circle of fellow veterans of Rugoff’s distribution company Cinema 5, old-school commentators, Rugoff’s ex-wife and sons, and grateful filmmakers (Lina Wertmuller, Robert Downey Sr., Costa-Gavras). Deutchman, a professor at Columbia University, also visits Edgartown, Mass., for traces of Rugoff’s life after his company was taken over.As someone who grew up going to some of the theaters Rugoff once ran — which included Cinema I and II and the Beekman, among others — I got the warm-and-fuzzies from seeing the love here for moviegoing and exhibition, which he goosed with gonzo showmanship. Equally so for the brief inclusion of Dan Talbot, fellow distributor and theater maven, whose cinemas and unparalleled New Yorker Films catalog also remain at the heart of the medium. It’s all part of an essential history of film culture that continues in new and different ways today.Searching for Mr. RugoffNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Apple TV and other streaming services. More

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      ‘The East’ Review: Imperialist Blues

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      This thoroughly generic war movie explores the Netherlands’ colonial legacy in Indonesia.At the tail-end of World War II, an armed conflict broke out that is known today as the Indonesian War of Independence. The Dutch, after having lost their former colony to the Japanese in 1942, regrouped and deployed forces to reconquer the archipelago in 1946. Naturally, Indonesian nationalists were having none of it. And perhaps even more predictably, the Dutch Army responded with a violent campaign.“The East,” a bloated and thoroughly generic war movie by the Dutch filmmaker Jim Taihuttu, reckons with the Netherlands’ colonial legacy by spotlighting this overlooked moment in history. The details may be novel — even eye-opening for some — but this story of white guilt and brutality feels mighty old.For one thing, Johan (Martijn Lakemeier), a young, idealistic soldier, disillusioned by the impotence of Dutch efforts to fend off rebel forces, quickly acquires a taste for blood. A volunteer recruit hoping to make spiritual amends for the sins of his Nazi-collaborator father, he is initially the most polite and benevolent of his group of juvenile, sex-obsessed troopers. The good boy goes bad, however, when he meets Raymond “The Turk” (Marwan Kenzari), a mustachioed brute known for his merciless tactics. Cue the firing squad, terrorized villagers, and shame-fueled inner torment.The jumbled script straddles two timelines: the events in Indonesia and Johan’s return to the Netherlands after completing his service. It’s all bleakness and self-loathing without the momentum or punch. Neither a joyless, immersive thrill ride (“1917”) nor a cartoonish display of tough-guy patriotism (“Midway”), “The East” fits squarely into the tradition of Vietnam War movies like “Platoon,” whose depictions of imperial carnage and psychic derangement might have once been provocative. Today, a film like “The East” feels more like a numbing recapitulation.The EastNot rated. Running time: 2 hour 17 minutes. In Japanese, Dutch and Indonesian with subtitles. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Meaning of Hitler’ Review: Understanding Fascism

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      This docu-essay inspired by Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 book of the same title argues that Hitler was disturbingly ordinary.The docu-essay “The Meaning of Hitler” proceeds with caution. The film, inspired by the historian and journalist Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 book of the same title, seeks to understand the combination of personal pathology, political shrewdness and mass complicity that allowed Hitler to create the Nazi regime. It also finds disturbing 21st-century echoes.But the filmmakers, the wife-husband directorial team of Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker (“Gunner Palace”), are wary of contributing to any mystique that surrounds Hitler, not least because they find little in Hitler’s background that makes him unique. Early on, a narrator expresses concern about the project: “Is it possible to make a film like this without contributing to the expansion of the Nazi cinematic universe?”Although the film features Holocaust historians like Saul Friedländer, Yehuda Bauer and Deborah Lipstadt and the authors Martin Amis and Francine Prose, it approaches Hitler from a variety of disciplines. The psychiatrist Peter Theiss-Abendroth says that Hitler has been assigned almost any diagnosis available, but he suggests that such speculation invariably creates excuses for culpability. Bauer notes that Hitler’s psychological problems were no different from those of millions of others. The movie delves into technology to explain how advances in microphones enabled Hitler’s theatrical style of oration. An archaeologist discusses the excavation of the Sobibor death camp.So is “The Meaning of Hitler” really playing with fire? It is when it trails the Holocaust denier David Irving on a visit to Treblinka. Irving makes offhand anti-Semitic remarks so flagrantly offensive it’s difficult to see what’s edifying about including him.But that misstep aside, “The Meaning of Hitler” takes a multifaceted, often counterintuitive approach to examining the underpinnings of fascism.The Meaning of HitlerNot rated. In English and German with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Apple TV and other streaming services. More