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      Stream These 12 Titles Before They Expire in August

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      Netflix in the United States is losing dozens of titles this month. These are the best among them.There’s a little something for everyone in this month’s selection of titles leaving Netflix in the United States, including indie dramedies, family features and crime pictures, as well as the best of the recent James Bond flicks. Check out these 12 titles before they disappear. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘Nightcrawler’ (Aug. 9)The screenwriter Dan Gilroy made his directorial debut with this disturbing 2014 thriller. Inspired by the work of Weegee, the influential photographer of New York City street scenes of the 1940s, Gilroy penned the story of a contemporary news videographer (played to chilling perfection by Jake Gyllenhaal) whose pursuit of grisly crime scene footage takes him into morally dubious territory. Rene Russo is in top form as a news director who doesn’t quite realize how dangerous her employee is, while Gyllenhaal does some of his finest acting, unnervingly personifying the slippery slope from ambitious go-getter to out-and-out sociopath.Stream it here.‘Safety Not Guaranteed’ (Aug. 12)Before they were tapped to reboot the “Jurassic Park” franchise, the director Colin Trevorrow and the screenwriter Derek Connolly crafted a much smaller-scale fusion of science fiction and human drama. Aubrey Plaza stars as a young journalism intern who responds to a classified listing for a time-traveling partner, figuring the delusional man behind the ad (Mark Duplass) could make for an entertaining profile. But her cynicism slowly dissolves in the face of his earnestness — and her observations of the strange activities that are fueling his paranoia. The filmmakers find just the right tonal mixture of character comedy, low-rent sci-fi and genuine warmth, while Plaza and Duplass create unexpectedly convincing chemistry.Stream it here.Michael Keaton as the fast-food entrepreneur Ray Kroc in “The Founder.”The Weinstein Company‘The Founder’ (Aug. 20)Michael Keaton is phenomenal in this biographical portrait of the McDonald’s mastermind Ray Kroc, using his trademark quicksilver wit and endless charisma at the service of a character who is slowly and counterintuitively revealed to be a bit of a snake. His Kroc is a rather desperate hustler, envisioning himself as a Horatio Alger protagonist just one step away from his big break, which he finally finds in the efficient, assembly-line burger stand of brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald (John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman, both excellent). But his dreams for the chain are bigger than its creators’, a bump in the typical rise-to-success narrative, which creates fascinating and fruitful thematic tension.Stream it here.‘Casino Royale’ (Aug. 30)The James Bond franchise had hit a bumpy stretch in the mid-2000s, as audiences turned away from the increasingly silly shenanigans of adventures like “Die Another Day” for the grittier superspy stylings of the “Bourne” movies. So the Bond producers brought back the director Martin Campbell — who had previously rescued the series from obsolescence with the 1995 jump-start “Goldeneye” — to reboot Bond with an origin story. Daniel Craig made his first appearance in the role, complementing the character’s signature debonair charisma and offhand wit with genuine danger and darkness, while Eva Green impresses as the woman who made Bond do what he seldom would again: fall in love.Stream it here.‘Stranger Than Fiction’ (Aug. 30)Will Ferrell revealed he was capable of more than dumb-guy slapstick with his leading role in this clever comedy-drama from the director Marc Forster (“Monster’s Ball”). Emma Thompson stars as a superstar novelist who finds herself struggling to complete her latest tome; it seems her protagonist (played with naïve, wistful charm by Ferrell) has, somehow, become aware of his fictional status and of the death his creator has planned for him. It’s an ingenious premise, but it’s no mere intellectual exercise. The screenwriter Zach Helm explores the rich emotional implications of the scenario, forging an unlikely but affecting relationship between Ferrell and a marvelous Maggie Gyllenhaal.Stream it here.‘Chinatown’ (Aug. 31)The neo-noir films of the 1970s, and particularly the era’s plethora of private eye movies, took advantage of the temperature of the times; in a decade where distrust of authority and institutions was at an all-time high, it’s not surprising the unshakable moral ethos of the dedicated detective were again in vogue. Few films reanimated the golden age of noir as expertly as Roman Polanski’s 1974 best picture nominee, which also took full advantage of the shifts in tolerance of adult subject matter to include the kinds of plot twists earlier films could only hint at. That tension, coupled with the beauty of John A. Alonzo’s cinematography and the stellar performances of Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, resulted in one of the finest films of the decade.Stream it here.Reese Witherspoon in “Election.”Paramount Pictures‘Election’ (Aug. 31)Reese Witherspoon turned what could have been a one-dimensional caricature into one of the most iconic performances of her era in this whip-smart satire of small-town life, political ambition and middle-age malaise from the co-writer and director Alexander Payne (“Sideways”). Witherspoon stars as Tracy Flick, a zealous high school student whose election to class president seems a foregone conclusion until the student government supervisor (Matthew Broderick) decides the front-runner could use a little competition. Broderick’s casting is a masterstroke, allowing the viewer to reimagine Ferris Bueller as a feckless school administrator, while Payne and his co-writer, Jim Taylor (adapting the novel by Tom Perrotta), nimbly weave a tale that plays both as small-scale drama and big-picture allegory.Stream it here.‘The Girl Next Door’ (Aug. 31)The brief, “American Pie”-prompted return of the teen sex comedy was coming to an end by the time this entry from Luke Greenfield hit theaters, to middling box office and missed reviews, in 2004. But it found an enthusiastic audience on home video and streaming services, drawn less to its ludicrous plot — in which a high school senior falls for his sexy new neighbor only to discover she’s hiding from a past in adult films — than to the genuine sweetness at its center. Elisha Cuthbert and Emile Hirsch convey a bond that goes beyond mere physical chemistry; their characters seem genuinely to like and care about each other, and the strength of that bond gives the film an unexpected emotional spine.Stream it here.‘Hot Rod’ (Aug. 31)The Lonely Island comedy trio — composed of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone — made the leap from viral videos to the big screen with this 2007 comedy. Samberg stars as Rod Kimble, who fancies himself as the second coming of Evel Knievel but is closer to the victims on “America’s Funniest Home Videos”; the movie chronicles his attempts to become a big-deal daredevil, primarily as a means of taunting his toxic stepfather (a game Ian McShane). The semi-surrealist approach of the Lonely Islanders puts this one a cut above the typical dimwitted ’00s comedy, as does the supporting cast, which also includes Sissy Spacek, Isla Fisher, Danny McBride and Bill Hader.Stream it here.‘Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events’ (Aug. 31)Over the course of three seasons, Netflix turned Daniel Handler’s series of children’s novels into one of their most entertaining series, a blackly comic tale of villainy and perseverance. But the Snicket novels had been adapted once before, in this 2004 film from the director Brad Silberling (“Casper”), with Jim Carrey as the dastardly Count Olaf. Neither version detracts from the other; the film and the series work in concert, creating a similarly stylized world with a correspondingly delicious sense of dark humor.Stream it here.Miss Piggy and Kermit in the 2011 film “The Muppets.”Scott Garfield/Walt Disney Pictures‘The Muppets’ (Aug. 31)The Muppet movie franchise was in a pretty sorry state when it was brought back to joyful life in this 2011 feature from the director James Bobin and the screenwriters Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller (who got the gig when their previous film, the decidedly adult-oriented romantic comedy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” included an uproarious puppet musical sequence). Segel also stars as a likable small-town guy whose visit to Hollywood with his fiancé (Amy Adams) and decidedly Muppet-like little brother results in an emergency reunion of the long-disbanded “Muppet Show” gang. Bobin, Segel and Stoller put together all the right pieces — winking humor, catchy tunes, a parade of cheerful guest stars — to create the best Muppet movie in decades.Stream it here.‘Road to Perdition’ (Aug. 31)Tom Hanks found a rare opportunity to explore his darker side in this 2002 adaptation of the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins (itself inspired by the classic manga “Lone Wolf and Cub”). Hanks stars as Michael Sullivan Sr., a Depression-era enforcer for the Irish Mob who must flee his Illinois home with his 12-year-old son when he crosses the erratic son (Daniel Craig) of his longtime boss and father figure (an Oscar-nominated Paul Newman, in one of his final roles). The director Sam Mendes re-teams with his “American Beauty” cinematographer Conrad L. Hall to create a picture that’s both gorgeous and melancholy, pushing past the surface pleasures of its period genre setting with timeless themes of family, morality and mortality.Stream it here.Also leaving: “The Big Lebowski,” “The Departed,” “Nacho Libre,” “The Manchurian Candidate (2004),” “The Social Network,” “Superbad,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” (all Aug. 31). More

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      ‘Bring Your Own Brigade’ Review: Some Say the World Will End in Fire

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      In her new documentary, Lucy Walker looks at California’s apocalyptic fires and finds more than the usual smoke and politics.A few times a year, I pull out our HEPA filter and begin reassuring worried friends and family members that, no, the city of Los Angeles, where I live, isn’t burning — or at least not yet. The air quality here is almost always poor, of course, but I tend to switch on the air filter only when the smoke comes, filling the basin and darkening the sky.“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote in 1967. It was two years after the Watts uprising, but Didion wasn’t writing about race and reckoning, she was creating a poetically apocalyptic image of the city and, by extension, California. Decades later, she returned to the topic, using a phrase — “fire season” — that now feels obsolete. In the age of enduring drought and climate change, the wildfires never seem to go out in the West, where so many burned in July that the smoke reached the East Coast.In “Bring Your Own Brigade,” the director Lucy Walker doesn’t simply look at the fires; she investigates and tries to understand them. It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting. She comes across as open, curious and rightly concerned, but her approach — the way she looks and listens, and how she shapes the material — gives the movie the quality of discovery. (She’s also pleasantly free of the boosterism or the smug hostility that characterizes so much coverage of California.)Specific and universal, harrowing and hopeful, “Bring Your Own Brigade” opens on a world in flames. It’s the present day and everywhere — in Australia, Greece, the United States — fires are burning. Ignited by lightning strikes, downed power lines and a long, catastrophic history of human error, fire is swallowing acres by the mile, destroying homes and neighborhoods, and killing every living thing in its path. It’s terrifying and, if you can make it past the movie’s heartbreaking early images, most notably of a piteously singed and whimpering koala, you soon understand that your terror is justified.To tell the story of this global conflagration, Walker has narrowed in on California, turning her sights on a pair of megafires that began burning at opposite ends of the state on Nov. 8, 2018. (There was also a mass shooting that same day.) One started in Malibu, the popular if modestly populated (about 12,000 people) beach city that snakes along 21 miles of the state’s southern coastline and runs adjacent to a major highway; the other, deadlier fire ignited near Paradise, a town in a lushly, alarmingly forested pocket of Northern California and which, at the time, had more than double Malibu’s population.The contrasts between the areas prove instructive, as do their similarities. As Walker explains, Paradise is tucked into a Republican-leaning part of the state (though its county went for Joe Biden), while Malibu sits in reliably blue Los Angeles County. In 2019, the median property value in Paradise was $223,400 (per the website Data USA); in Malibu, it was $2 million, the city’s Gidget-era surf shacks supplanted by mansions ringed with imported palm trees and incongruously bright green lawns. But, as Walker finds, despite their demographic differences, each area has a history of going up in flames.Drawing on both archival and original footage — including some extremely distressing cellphone imagery and 911 calls — Walker is on the ground soon after the infernos erupt, riding shotgun with a fire battalion chief in Southern California and interviewing residents who managed to get out of Paradise alive. She jumps around in time a bit, shifting forward and back as she surveys the terrain, fills in the backdrop and introduces a range of survivors, heroes, scientists and activists. She seeks answers and keeps seeking, building on regional contrasts to create a larger global picture. (Three cinematographers shot the movie and three editors seamlessly pieced it together.)The story Walker tells is deeply troubling and often infuriating, and stretches back past 1542, the year that the Iberian explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo dropped anchor in an inlet now known as the Los Angeles harbor region. He named the area La Bahia de las Fumas, or the Bay of Smokes. For thousands of years, native peoples up and down the West Coast had built campfires, but also used fire to productively manage the land. In the centuries since, fire management has come to mean fire suppression at any cost. The problem is, as Walker methodically details, fire suppression isn’t working: The top six largest California wildfires in the past 89 years have all happened since 2018.That’s bleak, but I’m grateful to Walker for not leaving me feeling entirely hopeless about the future of my home and — because this movie is fundamentally about our planet — yours as well. Climate change is here, there’s no question. But, she argues, we can do much more than curl up in a fetal position. The problem, as always, is people. And when, a year after Paradise burned, residents in a meeting complain about proposed fire codes that may well save their lives in the next conflagration, you may shake your head, aghast. Human beings have a disastrous habit of ignoring our past, but Lucy Walker wants us to know that there’s no ignoring the fires already destroying our future.Bring Your Own BrigadeRated R for upsetting images and audio of people trapped by fire. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Gotham Award

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      The Gothams will replace the best actress and best actor categories with a single category for “outstanding lead performance.”Should acting prizes be gender neutral? The question has been percolating for years, with zealous arguments for and against.But the biggest ceremonies that honor acting, aware that change would kick a cultural hornet’s nest, have adhered to tradition. Best actor. Best actress.On Thursday, a significant stop on the annual road to the Oscars broke ranks. The Gotham Awards said that, beginning with its November ceremony, prizes for acting would no longer be broken out by gender. The Gothams will replace its best actress and best actor categories with a single category for outstanding lead performance. For the first time, there will be a category for supporting roles: outstanding supporting performance.Each category can have up to 10 nominees, with the field chosen, per custom, by committees of film critics, festival programmers and film curators. Separate juries made up of writers, directors, actors, producers and other film professionals will determine the final recipients, the same as always. The acting categories at the Gothams previously had five nominees.“There are so many talented nonbinary individuals, and it’s not fair to force them into male and female boxes,” said Jeffrey Sharp, the executive director of the Gotham Film and Media Institute in New York. “We have a really proud history of inclusivity. It’s part of our DNA. But it was time for us to evolve, too.”Will other significant ceremonies follow?“We can only speak for ourselves, but we do have a history of leading the conversation,” Mr. Sharp said, referring to the position the Gotham Awards has as the first significant ceremony of Hollywood’s prize-collecting season.The influential Berlin Film Festival went gender neutral with its performance awards in the spring. Although not taken seriously as markers of artistic achievement, the MTV Movie & TV Awards stopped separating acting prizes by gender in 2017, along with MTV’s Video Music Awards. The Grammys did away with the division in 2012.But none of the organizations behind the most prestigious acting awards — Oscars, BAFTAs, Tonys and Emmys — have indicated that they will take the same action. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which manages the Oscars, has perhaps gone the furthest, telling The New York Times in 2019 that, while it planned to keep its current structure in place, it would “continue to be sensitive to the evolving conversation.” The Academy Awards for best actress and best actor were first presented in 1929.The Screen Actors Guild Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globes also have male and female acting categories.The debate has roots in older conversations about whether carving out places in a male-dominated field for one group, in this case women, comes at the cost of excluding others.Those seeking change contend that, in addition to forcing nonbinary performers into boxes, gendered categories give the false appearance that prime roles for women are far more prevalent than they actually are.“We should be more afraid of upholding a discriminatory, sexist policy than we are of abolishing it,” the nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon, known for their role on Showtime’s “Billions,” wrote in an essay last year. They added, “There are ultimately, two tangible obstacles to abolishing the actress category at awards shows, and they are — to be blunt — money and feelings.”Supporters of gendered categories say that absent such distinctions, men would dominate the nominees and winners. There are also those who swat away potential change as an example of progressive ideology run amok.Mr. Sharp said that the concern about maintaining an equitable mix of nominees when doing away with gendered categories was “valid.”“In terms of the danger of being skewed one way or another, we have great faith in the individuals who make our nominations decisions,” he said, referring to the Gotham Awards’ committee system. (The New York Times is a corporate sponsor of the awards and had no role in the decision about the new categories.)Mr. Sharp noted that his organization’s longtime “breakthrough actor” award, which will be renamed “breakthrough performer,” has always been gender neutral, having been given to stars like Amy Adams (“Junebug”), Elliot Page (“Juno”), Michael B. Jordan (“Fruitvale Station”) and Mya Taylor (“Tangerine”).The most-recent Gotham Awards ceremony took place in January and was staged virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Nicole Beharie was named best actress for her performance in “Miss Juneteenth” and Riz Ahmed won the best actor prize for “Sound of Metal.”The Gotham Film and Media Institute (formerly the Independent Filmmaker Project) also said on Thursday that it had created two new television categories: breakthrough nonfiction series and outstanding performance in a new series.Cara Buckley More

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      ‘The Viewing Booth’ Review: Do You See What I See?

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      One woman’s reactions to videos of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are interrogated in this documentary by the filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz.More than ever, moving images — body cameras that monitor police conduct, the video review of athletic event rulings — purport to capture the incontestable truth. But can the “evidence,” framed and reliant on human interpretation, truly force us to see eye to eye?In “The Viewing Booth,” the filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz tests this hypothesis.Filmed at Temple University in a dark studio that resembles both a confessional and a laboratory, the documentary considers one young woman’s reactions to videos of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Singled out from a broader swath of students, Maia Levy, a Jewish American supporter of Israel, peruses a selection of videos — mostly by the human rights watchdog group B’Tselem — that she questions aloud, skeptical as to their authenticity. In one video, soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces raid a Palestinian family’s home in the middle of the night, awakening and interrogating several children. Levy, whom we observe voicing her objections in unforgiving close-up from the perspective of a computer camera, is convinced that the video is manipulating us to feel empathy for the family. Alexandrowicz watches the shared screen in an adjoining room, struck by Levy’s incredulity.Six months later, Levy is invited back to the studio to review the footage of her responses, effectively replaying bits from the documentary’s first half with commentary from Levy and Alexandrowicz. In short: Images are not enough to challenge one’s beliefs.Though moderately compelling to bear witness to one individual’s objections in real time, “The Viewing Booth” touches on gloomy truths about spectatorship in the digital era that might have felt novel a decade ago. Inundated as we are by traumatizing images and indiscriminate claims of “fake news,” it should come as no surprise that our ideological bubbles are actually quite difficult to burst.The Viewing BoothNot rated. In English, Arabic and Hebrew, with subtitles. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Macaluso Sisters’ Review: Tragedy Across Time

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      This moving drama by the filmmaker Emma Dante imagines the ripple effects of a sister’s death across generations in Sicily.No mere sun-kissed coming-of-age film, “The Macaluso Sisters” opens on a blissful day filled with young love and beachside longing that is tragically upended by an accident that has everlasting reverberations.The Italian filmmaker Emma Dante, best known as a director of avant-garde theater and opera, adapted the film based on her acclaimed play of the same name. Here, she imagines the ripple effects of a sister’s death across generations with metaphysical grace and hints of fantasy, straying from the plot-reliant mold of most human dramas toward something more haunting and powerful.Five orphaned sisters — Katia, Lia, Pinuccia, Maria, and Antonella — live alone in a lively apartment in Palermo, Sicily, where they sustain themselves by loaning out pigeons for ceremonies and events. On their day off, they head to the beach, passing through a field peppered with enormous dinosaur figurines and initiating a pop music-scored dance party upon their arrival. These magical moments are grounded by the cinematographer Gherardo Gossi’s tactile photography, which accentuates the youthful vitality of the sisters’ bodies and the playful chaos of their movements.Following the death of a sister, Dante skips ahead to a future in which the group — now played by a different group of actresses — are middle-aged and broken, each in their own particular way. They remain in the same apartment, while ghostly manifestations of their missing sister create a stark contrast between their aging bodies and those of their brimming younger selves.A third act shows three sisters in old age and in mourning. Yet the apartment and its white cabinet — adorned with an etching of a beach — looks the same. By the end, Dante stages a transcendent confrontation with the impermanence of the body, destined to degrade, yet sustained by the memories and relationships that have come to define it.The Macaluso SistersNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘What We Left Unfinished’ Review: Spectres of History

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      For her first feature documentary, Mariam Ghani dug up five unfinished movies from the Communist era in Afghanistan.In “What We Left Unfinished,” five movies started and then abandoned during Afghanistan’s Communist era, between 1978 and 1992, form a dazzling time capsule of the nation’s political and cultural history. The director Mariam Ghani — the daughter of Afghanistan’s current president, Ashraf Ghani — digs into the archives of Afghan Film, a state-run company that endured the whims and demands of various regimes before the Taliban destroyed most of its holdings in the 1990s.Culled from the remnants of the company’s collections, the films Ghani remixes in “What We Left Unfinished” bear the traces of successive political upheavals. “The April Revolution” (1978), for instance, was commissioned by Hafizullah Amin, who became Afghanistan’s president in a 1979 coup. When the Soviets assassinated him months later in a takeover, the film had to be shut down.
      In interviews, the filmmakers and actors involved in these movies recall their struggles with strict ideological dictates and censorship, but also the generous resources that propaganda-hungry governments lavished on them. The snippets we see are beautifully lit and produced — some feature big explosions and shootouts involving real soldiers wielding real Kalashnikovs.“What We Left Unfinished” doesn’t dwell too much on the nuts and bolts of the making of these films, which is a pity, because they offer tantalizing glimpses into a cinematic culture whose formal ambitions seem to have been unstinted — and perhaps even encouraged — by political pressures. But Ghani’s mode is less interrogative than associative. Her montage of film fragments illustrates and sometimes poetically belies the interviewees’ recollections, evoking the ambiguous and unresolved contours of collective memory.What We Left UnfinishedNot rated. In English and Dari, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 11 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Whirlybird’ Review: Chasing a Story, From the Air

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      This documentary remembers the daring helicopter reporting of a couple in Los Angeles.According to “Whirlybird,” a documentary directed by Matt Yoka, the sprawling freeways of Los Angeles — and the difficulties they posed for reaching breaking-news events quickly — prompted Zoey Tur, along with Marika Gerard, her wife and partner in journalism at the time, to start reporting from a helicopter. They were stringers, Marika explains, and always needed new videos. Cars didn’t cut it, especially once they became parents. There is harrowing, if retrospectively charming, footage in which their young daughter, Katy Tur, now an MSNBC anchor, assists while she accompanies them on a pursuit.Once they took to the air, the pair gave a big boost to the news service they ran, and they could also report live. They flew over the intersection of Florence and Normandie filming the beating of the truck driver Reginald Denny, one of the earliest incidents in the 1992 riots. The documentary presents a lengthy account of how they found O.J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco. Marika says they were the first on the scene.Drawing on an amazing video stockpile from the 1980s and ’90s, “Whirlybird” is an editing feat. (The news clips and Marika consistently refer to Zoey by the name she was known by during the period recounted, before a gender transition.) The movie also has elements of a psychodrama: Building a family business around adrenaline turns out to be suboptimal for relationships and health. Zoey had a heart attack at 35. Despite the fires, floods and body count, “Whirlybird” plays like one big home movie.WhirlybirdNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 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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      ‘Annette’ Review: Love Hurts

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      Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard are star-crossed lovers in this hallucinatory musical, written by Sparks and directed by Leos Carax.“Annette” is a musical about the ill-starred romance between two artists, a description that suggests obvious kinship with “La La Land” and “A Star is Born.” Not to play algorithm or anything, but if you liked those movies, you will probably like this one too.Or maybe not. While it belongs, more or less, to the durable genre of backstage musical, “Annette” aims to be something darker and stranger than another angsty melodrama about the entanglements of ambition and love. It has some modern opera in its DNA — a lurid strand of violence, madness and demonic passion that evokes pre-World War II Vienna or Berlin as much as classic Hollywood. Rather than bursting into song or breaking into dance at opportune moments, the characters stream their tormented consciousnesses through lyrics that are never as simple as they sound.“We love each other so much.” That is the refrain that sticks in your head as you attend to the tragic tale of Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and Ann Desfranous (Marion Cotillard), a performance artist and an operatic soprano whose marriage is catnip for the tabloid media. Their love is the film’s premise and its central dramatic problem. It’s also, in a way, a red herring. The sexual bliss and emotional rapport that fill the first act give way to anger and alienation, but this isn’t just a love story with a sad ending. It’s more of a case study, a critique of the romantic mythology on which its appeal would seem to depend.A collaboration between Ron and Russell Mael — better known as the long-lived, pigeonhole-defying band Sparks — and the director Leos Carax, “Annette” opens with an overture in the key of anti-realism. The Mael brothers, who wrote the script as well as the songs, are in the recording studio. Carax and his daughter, Nastya, are behind the mixing board. The cast and crew walk out into the street, and Driver and Cotillard slowly move into character. He puts on a flowing dark wig and then a motorcycle helmet. She climbs into a black SUV. They are now Henry and Ann. The boundary between artifice and actuality has been clearly marked for us; for these two it will be blurry, permeable and treacherous.Carax, whose feverishly imaginative features include “Pola X” and “Holy Motors,” has never had much use for the naturalism that serves most filmmakers as a default setting. The world of “Annette” has some familiar place names (including Tokyo, London and Rio, though most of it takes place in Los Angeles), but it is a land beyond the literal, a figment of stage design, dream logic and hallucinatory expressionism. The fact that the characters sing more than they talk — even during sex — is in some ways the least strange thing about the movie, which casts a series of mechanical puppets in the title role.Annette is the name of Ann and Henry’s daughter, and to explain her centrality to the narrative may be to risk a spoiler or two. Not that the plot is terribly intricate or surprising; it unfolds with the relentless momentum of a nightmare. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Annette in the baby carriage. What follows is drunkenness and murder; shipwreck, ghosts and guilt.But let’s go back to the beginning, to Henry and Ann in their season of mutual enchantment. Though each has a flourishing career, it’s Henry who claims most of the attention. That’s partly charisma, partly narcissism, and entirely consistent with his identity as an artist. He is the star and author of “The Ape of God,” a one-man show (with backup singers) that traffics in the kind of belligerent self-display that popular culture sometimes mistakes for honesty.Bursting onto the stage in a hooded bathrobe that falls open to reveal tight boxer briefs and an impressively sculpted torso, Henry harangues the audience with intimate, often obnoxious confessions. Shame and bravado are the alternating currents of his act, yoked by hyper-articulate, cynical self-consciousness. The audience laughs, though Henry isn’t telling jokes so much as daring the public to take his aggression seriously.Ron Mael (in tie) and Russell Mael (in black) wrote the film’s script and songs. The brothers, better known as the band Sparks, also appear in this opening scene of the movie.Amazon StudiosIs he an internal critic of toxic masculinity or an exceptionally magnetic example of it? That may be a distinction without a difference. With Henry, as with some of his hypothetical real-life analogs, it’s hard to separate the art from the artist because the defiance of such a separation is the whole point of his art.Ann is a different kind of artist, and a less insistent presence in the film. She seems, at times, to recede in the shadow of her husband’s larger, louder personality. This can seem like a failure of imagination on the part of the filmmakers, who depict her more as the object of Henry’s desire, jealousy and resentment rather than as a creative force in her own right. She has more in common with the Cotillard characters in “Public Enemies” and “Inception” than the ones in “Rust and Bone” or “La Vie en Rose.”That imbalance turns out to be crucial to this film’s indictment of the cruelty that is excused in the name of genius, its unsparing dissection of male entitlement. This is less a love story than a monster movie, about a man incapable of grasping the full reality of other people, including his own wife and child. (The “not all men” objection is embodied by Simon Helberg, playing a conductor who is Henry’s sometime rival for Ann’s affection.) The consequences are lethal, and the final reckoning is as devastating as anything I’ve seen in a recent film, musical or not.Driver, some of whose best roles to date have been as troubled men of the theater (see also “Girls” and “Marriage Story”), doesn’t waste energy in trying to make Henry likable or in overselling his villainy. Instead, he’s entirely believable, not because you understand Henry’s psychological makeup, but precisely because you can’t. His megalomania distorts everything. He’s not larger than life, but he thinks he is, and Driver’s performance is perfectly scaled to that contradiction.“Annette” masters its own paradoxes. It’s a highly cerebral, formally complex film about unbridled emotion. A work of art propelled by a skepticism about where art comes from and why we value it the way we do. A fantastical film that attacks some of our culture’s most cherished fantasies. Utterly unreal and completely truthful.AnnetteRated R for Sturm und Drang. Running time: 2 hour 19 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More