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    ‘Metal Lords’ Review: Shred of the Class

    Teenage boys battling angst and bullies form a heavy metal band in this genuine Netflix movie.In the charming coming-of-age movie “Metal Lords,” misfit teenage musicians form a band. Not just any band — a heavy metal band. These are kids who lag in gym class and get shoved into lockers, but in the privacy of their makeshift practice space, they sure know how to solo, riff and headbang.The movie (on Netflix) opens on a basement band practice. Posters of Motörhead, Black Sabbath and Slipknot line the walls, and a stack of amps is ready for use. In the middle of it all is our hero, Kevin (Jaeden Martell), who takes his cues — musical, social and otherwise — from his bestie, Hunter (Adrian Greensmith). Kevin’s on drums while Hunter assumes lead vocals, guitar and fantasies of stardom.Don’t you dare confuse them with a pop group. These boys are hardcore. Just take their band name: It starts with “skull” and ends with a word too obscene to use in their local Battle of the Bands. A metal fanatic and rabble-rouser, Hunter is hellbent on winning the music contest; Kevin is more intrigued by parties with the popular crowd and by his budding romance with a mercurial cellist named Emily (Isis Hainsworth, a magnetic newcomer).Written by D.B. Weiss (“Game of Thrones”) and directed by Peter Sollett (“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”) — and with Tom Morello of the rock band Rage Against the Machine as executive music producer — the movie shows a keen awareness of how nerdy, shy or bullied children are drawn to metal music for its brute power and the high caliber of expertise it demands. Conventional but genuine, “Metal Lords” comprehends the riot of adolescent emotions and the many ways teenagers manage them.Metal LordsRated R for teen rage against the machine. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘As They Made Us’ Review: If the Apple Falls, Who Retrieves It?

    A dutiful daughter navigates the consequences of her parents’ failings in Mayim Bialik’s engagingly compassionate directorial debut.,For her directorial debut, Mayim Bialik — the neuroscientist, sitcom star, and finalist for the “Jeopardy!” host gig — hewed to what she knew: reckoning with the legacy of volatile parents.At the start of her smartly observed, well-cast drama “As They Made Us,” a young Abigail and her brother, Nathan, listen from the back seat of a car while their parents downshift into a nasty argument. It’s clearly not a one-off. The youngsters appear in flashbacks illuminating the power of their parents’ undiagnosed mental illness to shape the adults they become — especially Abigail (Dianna Agron).Dustin Hoffman and Candice Bergen portray the parents as they were — when eruptions of violence and stubborn denial were routine — and as they are now. Eugene is suffering a degenerative condition that exacerbates confusion; Barbara, so uncomfortable with vulnerability, doubles down on control even as she leans on Abigail.Abigail has two children, has been divorced a year and is a columnist for a glossy magazine, The Modern Jew. She’s smart, overtaxed and a textbook dutiful daughter. Decades earlier, Nathan (Simon Helberg) high-tailed it and remains estranged.Bialik gets adroit work from the ensemble. Helberg brings moving nuance to Nathan’s sullen reckoning. Justin Chu Cary keeps Abigail’s love interest on the grown-up side of what could have been a too-good-to-be true character. Still, even with veterans like Hoffman and Bergen, it’s Agron’s film. She and Bialik make Abigail’s filial loyalty as sympathetic as it is exasperating, and as rife with difficult truths about aging as it is understatedly hopeful about growing up.As They Made UsRated R for abusive and explosive language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    ‘Return to Space’ Review: Eyes on the Skies

    Platitudes prevail in this overlong documentary about the partnership between NASA and SpaceX.Glowing with grandiose pronouncements and uplifting sentiment, “Return to Space,” a draggy documentary about America’s first manned spaceflight since 2011, could be easily repurposed as promotional material for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.This is in part because the company’s decades-long effort to design a reusable rocket is presented almost entirely in altruistic terms, the tests and failures cushioned by a cloud of for-all-mankind babble. NASA’s space shuttle program might have ended 11 years ago, but the need to blast our astronauts into the thermosphere (and onto the International Space Station) remains. Enter Musk, whose belief that humans will be a “multi-planet species” — and whose company was the only viable option — made him the perfect candidate for a $1.5 billion government contract to deliver rockets to NASA.While the filmmakers, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, struggle to wring drama from weather delays and anxious suits clustered around consoles, we hang out, pleasantly enough, with the two delighted astronauts (Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken) who will make the flight. Footage from multiple sources (including video diaries and NASA space cameras) is woven together with interviews containing more starry-eyed boosterism than compelling information.Aside from a few grumpy lawmakers, “Return to Space” is notable for its almost total lack of naysayers regarding this public-private collaboration. Ignoring the transactional in favor of the inspirational, the film pays no heed to SpaceX’s commercial endeavors — watching it, you’d think making money was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.“We made a point of humanizing Elon,” Chin says in the production notes. Yet the partnership’s uninvestigated details seem consequential, and skeptics might be forgiven their anxiety about what tech companies could get up to in outer space. We’ve seen what they’ve done on Earth.Return to SpaceNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Aline’ Review: Tale as Odd as Time

    Celine Dion’s life story gets an unconventional telling from the French filmmaker Valérie Lemercier in this creative but flawed biopic.The best compliment one can give the French serio-comic filmmaker Valérie Lemercier’s “Aline,” a biopic of Celine Dion in which Lemercier plays a fictionalized version of the pop star from infancy through widowhood, is that it evokes the disorientation of discovering the singer as she was on her first album: a 13-year-old with snaggleteeth. The movie’s passion is incredible — but, boy, is it embodied in something awkward.There is barely time to adjust to the sight of the adult Lemercier shrunken through cinematic trickery to the size of a child before we’re forced to grapple with the dawning awareness that this tribute is intended to be heartfelt. “Aline” is no prank, even though the cinematography is as static as a Saturday Night Live skit. The director and her co-writer, Brigitte Buc, whisk through Dion’s timeline with efficiency. Lemercier observes the singer, here renamed Aline Dieu, as she shifts from ballads belted to her mother (Danielle Fichaud) to ones aimed at her Svengali and husband-to-be (Sylvain Marcel), who is sincerely presented as her one great love. Lemercier trots out Dion’s famous outfits and interviews, her 1998 Academy Awards performance of “My Heart Will Go On” and, when the action shifts to Dion’s Las Vegas residencies, does a quite good job imitating the star’s coltish, unpredictable dance moves.All “Aline” needs is a point. The closest thing to one is Lemercier’s insistence that Dion wasn’t simply a larger-than-life icon but a mortal, too, with relatable worries about her children, her sleep schedule and, er, getting lost in her 40-room mansion. To this end, in a film crammed with covers (splendidly sung by Victoria Sio), Lemercier opens and closes with “Ordinaire,” the Robert Charlebois song: “I am not a circus freak,” her star sings, adding, “I’d like to be understood.”AlineRated PG-13 for grace notes of sexual situations and language. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Review: The Director Lloyd Kaufman Returns With a Shakespeare Spoof

    Kaufman, the king of lowbrow, is back with this lusty parody.Should you be among those lamenting the lack of whale feces and exploding genitalia coming to a theater near you, not to worry: Troma Entertainment hears your pain. And with “#ShakespearesShitstorm” — billed, I kid you not, as a musical adaptation of “The Tempest” — the durable director Lloyd Kaufman lobs multiple notions at the screen to see what sticks. In a movie held together with this many slimy fluids, pretty much everything does.A good-natured dig at addiction, Big Pharma and the judgmentalism of liberal elites, the movie follows the efforts of a wronged scientist (Kaufman) to exact revenge on the sleazy head of an avaricious drug company (Abraham Sparrow). A lucid plot, though, is surplus to requirements as we’re dragged into a debauched shipboard party (cue the flatulent whales) and an interminable crack house orgy, while Kaufman and company gleefully lampoon social-media warriors and cultural appropriation. Wiggling women and tumescent men bump up against a revolting spoof of the elevator scene from “The Shining” (1980), and an animated sequence from the talented Josh Stifter briefly raises the tone. Excrement and other forms of ejaculate spurt continuously, suggesting that this bona fide abomination was even more disgusting to act in than to watch.It’s all quite insane, if par for the course for Troma, which has been churning out these low-budget curios for close to 50 years now. As sitcoms are to TV and Pink Floyd is to vinyl, Kaufman’s film feels made for a more nostalgic medium and a more substance-enhanced viewing experience. Its makers, however, deserve praise simply for living up to that doozy of a title.#ShakespearesShitstormNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Girl and the Spider’ Review: Where Did I Put That Thing?

    The twin brothers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher have created a wonderfully discombobulating feature about an apartment move.With “The Girl and the Spider,” the Swiss filmmakers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher, the identical twins behind the exceptional debut “The Strange Little Cat,” have made their second feature in a row that invites viewers to get lost in an apartment — or in this case, more than one.Set over two days, “The Girl and the Spider,” in its simplest outlines, tells the story of how Mara (Henriette Confurius) helps Lisa (Liliane Amuat), her roommate, move into a place of her own. We spend time in the new apartment and meet others assisting with chores, then return to the old place (and some friends’ apartment on a lower floor) for a farewell party that night. Everybody wakes up the next day burned out. By sunset, Mara and Lisa’s friendship will have entered a new phase.But a synopsis could barely describe how thoroughly the Zürchers — the credits list Ramon as director but call it “a film by” both of them — have confounded a sense of the ordinary. It’s not just that certain behavior seems off. (Mara professes to “lie without batting an eyelid.”) The shooting and editing are wildly unconventional.Entrances go unestablished. Shots fixate on odd details. Cuts react to offscreen noises and dialogue. (The clamorous sound design is as offbeat as the visuals.) Flashbacks and flights of fancy arrive out of the blue. The 1980s French hit “Voyage Voyage” — heard in bits on piano, then in pop form, then on piano again — becomes a disorienting motif.The movie opens with a shot of a floor plan that Mara has made for Lisa (she notes that a malfunction briefly scrambled the PDF), and the Zürchers in effect ask viewers to map their way through a tangle of spaces and relationships, with flirtations and suspicions peeking through the corners. The film demands and rewards repeat viewings; it’s different, and more entrancing, every time.The Girl and the SpiderNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘La Mami’ Review: Tough Love

    This documentary about the den mother of dancers at a Mexico City cabaret is vérité at its best.At the Cabaret Barba Azul, women get paid to dance and drink with the male patrons, a custom that dates back to the 1930s. In the beautifully-rendered documentary “La Mami,” the director and cinematographer Laura Herrero Garvín (“The Swirl”) immerses us in the behind-the-scenes world of these dancers through the lens of their den mother: Doña Olga. Like them, Doña Olga also used to spend her nights dancing for pesos, but after 45 years working various jobs at the cabaret to support her five children, she has settled into her post in the club’s dressing room-bathroom combo. There she regulates the distribution of toilet paper with an iron fist, and doles out a charming mix of motherly nurturing and fierce rebukes. Like this bit of poetry: “Men are only good for two things: for nothing, and for money.”Garvín’s adept camerawork allows the story to unfold so seamlessly in its vérité style, that the film emanates the magic of a scripted drama without revealing any noticeable interference. And it creates a palpable depth of intimacy too: from Doña Olga waving incense and whispering prayers throughout the club before the doors open, to the nervous new girl Priscilla putting on makeup in the mirror.The triumph of “La Mami” is that in depicting how Doña Olga and the Barba Azul dancers navigate a job where male pleasure dominates, the film does not look down on them, but instead revels in their humanity. And in so doing, this remarkable portrayal of female friendship offers a poignant, elemental take on the lives of working-class women in urban Mexico today.La MamiNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Nehemiah Persoff, Actor With a Familiar Face (and Voice), Dies at 102

    His most prominent roles included three tenderly caring parents, but he was most associated with the dapper gangsters he portrayed in the movies and on television.Nehemiah Persoff, a ubiquitous character actor whose gravelly voice and knack for conveying an air of menace magnified his portrayals of a bevy of sinister types, most notably a half-dozen Prohibition-era gangsters, died on Tuesday in San Luis Obispo, Calif. He was 102. The cause was heart failure, his grandson, Joey Persoff, said.For decades Mr. Persoff was one of most recognizable faces on television, by face if not by name; he was seen on hundreds of shows, beginning in the late 1940s. He usually played a supporting character, sometimes kindly, sometimes malevolent, but, given his gift for dialect, frequently with an undefined foreign accent.He appeared on such durable series of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s as “Gunsmoke,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Route 66,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Columbo,” and he continued into the 1990s, with parts on “Law & Order” and “Chicago Hope.”Mr. Persoff, a native of Jerusalem who emigrated to the United States when he was 9, was in real life an amiable father of four who was married to the same woman for seven decades, and who in retirement became an accomplished painter.His most prominent roles included three tenderly caring parents: a Jewish refugee escaping the Nazis and hoping to reunite with his daughter in Havana in the 1976 film “Voyage of the Damned”; the father of an Orthodox Jewish girl in early-20th-century Poland who poses as a boy so that she can study in a yeshiva, in Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl” (1983); and the voice of the father of Fievel Mousekewitz, the Russian Jewish mouse who emigrates to the United States to escape marauding cats, in the 1986 animated feature “An American Tail” and its sequels.Yet he was most associated with the dapper gangsters he portrayed in the movies and on television. He was the underworld boss Johnny Torrio in the 1959 film “Al Capone,” which starred Rod Steiger in the title role. In the TV series “The Untouchables,” he played two different real-life gangsters: Jake Guzik, the financial brains of Capone’s bootleg liquor gang, in a few episodes, and Waxey Gordon, New York’s king of illicit beer, in a 1960 episode in which he gleefully aimed a Tommy gun into a competitor’s barrels.His most memorable supporting role may have been his outsize parody of a mobster, Little Bonaparte, in the classic Billy Wilder comedy “Some Like It Hot” (1959). Two of his lines from that movie are often quoted by film buffs.In one, addressing a mob gathering disguised as an opera lovers’ convention, he says: “In the last fiscal year we made a hundred an’ twelve million dollars before taxes … only we didn’t pay no taxes!”And after a hit man pops out of a huge birthday cake and machine-guns another mobster, played by George Raft, and his entourage, Mr. Persoff tells an inquiring detective, “There was something in that cake that didn’t agree with ’em.”Mr. Persoff as the real-life mobster Jake Guzik in a 1962 episode of the TV series “The Untouchables.” He portrayed the gangster Waxey Gordon in another episode.Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesMr. Persoff once said he loved working on “The Untouchables” because he could lock horns with Elliot Ness, the federal agent played with righteous hauteur by Robert Stack.“Bob Stack was so nose-in-the-air stuck up, he was so correct and superior, so aristocratic, that without any effort on my part it brought out the rebel in me,” he told the magazine Cinema Retro. “It struck a vein of anger in me, anger which in my mind is such an important part of what makes a gangster.”Nehemiah Persoff was born in Jerusalem on Aug. 2, 1919, during the years when the territory was transitioning from Ottoman rule to a British mandate. His father, Shmuel, a silversmith, jeweler and art teacher, decided that his prospects would improve in America and emigrated on his own. After six years he brought over his wife, Puah (Holman) Persoff, a homemaker, and his three sons and two daughters.It was the start of the Depression, and the family lived in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, though they eventually moved to the Bronx.Nehemiah attended the Hebrew Technical Institute to study the electrician’s trade, and his first job was as a signal maintenance worker on the old IND subway line. It paid him $38 a week, more than his father earned.His introduction to acting happened by chance: He was asked to perform a walk-on in a play that was the highlight of a Zionist organization’s function. The experience planted a notion, and after completing three years in the stateside Army, he took a leave from subway work and began studying acting.Mr. Persoff was among the first students at the Actors Studio, where his teachers were Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, proponents of method acting. His fellow students included Julie Harris, Martin Balsam, Cloris Leachman and Kim Hunter.His first bit part was in the 1948 film noir “Naked City,” but it was another small part that brought him to widespread attention: He was the silent cabdriver in the memorable taxi scene in “On the Waterfront” (1954). His face appears briefly after one of film lore’s most famous conversations, when Marlon Brando tells Rod Steiger: “I could’ve had class, I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been a somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”Mr. Persoff was usually cast in small supporting parts, but he often turned them into gems of characterization. One was Leo, the crooked accountant, in Humphrey Bogart’s last picture, “The Harder They Fall” (1956). He coolly tells a furious Bogart that out of the $1 million gate for a championship fight, the story’s overmatched boxer will receive $49.07.In 1951, Mr. Persoff married Thia Persov, a distant relation who had been a nurse with the Palmach, a Zionist military group, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. She died of cancer last year. In addition to his grandson, Mr. Persoff is survived by three sons, Jeffrey, Dan and Perry; a daughter, Dahlia; and four granddaughters. He lived in the town of Cambria on the central Californian coast.In Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl” (1983), Mr. Persofff played the father of an Orthodox Jewish girl (Ms. Streisand) who poses as a boy so that she can study in a yeshiva.United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock PhotoWhile acting in Hollywood, Mr. Persoff kept his hand in live theater. In 1959, he starred on Broadway as the newspaper editor and essayist Harry Golden in a short-lived adaptation of Mr. Golden’s folksy book “Only in America.” It was the last of his more than a dozen Broadway appearances.In California, he starred as a cantankerous socialist in his 80s in the Herb Gardner comedy “I’m Not Rappaport” and as the milkman Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” And for almost two decades he appeared as Tevye’s creator, the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, in a one-man show for which Mr. Persoff adapted five of the writer’s fables.In 1975, he was awarded the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his supporting role in “The Dybbuk” at the Mark Taper Forum.When high blood pressure and other health problems forced him to reduce his workload, Mr. Persoff took up painting, studying in Los Angeles and producing watercolors that have been exhibited in galleries in Northern California. He kept painting until the last week of his life. In 2021 he published a memoir, “The Many of Faces of Nehemiah.”Beyond dialects and accents, he had a telling philosophy about acting. “If I’m playing a good guy, I’ll try to show that he has some bad in him,” he once said. “If I’m playing a bad guy, I’ll give him some dignity and love.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More