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      ‘Mothering Sunday’ Review: Sex, Death and Literature

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      A fine British cast is featured in this mildly transgressive love story set in the aftermath of World War I.It’s Mother’s Day in 1924, and England is a green and pleasant land of sturdy cars and bicycles, repressed emotions and class divisions. A familiar place, in other words, even — or especially — if your ideas about 20th-century Britain have been shaped by books, movies and prestige television.There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing egregiously amiss with “Mothering Sunday,” Eva Husson’s adaptation (from a script by Alice Birch) of Graham Swift’s 2016 novel. Pirouetting backward and forward from its highly eventful titular day, the movie samples a buffet of tried-and-true narrative offerings. It’s a love story about the mildly transgressive romance between a servant and a son of the gentry; a chronicle of literary awakening; a reckoning with the awful legacy of World War I and a foreshadowing of the social transformation that was to follow.Living through all of it is Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), an orphan who works in the household of the Nivens, a kind couple who wear their unhappiness like well-tailored tweed. They are played by Colin Firth and Olivia Colman, who appear in just a handful of scenes and stamp the rest with a seal of highest British quality. So does Glenda Jackson, in even fewer scenes as the famous novelist Jane will grow up to be.First, however, she must cycle off to meet her lover, Paul (Josh O’Connor, Prince Charles in “The Crown”), a privileged fellow whose parents are off at a picnic with the Nivens, who are part of their social circle. The servants are all given the day off, which means they can have sex and then sit around smoking with no clothes on.Paul, who is engaged to a young woman of his own caste, goes off to join the luncheon. Jane then spends a significant portion of the movie wandering naked through the house, gazing at family portraits, studying spines in the library and grabbing a snack in the kitchen. Her reverie, and the audience’s discreet voyeurism, is intercut with scenes that point toward the past and the future. Later, she will marry a philosopher named Donald (Sope Dirisu), whom she meets in a bookshop and encourages her writing, giving her a copy of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” on one of their dates.Earlier, the war took many of the young men in the area, including Paul’s two brothers and the Nivens’ only son. Mrs. Niven at one point tells Jane that she was lucky to have been “comprehensively bereaved” at a young age, as if that would inoculate her against further loss.But more tragedies lie in store, and they tear at the gauzy fabric of sensuality that Husson has woven. “Mothering Sunday” never conveys the intensity of erotic passion, the ardor of creative ambition or the agony of grief. Even though it is ostensibly about all of those feelings, it handles them with a tastefulness that is hard to distinguish from complacency.Mothering SundayRated R. Naked lunch. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Lost City’ Review: Raiders of the 1980s Blockbusters

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      Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum and a vamping Brad Pitt run around in a romantic adventure that you have seen before and will see again.If you don’t have a few hours to watch the cheerfully dumb comedy “The Lost City,” just stare at the poster. Almost everything you need to know about this nonsensical lark is crammed into the one sheet: the stars, the tropical location, the Bruckheimer-esque fireball. The poster is selling sex and violence and obvious laughs, with Sandra Bullock’s sequined purple onesie doing the heavy comic lifting. And while she and Channing Tatum are the headliners, the studio has hedged its bets by also cramming in a leering goat and a Fabio-ed Brad Pitt.The goat and Pitt are among the high points of the movie, a high-concept romp about a widowed writer, Loretta Sage (Bullock), making a tortuous re-entrance into the world. A successful romance novelist, Loretta writes books featuring a hunky dreamboat and throbbing verbs. For strained reasons, she is kidnapped while on a promo tour with the cover model for her books, Alan (Tatum). He tries to rescue her and soon they’re joking through a jungle adventure featuring a lost treasure, and a deranged rich villain (Daniel Radcliffe) and his minions. Bullets and jokes fly, not always hitting their targets.That’s more or less the movie, which is basically a vehicle for Bullock to play her most enduring role: Sandra Bullock, your supremely likable BFF. Genuine yet packaged, challenged but unsinkable, the Bullock BFF has been a mainstay for decades. She’s endured rough patches, as in “Speed 2,” but has always bounced back, buoyed by a shrewdly deployed, indomitable persona that’s wholesome, sardonic and goofy, though not (usually) insultingly so. Although she can handle a range of genres, she excels at comedy partly because she can play off a wide range of performers: Like all BFFs, she makes a generous double act.That said, it takes a while for Bullock and Tatum to find their groove, in part because he isn’t as comfortable in his lunkhead role as he needs to be. He’s playing a conventional sweet dope, a cliché role he handles fluidly when in Alan’s exaggerated cover-model drag, complete with flowing hair and peekaboo waxed chest. But he is less facile when his character comes off as impossibly stupid, moments he plays by affecting a bit of a Mark Wahlberg whiny singsong. Is it homage, coincidence — who knows? Whatever the case, Tatum seems happier when his character fares better too, allowing him and Bullock to settle into a breezy intimacy.For the most part, “The Lost City” delivers exactly what it promises: A couple of highly polished avatars quipping and hitting their marks while occasionally being upstaged by their second bananas (Da’Vine Joy Randolph included). There are some accommodations to contemporary mores. Tatum bares more skin than Bullock does, flashing his sculpted hindquarters in a scene that, like the movie overall, isn’t as sharp or as funny as it should be. But while Loretta isn’t as helpless as she might have been back in the old studio days, this is still about a man rescuing a woman whose eye makeup never runs even when she does.The director brothers Adam and Aaron Nee handle the many moving parts capably, working from a script they wrote with Oren Uziel and Dana Fox. Everything looks bright and in focus, and there are moments when the physical comedy pops, mostly when Pitt swashbuckles in. It’s clear that someone involved in the making of this movie is a fan of Robert Zemeckis’s 1984 romp “Romancing the Stone,” one of several adventure pastiches made in the wake of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” While “Raiders” transcends its inspirations with wit and Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking and “Romancing” tries hard to do the same, “The Lost City” remains a copy of a copy.It’s too bad that “The Lost City” isn’t more ambitious, because a woman writing her dreams into reality is a potentially rich riff on the Pygmalion and Galatea myth. Like “Romancing the Stone,” “The Lost City” opens with a scene from a book — cue the purple prose and dashing hero — that its novelist heroine is writing. In “The Lost City,” Loretta deletes the scene because it doesn’t work, but she can’t erase the hero. He’s a fantasy but he’s all hers. That’s the appeal of movies like this, which at a minimum understand that some of us hunger for fairy tales, even those that promise the stars and deliver Channing Tatum mooning.The Lost CityRated PG-13 for bloodless violence and partial nudity. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘7 Days’ Review: Mothers’ Matchmaking Goes Awry

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      Two Indian American youngsters are set up on a date that takes an unexpected turn in this pandemic-themed comedy.There’s an endearing perversity to “7 Days,” Roshan Sethi’s bad-date-gone-wrong caper that updates rom-com clichés with cultural and topical details. For one, the date between the Indian American youngsters Rita (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Ravi (Karan Soni) is arranged by their mothers via a matrimonial website. “Her hobbies include caring for her future in-laws,” Rita’s profile reads in the film’s opening. If you think catfishing is bad, meet mom-fishing: The fibs are laced with parental disappointment.Then there’s the timing. It’s March 2020, at the cusp of the coronavirus pandemic. Ravi — who turns out to be just as nerdy, neurotic and rigidly traditional as his profile promised — arrives with masks and surgical gloves and cans of Hard Lemonade that he pours out in horror when he realizes they’re alcoholic. Rita’s homely good-girl avatar, on the other hand, belies a ring of falseness. Sure enough, when their phones explode with news of shutdowns, and they head back to Rita’s, Ravi receives a righteous shock: Beer bottles and chicken wings are strewn over a never-used kitchen stove, and when Rita takes a call from “Daddy” … it’s not what Ravi expected.The masks are off (so to speak), and the two are stuck together for a week until Ravi can get a car home. The bickering and bonding that ensue are predictable, but for the most part, “7 Days” resists easy rom-com wins. The eventual Bollywood-style happy ending notwithstanding, Ravi and Rita’s incompatibility is too real — and Soni and Viswanathan’s comic timing too sharp — to permit a mawkish tale of opposites who attract. Instead, “7 Days” takes a warm, witty look at the kinds of companionship that can emerge even — or especially — in the most unromantic, pragmatic of circumstances.7 DaysNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Outside Noise’ Review: Walking and Talking in Vienna and Berlin

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      Three women laze around German-speaking cities in the languid third feature from the indie director Ted Fendt.“Outside Noise,” a sleepy excursion around Vienna and Berlin, is the third feature from the indie director Ted Fendt (“Classical Period”), and his first to take place mostly in Europe. Its focal characters are young women listlessly pursuing various, indeterminate creative callings. Fendt is more interested in tracing the architecture of their ennui than considering its cause or consequences, and the movie observes their leisure with a warm gaze.We spend most of our time with Daniela (Daniela Zahlner), a literary type partial to flowing linen clothing and messy buns. Natural light filters into her petite Vienna flat, where she suffers insomnia by night and aimlessness by day. The movie begins with Daniela as a New York City tourist. Upon her return to Europe, she stays with her friend Mia (Mia Sellmann) in Berlin, where Daniela reads perched on a windowsill, strolls the city and meets Mia’s graduate-school classmate, Natascha (Natascha Manthe), who asks Daniela, perhaps inappropriately, to lend her some money.This may sound like the beginnings of a plot, but “Outside Noise” hardly revisits the episode. While Fendt previously powered films with awkward humor, here the mood is ruminative. (Alongside Fendt, Zahlner, Sellmann and Manthe are credited as writers.) Fendt shoots on lovely 16-millimeter and 35-millimeter film, and the movie’s texture, along with the women’s musings, at times recall several female-led features from the late 1970s and early ’80s: “Girlfriends,” “Smithereens” and “Variety.” Although less vibrant than those predecessors, Fendt’s film is equally committed to capturing the aura of an independent city dweller finding her way.Outside NoiseNot rated. In English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘Superior’ Review: Double Fantasy

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      Two identical sisters reunite under mysterious circumstances in a compelling debut feature from Erin Vassilopoulos.Believe it or not, Alessandra Mesa and Ani Mesa may be one of the only identical-twin sister pairs to lead a theatrical feature since the Wilde twins, who romanced Andy Hardy in “Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble” in 1944. (Yes, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are — gasp — fraternal twins.) “Superior,” a compelling debut feature from Erin Vassilopoulos, casts the Mesas as Marian and Vivian, estranged siblings who reunite when Marian, a cagey chain-smoker, abruptly returns to their hometown claiming she’s just flown in from headlining a rock concert in Paris. “Kind of suspicious,” notes Vivian’s husband, Michael (Jake Hoffman), who grouses that Marian finished off his carton of milk.Outside of their matching faces, the sisters look like opposites. Hewing to the thriller’s manicured visual and sonic palette — it’s so tidy, the room tone sounds threatening — Marian slinks around in leather miniskirts while Vivian grocery shops in a beige trench coat. Yet the script, written by Vassilopoulos (the director) and Alessandra Mesa (the younger of the twin actresses by 14 minutes), reveals that the twins share one thing besides DNA: a terrible taste in men, whether a drag of a spouse who seeks a stay-at-home brood mare or a reptilian abuser (Pico Alexander) who prefers his women drugged and bound.The Mesas prove to be nimble, engaging performers. But for a long stretch, it’s unclear whether the menace of the movie that they are in is building toward anything. (There’s a limit to how often an audience is willing to fall for a hallucination.) When Vassilopoulos finally puts her characters in a squeeze, the tension remains oddly vaporous, as though she has tried to trap a thundercloud in a vice. The violence is presented with a deliberate languor that makes it feel insubstantial. Instead, it is the film’s shaggier pleasures that leave an impression, particularly its soundtrack of ’80s electro disco and a physically shaggy ice-cream parlor manager (played by Stanley Simons) who is too stoned to notice that his new employee is two different people.SuperiorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘You Are Not My Mother’ Review: Parental Misguidance

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      A lonely teenager is traumatized by her mother’s volatile behavior in this impressive horror debut.A baby in a stroller sits alone on a deserted nighttime street. A young mother sprawls on a bed, limbs bound and head shrouded. A teenage girl cowers before classmates who are threatening to set her on fire.These are only a few of the chilling images in Kate Dolan’s arresting debut feature, “You Are Not My Mother,” a skin-crawling merger of Irish folklore and family secrets. At once deeply metaphorical and genuinely distressing, the film hovers anxiously around Char (Hazel Doupe), a withdrawn and bullied teenager who’s becoming increasingly alarmed by the erratic behavior of her mother, Angela (Carolyn Bracken). When Angela disappears, only to reappear the following day without explanation, the mystery of her whereabouts is only deepened by the unfazed reaction of Char’s grandmother (Ingrid Craigie). In this household, the silences scream.Set just outside Dublin during the run-up to Halloween, “You Are Not My Mother” leaves much of its supernatural thrust to vagueness and allusion, focusing instead on Char’s responses to her mother’s terrifying transformation. Pale-faced and wide-eyed, Doupe is heartbreaking; but it’s Bracken who has the more challenging role, flitting from hostile to loving, severe to vulnerable, energized to near-catatonic. In one startling scene, performed to Joe Dolan’s toe-tapper “You’re Such a Good Looking Woman,” she slowly turns a simple dance into a petrifying act of predation.Imaginative and spooky, “You Are Not My Mother” shows just how frightening — and stigmatizing — a parent’s mental illness can be to a child. Trapped in her suffocating suburb, where steel-colored skies press down on crouching rooftops (the wonderfully moody cinematography is by Narayan Van Maele), Char is alone. If she should find a champion, it won’t be from inside her house.You Are Not My MotherNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 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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      ‘King Otto’ Review: For Greece, a Whole Different Ballgame.

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      Christopher André Marks analyzes the Greek national soccer team’s championship season under the leadership of a German coach.“King Otto,” which opens with a quote from “The Odyssey,” treats its retelling of a soccer underdog story as the stuff of myth. In 2004, the German coach Otto Rehhagel led the Greek national team to victory in the European Championship. The team had never even won a match at a major competition before. According to the closing titles, Rehhagel became the first foreign-born coach to win a major international soccer tournament for another country’s national team.In this documentary directed by Christopher André Marks, the coach, the players and others recount Rehhagel’s arrival in Greece as someone who didn’t understand the culture or speak the language. (In its opening minutes, “King Otto” makes clear that the offscreen filmmaker and Rehhagel also had a linguistic barrier to overcome.) Ioannis Topalidis, who became Rehhagel’s assistant coach and the interpreter connecting him with the players, emerges as one of the liveliest subjects.Somewhat gratingly, “King Otto” treats its story as a tale of national stereotypes colliding head-to-head. Vassilis Gagatsis, the president of the Hellenic Football Federation at the time, says he hired Rehhagel because he thought that “being a German, he would be able to instill the discipline that we Greeks lack.” One player says that the team “became calmer and cold-blooded” under Rehhagel. According to Gagatsis, the German coach turned out to have “the heart of a Greek.”“King Otto” is less grandiose and more granular when it goes match by match through the 2004 tournament. The briskly edited recap probably holds more suspense for those who didn’t follow the events than those who did.King OttoNot rated. In Greek and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 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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      ‘Bronco Bullfrog’: Hello Young Lovers

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      Barney Platts-Mills’s 1969 feature about aimless East End teenagers in love comes to Film Forum after a cinematic rediscovery.An auspicious first feature, Barney Platts-Mills’s “Bronco Bullfrog” fell between the cracks — a belated example of British “kitchen sink” naturalism that arrived in 1969 before the wave of disaffected youth films by Mike Leigh and Alan Parker.Still, the writer-director Platts-Mills lived to see his movie restored and revived, if not to enjoy its American rediscovery, heralded by a weeklong run at Film Forum in New York.Platts-Mills intended “Bronco Bullfrog” as a British equivalent of Italian neo-realism: A cast of nonactors recruited from the streets of London’s depressed East End enact a story that might have been their own. Indeed, the movie grew out of a short documentary, “Everybody’s an Actor, Shakespeare Said,” that Platts-Mills made about an improvisatory workshop established by the radical theater artist Joan Littlewood in the neighborhood.The camera tilts down from smoky factories to a world of grimy alleys, dreary housing projects and aimless teenagers, who are introduced smashing into a cheap cafe to find nothing more than a few pence and some stale cakes — the first of many disappointments. A similarly barren establishment is where diffident Del (Del Walker), 17, an apprentice welder with a bad Beatles haircut, first courts discomfited Irene (Anne Gooding), a gawky 15-year-old schoolgirl in a micro mini.The couple’s awkwardness is compelling. According to Platts-Mills — who at 25 wasn’t much older than his actors — the movie was largely improvised because the cast hadn’t bothered to read the script. Del and Irene are frequently at a loss for words but, in the Littlewood tradition, Platts-Mills gives their relationship a Shakespearean framework. Irene’s mother loathes Del as instinctively as Del’s father hates Irene. What brings the couple closer is precisely their inability to find a place to be together.The fantasy of escape is underlined by the movie’s title. Bronco Bullfrog (Sam Shepherd) is the neighborhood hero — newly escaped from reform school to embark on a dead-end career of petty larceny. Del and Irene suggest lumpen mods; Bronco is a suedehead with wide suspenders and polished work boots. He has style but no sense, happily hiding out amid cartons of stolen consumer goods he is unable to fence.Movies are part of the daydream. In a rare liberating moment, Del pays for a movie ticket then opens a theater’s side door for a small crowd of crashers that includes a jolly grandmother. A corresponding scene has Del and Irene venture into London’s West End to discover they don’t have enough money to see “Oliver!,” a candy-color musical treatment of criminalized youth.Platts-Mills’s film is unpretentiously atmospheric: The thick Cockney accents require subtitles, and Audience, an East End prog band, supplies a credible score. Its understatement impressed the New York Times critic Roger Greenspun who, appreciative, wrote that, “It takes a while, with ‘Bronco Bullfrog’ to realize that you are witnessing a love story, so free is it from the rhetoric of love, or love stories.”“Bronco Bullfrog” is essentially a study in frustration — economic, sexual, even cosmic. (Del matures at the very moment that his life unravels.) But its bleak ending is mitigated by the energy of the cast and the spirit of the filmmaking.Bronco BullfrogPlays Friday, March 25 through Thursday, March 31 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More