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      ‘The Contractor’ Review: The Pine Identity

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      Chris Pine and Ben Foster team up to play mercenaries in a solid thriller about losing your faith and finding yourself in a violent reckoning.Chris Pine often seems too pretty, too nice, decent and, well, intelligent for his movies. He’s comfortable sharing the screen with both men and women, and can persuasively shift registers, all while letting you see him thinking, not just emoting. His range elevates action movies like “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” a 2014 take on the Tom Clancy property. Even so, I forgot that I’d reviewed “Jack Ryan” until I looked it up recently. Like too many of Pine’s movies, it just didn’t stick.Multiple knowns and unknowns shape the careers of actors — the choices that they make and the good and baffling ones that are made for and despite them. For whatever reason, Pine has never taken off the way he should have. One obvious explanation is that unlike, say, Andrew Garfield or the Marvelites named Chris (Evans, Hemsworth, Pratt), Pine hasn’t slipped on a superhero suit. He did voice one of the title characters in the animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” but that was a collective rather than self-aggrandizing endeavor.And while Pine has done time in the superhero world (including as Wonder Woman’s squeeze), his biggest franchise turn as a headliner has been in the uneven “Star Trek” series, in which he plays Captain Kirk. (A fourth is apparently in the works.) Pine has made Kirk his own with a deft balance of personality and character homage that holds the center even when the movies collapse around him. He has also appeared in a raft of fine and middling smaller movies. What’s missing from his résumé is more work that’s sharp and distinctive enough to rise above the gray middle, the way that his 2016 western “Hell or High Water” did.Which brings me to Pine’s latest, “The Contractor,” a thriller that yearningly evokes the Bourne series while never approaching its level. (Pine even mentions that franchise in this movie’s production notes.) He plays James, an Army Special Forces officer recovering from a serious injury that he suffered out in the field, and that has nearly ruined one of his knees. It’s a character-defining detail (he’s vulnerable, physically and otherwise) that also works as a convenient plot device. But James’s struggles also extend to the home front: Like many American families, his is badly in debt and the bills keep coming.“The Contractor” has some serious things on its mind, notably James’s crisis of faith about service, nation and his military father’s legacy. The first hour or so sets up his situation steadily with introductions and explanations, along with a dramatic jolt that sets the narrative on its course: As he hobbles toward recovery, with bills spread out on the kitchen table, James is booted out of the Army without a pension for taking unsanctioned meds. He’s still a good guy, the story assures you, though it whiffs on assigning who’s to blame for his dire straits: him, his superior, the military or the bitter dregs of what’s still called the American dream?All these earnest sensitivities fade for a time once the story shifts gears, turning the movie into a tight, brutal thriller. Seeing no other option financially, with a small family to support — Gillian Jacobs does what she can with the rote wife role — James signs on with a private military firm. The energy picks up with the entrance of Ben Foster (Pine’s co-star in “Hell or High Water”), a former Army buddy who works for the outfit and now owns a big house and truck. The casting of Kiefer Sutherland as the company’s owner is a nice touch, mostly because you know that there’s a whole lot of serious trouble coming James’s way.Written by J.P. Davis and directed by Tarik Saleh, “The Contractor” finds its genre groove once James signs up with the company. As more pieces click into place, the filmmakers heat up the story and the atmosphere, creating a mounting sense of unease. James heads off to the owner’s ranch, where burly he-men help run a coffee company, presumably a nod at the veteran-owned Black Rifle Coffee Company (one of the Jan. 6 insurrections wore one of its logoed caps). At some point, amid all the wolfish smiles and bulging muscles, someone lobs an insult at Erik Prince, the founder of the private military firm Blackwater.The second half of the movie moves quickly, boom, boom, boom, and shows off Saleh’s ability to fluidly stage violent set pieces. James is sent to Berlin on an enigmatic assignment involving an mysterious scientist and, after some tension-ratcheting quiet, things rapidly go south. The great German actress Nina Hoss briefly shows up, adding a dash of glamour to the escalating mayhem. Pine and Foster sync up flawlessly, even when the dialogue fails them. This isn’t the reunion they deserve, but it’s nevertheless welcome. In silence and in action, they show you the unfathomable loss that the rest of movie never coherently expresses.The ContractorRated R for extreme gun violence. Running time: 1 hour 43 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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      ‘Gagarine’ Review: Head in the Clouds

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      Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh re-envision the demolition of the housing project Cité Gagarine — an aspirational symbol of French communism — with a heavy dose of magical realism.In August of 2019, Cité Gagarine — a once-aspirational housing project located in the eastern suburbs of Paris, one of the last strongholds of the French Communist Party — was demolished as a crowd of its former residents watched from a distance. In “Gagarine,” by the filmmakers Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, this real-life moment is re-envisioned with a heavy dose of magical realism, foregrounding the dreams of a new generation that build upon the structure’s utopian roots.An extension of the directing duo’s 2015 short, the movie was shot in and around Cité Gagarine during much of the same time that construction workers began clearing it out. As a result, “Gagarine” is part coming-of-age story, part historical document. In this latter guise, the film is a curious artifact, weaving archival footage of the community’s heyday into a fictional account of its recent demise.It follows Youri (Alséni Bathily), a soft-spoken Black teenager with a fierce passion for all things astronomical — his namesake, like the building’s, is the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Rattled by the sudden departure of his family and neighbors, Youri holes up in the building’s basement, an increasingly surreal abode complete with a vegetable garden and a makeshift planetarium — kind of like a spaceship.A humdrum drama unfolds as Youri agonizes over the loss of his community, deals with an unruly pal who’s turned to drug-dealing, and falls for a resourceful young woman (Lyna Khoudri) who belongs to a Roma family similarly facing housing-related injustices.Though Liatard and Trouilh center the experiences of underprivileged, immigrant groups in France, creating a sense of continuity between the past and present, the slight narrative is mostly shrug-inducing and sleepy. “Gagarine” is more interesting conceptually than it is in execution, but at least the filmmakers know to exalt the setting’s spectral qualities, adding dreamy, hypnotic touches to their phantom portrait of a place that is no longer of this world.GagarineNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bull’ Review: Vengeance Is His

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      The British crime thriller plays out a meat-and-potatoes (or bangers-and-mash) revenge story with suitable menace and more than a dash of Grand Guignol.The British crime thriller “Bull” is named after a small-time gangster seeking vengeance, but it could be short for “bullet.” Compact, lethal and nearly unstoppable, Bull (Neil Maskell) hits his targets, one after another, even though he can look like a scruffy dad, which he also is. He’s on the war path against Norm (David Hayman, with a face of placid malice), his former boss, whose daughter, Gemma, he married. (They have a son.)Bull was one of Norm’s heavies, until — as converging flashbacks reveal — Norm brought the hammer down on his son-in-law, years ago. Now Bull has returned, and the writer-director, Paul Andrew Williams, embraces this meat-and-potatoes (or bangers-and-mash) revenge story and its humble hard-man setting, while making visual asides to the lovely Kent countryside and a garish fair. Almost amusingly, Norm’s crew wear construction safety vests between brutal shakedowns.Williams stages the story’s sometimes grisly violence with variations in tempo, methods and mood, though Bull harbors a special fondness for mutilating people’s hands. It’s a world away from the cool of “The Limey,” another story of retribution that comes to mind because of the editorial shuffling and an echo of that film’s “Tell him I’m coming!” line. Williams and Maskell dip more into the cauldron of Grand Guignol, turning a gunfire ambush into an unholy apparition through slow motion and silhouettes.The film’s rejiggered timeline is a little hard to follow, but the climax swings for the fences and shows an unashamed verve for tale-telling that warms the cockles.BullRated R for gory payback by a gangster who has thought of little else. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘You Won’t Be Alone’ Review: Season of the Witch

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      A supernaturally altered young woman learns how to be human in this mesmerizing folk-horror tale.“You Won’t Be Alone,” the ravishing, wildly original first feature from Goran Stolevski, moves so hypnotically between dream and nightmare, horror and fairy tale that, once bound by its spell, you won’t want to be freed.Set in a mountain village in 19th-century Macedonia and drawing on regional folklore, Stolevski’s supremely confident script centers on Nevena (Sara Klimoska), an innocent young woman driven by an intense curiosity. To protect her from an ancient witch (Anamaria Marinca) who lusts after the blood of newborns, Nevena’s mother had hidden her in a cave from birth until her 16th birthday. When the witch returns on that date and abducts Nevena — having rendered her mute in infancy — the young woman embarks on an astonishing, shape-shifting journey of death and discovery.Unwaveringly committed to its singular vision, and softened by Matthew Chuang’s lushly seductive images, “You Won’t Be Alone” ponders more than one existential question. How should we understand human nature when we’ve never been nurtured? Soft scraps of narration, poetic and wonder-filled, allow us to glimpse Nevena’s thoughts as she accidentally kills a village woman (Noomi Rapace), opens her own chest cavity and stuffs the woman’s bloody organs inside. Assuming the woman’s shape, Nevena will go on to inhabit a series of villagers, mirroring behaviors and soaking up experiences.Along the way, this strange, deeply humane movie becomes a beguiling meditation on identity and gender, underscoring the precarity of women in a society ruled by men. Within its mystical borders, tenderness and savagery walk side by side, and a palm stretched out in friendship may conceal a witch’s claw.You Won’t Be AloneRated R for sexual assault and a satisfying revenge. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Babi Yar: Context’ Review: Unearthing Footage of a Nazi Massacre

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      Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, about the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews in 1941, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own.Over two days in September, 1941, German soldiers, assisted by Ukrainian collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kyiv. The massacre was one of the earliest and deadliest episodes in what is sometimes called the “holocaust by bullets,” a phase of the Nazi genocide that took place outside the mechanized slaughter of the death camps. These mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, are estimated to have taken at least 1.5 million lives.The Ukrainian-born filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, consisting of archival footage interspersed with a few tersely informative title cards, is called “Babi Yar: Context.” What’s meant by “context” isn’t so much a broad, explanation of the event — such as one finds in the historian Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands” — as a detailed visual narrative with a hole in the middle.When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they brought movie cameras as well as rifles. So did the Soviet Army when it took back Kyiv in 1943. Some of those cameras were instruments of propaganda; others were wielded by amateurs. The two sides left behind an extensive cinematic record, a pool of images that have mostly languished unseen since the end of the war. Weaving them together and dubbing in sound (the rumble of tanks and the murmur of crowds, with an occasional snippet of intelligible speech), Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.The killing itself took place off camera. What is astonishing is how thoroughly nearly everything that happened before and after the massacre was documented, in black-and-white and sometimes in color. The detail is unsparing and relentless: farms and villages set on fire by German soldiers; Jews being rounded up, humiliated and beaten; snowy fields strewn with frozen corpses; bombs exploding in downtown Kyiv; the public hanging of 12 Germans convicted of atrocities after the war.Though there is a military and political narrative to be gleaned from all of this, Loznitsa’s method (displayed in earlier found-footage films like “State Funeral,” about the aftermath of Stalin’s death) is to allow the human reality to speak for itself. A few prominent officials are identified — you may recognize Nikita S. Khrushchev, who became the leader of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic soon after the Germans were driven out — but what the film displays most vividly is the intense individuality of anonymous, ordinary people. History is a catalog of faces: city-dwellers and peasants; victims, perpetrators and bystanders; Germans, Jews, Russians and Ukrainians.Mostly, these people don’t speak. Toward the end, there are scenes of courtroom testimony, during which a German soldier and several witnesses and survivors talk about what happened at Babi Yar. Their words, in the absence of images, have a harrowing intensity beyond what any pictures might convey. So does the Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s 1943 essay “Ukraine Without Jews,” quoted onscreen to emphasize the enormity of what can’t be shown.Much of the rest of “Babi Yar: Context” works the other way around, finding an eloquence in actions and gestures that words might not supply. And also an element of indeterminacy, as you try to read the thoughts and feelings on those faces.There is a political, moral dimension to the work of interpretation that Loznitsa compels. After Kyiv, other cities like Lviv fall to the Germans; the streets fill with Ukrainians celebrating their victory as liberation from Soviet oppression. Girls in traditional costumes present bouquets of flowers to Nazi officers, and banners are hoisted proclaiming the glory of Adolf Hitler and the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. When Jews are rounded up, harassed and brutalized, local civilians are on hand to participate.Later, there are parades and flowers to welcome the Red Army. Hitler’s likeness is taken down and replaced with Stalin’s. You might wonder about the composition of the crowds. Did some of the same people who welcomed the German army as liberators also turn out to support the Soviet army’s return? Did residents of Kyiv who cheered the arrival of Nazi fighters also cheer their execution?Forcing you to think about these questions is one of the ways Loznitsa’s film draws you closer to the horror at its center, stripping away the easy judgment of hindsight as well as the layers of forgetting and distortion that accumulated around the massacre in subsequent decades.And of course “Babi Yar: Context,” completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own. The Babi Yar Memorial near Kyiv was damaged in early March by a Russian missile. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has claimed that one of his goals is the “denazification” of Ukraine, whose current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. The past that Loznitsa excavates casts its shadow on the present. Knowing about it won’t make anything easier, but not knowing can make everything worse.Babi Yar: ContextNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘Better Nate Than Ever’ Review: Castaway Seeks Broadway

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      Hearty performances elevate this effusive Disney+ family comedy, even as the movie itself is awkward in its handling of its core subject.Nate Foster (Rueby Wood), the stage-struck seventh-grader at the center of “Better Nate Than Ever,” is “different,” according to his father (Norbert Leo Butz). How so? Classroom discussion of the heavily implied answer to that question has recently come under fire in Florida — and isn’t directly stated in this shiny, otherwise effusive Disney+ family comedy. But it is signified with various degrees of directness: A rainbow-striped rabbit’s foot dangles from Nate’s backpack, and at one point it is revealed that Nate, a member of Generation Z, somehow has memorized a monologue from a 1986 episode of “Designing Women,” originally delivered by Dixie Carter.Nate has too much personality for the school play. Heck, he proves too much for the school-bus driver, whom he greets with a jaunty “Good day, guv’nor!” So when Nate’s parents leave his jock of an older brother, Anthony (Joshua Bassett), in charge for the weekend, Nate and his best friend, Libby (Aria Brooks), abscond on an overnight bus to Manhattan to see if he fits in — or better still, stands out — at an open audition for “Lilo and Stitch: The Musical,” an as-yet-unrealized idea that Disney seems to be gauging for Broadway interest.Tim Federle, who wrote the children’s novel on which this movie is based and makes his feature directing debut here, paints Times Square in cotton-candy colors. As a filmmaker, he doesn’t yet have the comic timing to prod a laugh from a montage of rats and garbage. But his leads deliver hearty performances that elevate the movie, particularly once we’ve had time to adjust to the gusto of Wood, whose wired performance has the flavor of Hugh Jackman’s exuberance squeezed into an espresso cup. The slight story is buttressed by the L.G.B.T.Q. affirmations, even if the movie is indirect in delivering them. At least the script finds creative ways to do that — as when Aunt Heidi (Lisa Kudrow), herself a struggling actor, sighs, “Some boys aren’t comfortable admitting they know every word to ‘Pippin.’”Better Nate Than EverRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘The Rose Maker’ Review: Purloined Blossoms for a Blue Lady

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      A boutique cultivator competing with industrial farms initiates a war of the roses in this gentle French comedy by Pierre Pinaud.The first flowers to grace the opening credits of this gentle French comedy are white roses in full bloom. Their petals are unblemished, and their milky hue seems luminous, a reminder that what appears to be white is a reflection of all colors. Horticulturists know it’s not easy to grow a perfect rose, and that principle will become the cornerstone of the plot in “The Rose Maker.” The film indicates its cinematic commitment with the perfection of these first roses — their almost shocking vibrancy complimented by a jovial Dean Martin tune. It’s easy for characters to say they grow such a flower, and another achievement entirely for filmmakers to find one to display onscreen.Narratively, these unparalleled blooms belong to Eve (Catherine Frot), a rose cultivator who has inherited her family’s prestigious farm. Yet despite Eve’s boutique care, industrial farms sell more roses and win more prizes, while Eve struggles to keep her small business afloat. Eve is prone to pessimism, but her faithful secretary, Véra (Olivia Côte), hires three pairs of helping hands to revitalize the farm. At first Eve protests, but soon she bonds with her amateur, even miscreant employees, enlisting them first in a heist to capture a rare rose, and then in the delicate efforts to grow fields descended from this stolen blossom.The director Pierre Pinaud doesn’t strain the high jinks for belly laughs, nor does he push for tears when it comes to forging the cross-class bonds between his characters. It’s a relaxed film, one that allows the audience to sit back and, if not smell the roses, then at least appreciate them. Just as they are for Eve, the flowers are this film’s raison d’être — a reminder that glimpsing beauty is reason enough.The Rose MakerNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Devil You Know’ Review: A Thriller Thinner Than Blood

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      This misbegotten family drama, starring a squandered all-Black ensemble, begins with stolen baseball cards.Recently released from prison, Marcus Cowans (Omar Epps), a recovering alcoholic, searches for a fresh start. He comes from a steadfast family, of four flatly sketched siblings, who worry about his well-being. But it’s his brother Drew (William Catlett), unemployed, alone, and hanging around a bad crowd, who’s concerning.Written and directed by Charles Murray, “The Devil You Know” is a grim crime and family drama that struggles to find a consistent tone. It begins with a jarring one-shot of three thieves infiltrating a quaint suburban home. Two occupants are murdered, another lies in a coma. At Drew’s apartment, Marcus discovers a book of valuable baseball cards, reportedly stolen from the vandalized home. Could his stoic brother be capable of the heinous violence that occurred at the house?Aimless and incoherent, the film maps the “no good deed” trope to Marcus. He tips off the police about Drew’s shady associates. The move causes Marcus’s devoted father (Glynn Turman) to suffer a heart attack and his loving girlfriend (Erica Tazel) to leave him. It also leads Joe (Michael Ealy), a tedious detective, to knock on his door.The soft-spoken Epps is frustratingly miscast. The editing by Geofrey Hildrew and Scott Pellet limps lifelessly along, and the direction lacks the necessary pulse for a story line with more twists than a low-budget soap opera. The film teases a confrontation between Marcus and Joe, climaxing with a meeting recalling Michael Mann’s “Heat.” But the oblique framing, undercutting the veteran actors, only reminds viewers of what “The Devil You Know” isn’t.The Devil You KnowRated R for violence and intense language. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More