Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Intregalde’ Review: Oh, Be Good!

      by

      A Romanian satire charts what happens when some humanitarian aid workers set out to save others (and need to be saved themselves).Beware of laughing when watching “Intregalde” because your laughs will have a way of catching — and dying — in your throat. A sly, mordantly funny, at times brutal satire about altruism and its discontents, the movie offers something of an emotional workout. One minute you’re grooving on the story and the nice, warm feeling you get from watching Romanian charity workers dole out food and treats for Christmas. The next you’re squirming as they lose their bearings and their good intentions go ridiculously awry.At the heart of “Intregalde” is the tension between individual and community, and the age-old tug between self-interest and caring for others. What do we owe others? What do we owe ourselves? The movie doesn’t offer any obvious answers; it’s more interested in stirring the pot. But it still provokes the kind of searching questions that aren’t always asked outside of lecture halls, places of worship or newspaper columns. Yet, if you’re like me, I imagine that these are some of the very questions that — when you’re not hurriedly running on your gerbil wheels — haunt you, troubling your thoughts and sleep.The story takes place in a rural part of Romania that gives the movie its title, a sparsely populated area with beautiful hills, wide valleys, unpaved roads and a spooky loneliness. There, a group of boisterous volunteers from Bucharest has gathered to pass out donations to locals. The volunteers seem pumped with energy as they fill large plastic bags with cheese, cans of salmon and other offerings. The vibe is upbeat, almost giddy. The director Radu Muntean (he also co-wrote the script) plunges you right into the makeshift storehouse where the donations are hurriedly being gathered in an excited churn.As the camera energetically moves around the space, it at once catches the amped mood (as if it too were a volunteer) and discreetly nudges your attention toward individual people. Once they’ve loaded up, the volunteers clamber into muddied S.U.V.s, forming a humanitarian convoy to make the world a better place. You’re riding too, the camera having hitched along with some of these folks. They all look happy and seem smart and agreeable. But as they continue, drive on and off the road, admire the scenery, change cars and buy a sheep for a barbecue, they also come into lacerating focus.You settle in quickly with these characters, their smiles and the S.U.V.s’ tight spaces creating a kind of conspiratorial bond with them. The naturalistic dialogue is light on exposition, so you learn little about their backgrounds. Instead, they emerge through how they act and talk, most instructively with the locals. “It makes a difference to these people,” a charity worker says a bit too smugly after an early visit to a family. The visit goes fine, but the volunteers are overly familiar, and when they take a group photo with the recipients of their largess, I thought of how hunters pose with their prey.It gets worse, at times with painfully comic results, when the three workers you’re riding with drive deeper into the countryside. The light has begun to fade and the trees lining the road obscure the sky, darkening the scene and shifting the texture of the realism. The woman in the back, Maria (Maria Popistasu), asks her companions if they came this far last time. No, says Dan (Alex Bogdan), who’s riding shotgun. He owns the S.U.V., but Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu) is driving. Then they see a small figure in the middle of the road. “Move it, Forrest Gump!” Dan jokes. “Mind you don’t hit him!” Maria yelps.The figure turns out to be Kente (Luca Sabin), a weathered old man with sunken cheekbones and a hawkish profile. Shabbily dressed in clothes that look inadequate for the fast-approaching night, he greets the aid workers, inaugurating an amusingly absurd, confusing conversation. Kente babbles on about a mill; the workers struggle to understand what he’s on about even as they try to explain what they’re doing. Everyone talks at cross purposes, fraying nerves. But when Kente asks for a lift, the workers agree, a decision that instigates a cascade of misadventures and sets the movie’s ethical course.Like Forrest Gump, Kente is an enigma, though considerably less cutesy. He seems addled and hapless, and may be cognitively challenged, but he’s also mulish, incoherent, exasperating and cunning. Is he a holy fool, a trickster or just a lost soul in need of saving? Whatever else he is, he becomes a wedge that rapidly changes the dynamic among the workers and frays their solidarity. Maria, Dan and Ilinca have opinions about Kente and what they should do with him, and nearly every one of their ideas is bad.The first time I watched “Intregalde,” I recognized in the workers the desire, however naïve or ill-conceived, to play savior. Yet while the movie can be read as a skewering of bourgeois do-goodism, Muntean doesn’t punish his characters and he doesn’t slap his viewers around for their complicity in the horror show we call the world. Watching it again recently, I now saw a movie that, with humor, tenderness and flashes of filmmaking brilliance, looks at what happens when kindness is tested, masks are dropped and self-interest runs free. It’s all a mess and so are we, which I think is very much to Muntean’s point.IntregaldeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In Romanian, with subtitles. In theaters. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Ahed’s Knee’ Review: A Filmmaker’s Agony in the Desert

      by

      Nadav Lapid’s new film, about a brooding director much like himself, is a howl of rage at the state of Israeli society.“Ahed’s Knee” is the Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s fourth feature film. The first three — “Policeman” (2014), “The Kindergarten Teacher” (2015) and “Synonyms” (2019) — are in their different ways works of social criticism. They take aim at what Lapid sees as modern Israel’s political, moral and spiritual shortcomings, focusing on characters whose personal agonies mirror the national crisis.Though its themes are the same, this movie is different. It’s a howl of rage. The person doing the howling isn’t exactly Lapid, but someone who might easily be mistaken for him: a filmmaker in his 40s working on a project called “Ahed’s Knee.” There are other biographical details that link this fellow, known only as Y (and played by the raggedly charismatic Avshalom Pollak), with his creator. He’s in close contact with his mother, who works on his films with him and who is dying of lung cancer. Lapid’s mother, Era, who died of that disease in 2018, was his regular editor.The plot of “Ahed’s Knee” arises from a professional conflict that really happened to Lapid. (Y’s project is based on a more public event: a widely reported confrontation between Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian teenager, and Israeli soldiers in 2017.) There’s no doubt that this is, in several senses, a personal film. But that doesn’t mean that the character is simply the author’s mouthpiece; one of the things that gives this movie its raw, unbalanced energy is the indeterminacy of the distance between them.Y has a habit of standing too close. This is evident as soon as he meets Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a young woman who has organized a screening of one of his films. She is a big fan of his work, and also an employee of the Ministry of Culture, commitments that turn out not to be entirely compatible. The immediate, unnerving intensity that springs up between them is both a portent and a misdirection. Will this turn into the story of a troubled artist finding a new muse, or perhaps a #MeToo parable of male entitlement run amok?Both seem plausible, but what happens is more unsettling. Y’s movie is being shown at a public library in a village in the Arava, a sparsely populated, austerely beautiful desert region in southern Israel. Y, who is (like Lapid) from Tel Aviv, has never been there before. The strangeness of the landscape and the blazing heat may contribute to his emotionally volatile state, but what pushes him to the edge is a document Yahalom asks him to sign. It’s a list of approved topics for his post-screening talk, and a promise that he’ll stick to them.Is this a bureaucratic formality or a sign of creeping fascism? Yahalom’s request seems to confirm Y’s darkest suspicions about Israel’s drift away from democracy and cultural vitality, a brooding, passionate pessimism that will be familiar to anyone who has seen Lapid’s previous films. Unlike other politically minded Israeli filmmakers, he doesn’t concentrate on the Palestinian conflict or on the simmering culture war between Israel’s secular and religious citizens. When those matters come up, they appear as symptoms of a larger, less easily defined malaise having to do with the sacrifice of Jewish ethical norms, political ideals and intellectual traditions on the altars of power and materialism.There is something deeply conservative about this attitude, even if Lapid’s allegiances — and Y’s — are clearly on the left. The difference between the two directors might just be that Lapid gives vent to his despair by making a movie — with beautiful, hallucinatory shots of the Arava and splinters of comic absurdism — whereas Y throws a tantrum, alienating his audience and humiliating his biggest fan.Or: the real filmmaker retreats into his art, whereas his fictional counterpart is bold enough to make a scene, hurt some feelings and possibly risk his own comfort and career. Neither one asks to be taken as a hero. Y, on a dating app during the pre-screening reception, boasts to a potential companion that he won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival. That’s where “Synonyms” was awarded the Golden Bear. The privileges granted to artists can always be held against their art, and so can their personalities. It’s possible to reach the end of “Ahed’s Knee” with just one question in mind: What is this guy’s problem? The answer is complicated, because it isn’t only one guy’s problem.Ahed’s KneeNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Love After Love’ Review: Elegance Without a Center

      by

      Ann Hui’s World War II-era film is lovely to look at but lacks emotional depth and resonance.Early on in “Love After Love,” the director Ann Hui introduces the viewer to an astonishing shade of green, an emerald lushness that radiates from the foliage surrounding a Hong Kong mansion on the eve of World War II. If only the rest of the overlong feature were so memorable.“Love After Love” is Hui’s 30th film, and an adaptation of a short story by the novelist Eileen Chang, whose fiction she has now used in three films. Hui, who rose to prominence as a director of the Hong Kong New Wave in the 1980s, has been less well-known in the West.This film is a sufficient showcase for Hui’s craftsmanship, but it lacks the emotional depth or resonance that its composed visuals, lofty setting, and melodramatic stakes would portend.The film, streaming now on Mubi, shows sympathy for its young protagonist Ge Weilong (Sandra Ma), who comes from Shanghai to live and work for her cold, aristocratic Aunt Liang (Faye Yu) in Hong Kong while pursuing an education. Attending the banquets and high-society functions of Hong Kong’s international upper class, her aunt’s social circle, Weilong unwittingly finds herself under the gaze of George (Eddie Peng), a former lover of her aunt’s with an outsize Don Juan persona.What could make for a captivating story involving a transgressive love triangle is, even on a micro level, ineffective. Interactions between characters feel hollow, no matter how well-lit or well-cast the scenes are, with a passionless non-ending that has little of substance to say about the period or its social morés. Nevertheless, the bright spots in “Love After Love” may encourage viewers to seek out more robust works in Hui’s cherished oeuvre.Love After LoveNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Alice’ Review: American Slavery and Black Power Collide

      by

      This time-bending thriller about a woman who escapes from slavery in 1973, starring Keke Palmer and Common, is a vapid historical romp.In “Alice,” a coming-of-age revenge thriller from the writer-director Krystin Ver Linden, the eponymous main character (Keke Palmer, “Akeelah and the Bee,” “Hustlers”) successfully flees an abusive enslaver (Jonny Lee Miller) only to discover the year is actually 1973. Yes, 1973, and she and her fellow “domestics” have been trapped in a century-old bubble on a Georgia plantation, where not much has changed since Emancipation.The events that the movie says it is inspired by reportedly date back to the 1960s, but Ver Linden pushes the clock forward to the Blaxploitation era so that she can achieve her fait accompli: After reading a stack of encyclopedias provided by her savior and sidekick, Frank (Common), and taking marching orders from Pam Grier in “Coffy,” Alice morphs into an Afro-sporting Black Power heroine ready to free her kin back on the plantation and exact revenge on her white captors.Ver Linden wants us to view Alice as an empowered freedom fighter. Instead she lands as a caricature of one, as the film never really metabolizes or unpacks its conceit: the bonkers time-traveling predicament of its protagonist.Instead we’re made to sit through a microwave-dinner version of Black history — from slavery to civil rights to the Black Power movement — all while Palmer’s character shouts inadvertently comedic one-liners at her white enslavers like, “I don’t give a damn about your life!” Aside from the steadying cinematography (Alex Disenhof) and a few moments when Palmer leans into the more subtle aspects of her range, “Alice” takes the historic struggles for Black freedom in America and exploits them in the most vapid ways possible.AliceRated R for racial slurs, violence, torture and sexual assault. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Panama’ Review: Welcome to the Jungle, We Lack Fun and Games

      by

      Mel Gibson drops in from time to time in this predictable throwback thriller from Mark Neveldine.There is absolutely no need to brush up on geopolitics for Mark Neveldine’s macho thriller “Panama,” which might be a blessing: This over-plotted yet utterly predictable throwback is set in the waning days of Manuel Noriega’s presidency, when sorting out the C.I.A.’s allegiances in Central America was trickier than playing three-card monte. The movie is more interested in resurrecting the spirit of action flicks from the late 1980s, a time when men were brutes, women were pawns or eye candy, and declarative assertions passed for dialogue. “Nothing more rock ‘n’ roll,” Mel Gibson’s Stark whoops here, “than taking out the bad guys for the red, white and blue!”Gibson is only onscreen for a few scenes, abiding by the current career playbook used by actors of his generation who like an easy paycheck. The heavy lifting (and glowering, and killing) is done by Cole Hauser’s Becker, a dour Marine who, when not gunning people down, spends his time drinking on his wife’s grave. Once enlisted by Gibson’s character to acquire a Soviet helicopter for the Contras, Becker discovers to his grim satisfaction that he and the rebel fighters share a bottomless hunger for revenge — an appetite for destruction, one might say, particularly if that one person were the Contra leader in this movie who, while playing air guitar on a rifle, screams, “Welcome to the jungle!”“Panama” should be more fun, given that Neveldine was a writer and director of the giddily moronic “Crank” films, which he made alongside Brian Taylor. (This movie was written by William Barber and Daniel Adams.) But it’s mostly a lot of manic editing and caffeinated camerawork, each trying and failing to juice some excitement out of Hauser’s dull performance. There is a slow-motion shot of a snow leopard, sound-tracked by hair metal. It is delivered without a lick of ironic wit.PanamaRated R for brutal fracas and repeated references to rape. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Outfit’ Review: The Violent Measure of a Man

      by

      In this gangster exercise set in 1956 Chicago, Mark Rylance plays a tailor who has very large scissors and some sharp moves.The gangsters in “The Outfit” have plenty of tough moves, but none of these guys hold the screen like Mark Rylance when he just stands or stares — or sews. His character, Leonard, is a bespoke tailor who once worked on Savile Row and now practices his trade in an unassuming shop in Chicago. There, he snips and stitches with a bowed head and delicate, precisely articulated movements that express the beauty and grace of Rylance’s art.Sometimes, all you need in a movie is a great actor — well, almost all. Certainly Rylance’s presence enriches “The Outfit,” a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense. It’s a nostalgia-infused genre exercise set in 1956 that centers on Leonard, who, having left London after the war, now makes suits for a clientele that includes underworld types, some of whom use his shop for business. Day after day, he works in his somber, claustrophobic store while dodgy types parade in and out, dropping envelopes in a locked box. Like the box, Leonard is a mystery that the movie teases out one hint at a time.Leonard takes longer to open, although the box’s contents are central to the puzzle that also involves a clandestine recording, a secret romance, rampaging rival crews and the larger mysterious criminal enterprise that gives the movie its title. There’s also Leonard’s employee, Mabel (Zoey Deutch), one of two women in the mix; Nikki Amuka-Bird also pops in as a glamorous villain. For the most part, Mabel is around to greet the customers and brighten up the store’s gloomy interior: She smiles at one villain (Dylan O’Brien), gives the cold shoulder to another (Johnny Flynn) and so on.The director Graham Moore and his screenwriting partner, Johnathan McClain, move their limited pieces around, spill the requisite blood and modestly complicate the proceedings. The story is self-aware, chatty and thin; it plays out as an extended cat-and-mouse, though who’s who in this particular duet shifts over time, if not all that surprisingly. Mostly, the movie seems like it was concocted by a couple of cinephiles who wanted to play with genre for genre’s sake. And why not? That’s as fine a reason as any to dust off some fedoras and hire actors of varying abilities for some retro American gangster cosplay on a British soundstage.“The Outfit” basically consists of characters moving in, out and through the store’s two main rooms, spatial limitations that can feel stagy and be tricky to manage. This is Moore’s feature directing debut (he wrote “The Imitation Game”) but, working with the director of photography Dick Pope, he handles the space thoughtfully. With a muted palette, shifts in the depth of field and complementary staging and camera moves, Moore and Pope map the store’s (and story’s) geography from different vantage points. And, in sync with Rylance’s finely calibrated performance, they insure Leonard remains the visual axis.Rylance put on a fright wig to play William Kunstler in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and wore Mr. Ed-size choppers for his role as the eccentric zillionaire in “Don’t Look Up.” But he’s a master of restraint and he doesn’t need accessories to hold you as he proved with his mesmerizing turn in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War drama “Bridge of Spies.” Rylance’s role here isn’t as rich, but one of the attractions of “The Outfit” is that it allows him to etch his character in pockets of filigreed solitude. Leonard’s focused yet effortless meticulousness when he works — how his hands smooth the fabric and control his enormous shears — define this man more than any line of dialogue. You also get to see Rylance engaging with a worthy foil.That would be Simon Russell Beale, who plays Roy, a gangland boss. Roy enters about midway through the movie. By then, bullets have been fired and blood has splashed across the floor, developments that are nowhere as ominous or tense as watching Leonard and Roy have a polite little talk in the back. Beale has the more overtly showy role. But like Rylance, he builds his characters through meticulously orchestrated moderation — vocal and physical — that faint smile by smile, hushed word by word, shifts the very particles in the air. Together, Rylance and Beale create a little world and a movie within a movie that’s worth watching.The OutfitRated R for gun violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Deep Water’ Review: Love and Loathing in New Orleans

      by

      An unhappy husband raises suspicions when his wife’s lovers begin to disappear.Two decades have passed since Adrian Lyne made “Unfaithful,” maybe his best film, though not his best known. (That would be his 1987 sizzler, “Fatal Attraction.”) A slickly accomplished purveyor of the erotic thriller, Lyne doesn’t make love stories so much as lust stories — specifically, the way an incorrigible sexual appetite can rip a life apart.On paper, then, he seems the perfect choice to direct “Deep Water,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel about a dangerously sick suburban marriage. Vic (Ben Affleck) is retired, enjoying his tech-derived fortune by mountain biking and raising snails. (Glistening gastropod close-ups suggest this hobby has some ominous narrative purpose; let me know if you find one.) Vic’s gorgeous wife, Melinda (Ana de Armas) — rarely seen without a glass in one hand and a lover in the other — favors little black dresses that shrug off as easily as her sobriety. Vic might be tortured by her flagrant infidelities, but how can you stay mad at a woman who gets topless just to wash the dishes?Filmed in New Orleans and soaked in boozy parties where Melinda’s public humiliations of her husband earn the pity of Vic’s friends, “Deep Water” (a French version was released in 1981) is a ridiculous murder mystery that could have worked much better as a study of sexual masochism. (The marriage has no heat, yet there’s sly relish in Melinda’s cruelty and a psychological puzzle in Vic’s pained stoicism.) Alternatively, had the story been set in the 1950s of Highsmith’s novel, when divorce was more stigmatized and alcohol the favored alternative, Vic’s forbearance — not to mention all those parties — might have made more sense.As it is, Affleck is left with little to play but a sorry, perpetually glum cuckold. When the movie opens, a previous lover of Melinda’s has mysteriously disappeared. “I killed him,” Vic tells the dimwitted replacement (Brendan C. Miller), and we wonder if he’s capable of joking. And as Melinda’s flings — including a cheesy pianist who woos her by playing “The Lady Is a Tramp” — continue to vanish, a local writer (Tracy Letts) grows suspicious. Even Vic’s 6-year-old daughter (a delightful Grace Jenkins) looks at him askance.None of this is ever less than preposterous. Though heaven knows I’m grateful for any grown-up movie these days, “Deep Water” is in many ways a baffling return for Lyne, whose advertiser’s eye for the allure of an image is repeatedly undercut by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson’s messy, often mystifying screenplay. Eigil Bryld’s caressing camera is fully up to any task his director sets him, but the movie appears chopped into misaligned chunks and dangling loose ends, its scenes spat out as randomly as bingo balls.Originally intended for theatrical release, “Deep Water” has landed on Hulu, possibly because of nervousness over its themes. Yet there’s surprisingly little sex, and what there is has none of the vividness and tactility Lyne is known for. Like Vic’s snails, who must be starved before they can be consumed, “Deep Water” feels like a movie that’s had everything of interest well and truly sucked out.Deep WaterRated R for bored fellatio and passionate murders. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Jane Campion and the Perils of the Backhanded Compliment

      by

      Jane Campion’s comment about Venus and Serena Williams reminded our critic of his own night of ‘botched fanciness’ and racial slights.Something about the way the director Jane Campion went overboard on Sunday to identify with, then insult, Venus and Serena Williams at an awards show brought to mind a night of botched fanciness that happened to me. A couple Fridays ago, I went to see some art: a Faith Ringgold retrospective at the New Museum in the afternoon, with friends; Norm Lewis singing at Carnegie Hall in the evening. (That was a solo trip.) For both, I wore a suit.The Ringgold show requires three floors and includes her 1967 masterpiece “American People Series #20: Die,” a blunt, bloody racial-rampage frieze that would be pure physical comedy about the era’s racial cataclysms were it not for the helpless terror in the faces she’s painted (Black men, women and children; white men, women and children). The scale of the canvas helps. It’s huge. Ringgold has always painted Black women in a range of moods, feelings, conditions, beauty. She gives them faces that feature both personal serenity and indicting alarm.I planted myself in a tight corridor that featured three works at the alarm end of things — the “Slave Rape” trio, from 1972. Each is a warm, sizable canvas of a woman nude and agape, framed by patchwork quilting, a signature of Ringgold. I was taking my time with one called “Slave Rape #2: Run You Might Get Away” — the woman is mid-flight, loosely shrouded by leaves, a big gold ring in each ear — when two strangers (women, white) parked themselves between me and the piece and continued a conversation I had heard them having in an adjacent gallery. They noticed neither me nor the depicted distress nor my engagement with it. I waited more than a minute before waving my hand, a gesture that seemed to irritate them.“Is something wrong?,” one stranger asked.“You’re in my way,” I told her.“Please accept our deepest apologies,” said her friend. If a middle ground exists between sincerity and sarcasm, these two had just planted a flag. But they did move, though not immediately, lest I relish some kind of relocation victory, and kept their talk of real estate and art ownership within earshot.The Faith Ringgold painting “American People Series #20: Die,” from 1967, in an  exhibition at the New Museum.Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY; Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesAfter a drink with my friends I left for Carnegie Hall. A cab made sense. One pulled up, and the driver (male, brown) took a look at me, then noticed a white woman hailing a taxi up ahead and drifted her way, instead. When I jogged over to ask him what just happened — Is something wrong? — I was given no acknowledgment in the way only a guilty cabby can achieve. I chased the car half a block to photograph a plate number that you’d have to be Weegee to get just right. I’m not Weegee.I’d never been to Carnegie Hall. And I liked the idea that Norm Lewis was going to break me in. He played Olivia Pope’s senator ex on “Scandal” and one of the vets in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” He’s got a luscious, flexible baritone that I’d only ever encountered in recorded concerts on PBS. That night, backed by the New York Pops, he gave Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Marvin Gaye the polished jewel treatment and pumped “Ya Got Trouble” with enough breathless gusto to make you wonder, with all due respect to Hugh Jackman, why the current “Music Man” revival isn’t starring him.As a solo performer, this was Lewis’s first show at Carnegie Hall, too. And people were anxious to see him and their beloved Pops. In a queue in the lobby before the show, one such person (woman, white) was making a point to push past me when I turned to ask if she was all right.“We’re going to will-call,” she said of herself and the gentleman she was with.“Ma’am, I think we all are,” I said.“We’re members. Are you?” she asked.I lied, hoping a yes would stanch her aggression.“Of the Pops?”She had me.“I like Norm Lewis,” I told her.“We love the Pops.”Venus Williams, left, and Serena Williams at the Critics Choice Awards; “King Richard,” a movie about their family, earned a best actor award for Will Smith.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesI was thinking about my night out a week later when one of the world’s great filmmakers saluted two of the world’s greatest athletes in an acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards. Jane Campion had been given the directing prize for a sneaky-deep ranch drama called “The Power of the Dog.” From the stage, Campion (woman, white) saluted Venus and Serena Williams and announced that she had taken up tennis but her body had told her to stop. In her nervous excitement, Campion was charming. She then took curious note of her plight as a woman in the film industry by informing the Williamses that they’ve got nothing on her. “You are such marvels,” she said, through a grin. “However, you do not play against the guys like I have to.”The Williams sisters were in the room that evening because a smart, tangy movie about their family, “King Richard,” was in the nominations mix, alongside Campion’s. “King Richard” is not about the time in 2001 when a California crowd booed and slurred Venus and Serena and their father, Richard, at a top tennis tournament. It’s not about the many mischaracterizations of their bodies, skills and intent in the press and by their peers. It’s not about the insidiously everlasting confusion of one sister for the other, the sort of thing that, just a few weeks ago, took place on a page of this newspaper. It’s not even about their fight, Venus’s particularly, to get women’s prize money even with men’s “King Richard” is about how the sisters’ parents molded and loved and coached them into the sort of people who can handle sharp backhands and backhanded compliments with the same power and poise.Even though Campion’s errant backhand had flown wide, the room lurched into cheers. Some of the applause came from Serena Williams, who has watched many a shot sail long. I had to desist further thought about the meaning of Campion’s aside. It was too confused. Was this a wish for the establishment of gendered guardrails for directors at award shows or the elimination of such distinctions in sports? Are there no men to be contended with in tennis? The line separating argument from accusation and accusation from self-aggrandizement was murky. I thought instead about the costs of the murk.Sunday afternoon, the Williamses got dressed up to celebrate some art. And somebody stood before them and challenged the validity of their membership, here in Campion’s restricted vision of sisterhood. The next day, Campion gushed an apology. These slips and slights and presumptions have a way of lingering, though. Their underlying truth renders them contrition-proof. I had every intention of keeping my date with Faith and Norm to myself. These incidents aren’t rare in fancyland, and therefore don’t warrant a constant spotlight because standing in its glare is exhausting. But Venus. Her face does something as Campion speaks. A knowing cringe. She and her family came out to soak up more of the praise being lavished on art about their life. They were invitees turned, suddenly, into interlopers, presenting one minute, plunged through a trap door the next. Faith Ringgold would recognize the discomfort. She painted it over and over. Run you might get away. But you probably won’t. More