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      ‘The Forever Purge’ Review: Anarchy Ever After

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      This newest installment in the dystopian franchise, set in a Texan town, pits white supremacists against immigrants and their allies.James DeMonaco’s scripts for “The Purge” play out like drafts from the edgiest guy in your Intro to Creative Writing class. He asks us to imagine America at its hypothetical worst: The government has instituted an annual daylong crime spree called the Purge, and protagonists must fight their way through the waves of rabid murderers they once called neighbors. They’re the sort of plots that only hold up if you buy the misanthropic thesis of something like “Joker,” but DeMonaco likes to throw a few hot political topics into each script to keep things fresh. “The Forever Purge,” directed by Everardo Valerio Gout, tries to criticize American racism against Mexicans.Adela (Ana de la Reguera) and Juan (Tenoch Huerta) are new immigrants to the United States settling in for their first ever Purge. Juan works on a ranch for the wealthy, white Tucker family, where he must weather harassment from his boss’s petty son, Dylan (Josh Lucas). But once droves of rogue Americans rise up to continue the Purge for all time, the Tuckers, Adela and Juan (who notably are not given last names) must learn to fight together.“The Forever Purge” tries for political relevance by introducing immigrant protagonists, but it easily excuses racism from the other leads. (After all, Dylan doesn’t seem so bad compared with the bands of white supremacists stalking the film.) Words like “colonialism” and “the American dream” are thrown around, to little avail. This movie ultimately cares more about monotonous shootouts than making points about border relations.The Forever PurgeRated R for endless gun violence and a smattering of gore. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Phantom’ Review: The Death Penalty for a Doppelgänger

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      This documentary examines the circumstances of a 1983 killing in Texas, for which it contends the wrong man was convicted and executed.“The Phantom,” a documentary from Patrick Forbes, examines a case that in recent years has been cited as an example of a likely wrongful conviction that ended in the death penalty. Carlos DeLuna was executed in Texas in 1989 for the murder of a Corpus Christi gas station convenience store clerk. At his trial, he implicated another man, Carlos Hernandez. The prosecution dismissed Hernandez as a phantom.But the movie, based on an account by a Columbia law school professor, James Liebman, and his researchers, amasses evidence that Hernandez, who died in 1999, was no apparition. It indicates that he had a history of violence and that the investigation was hasty. The film’s most damning suggestion is that the conviction didn’t simply involve mistaken identity — two men named Carlos, who knew and resembled each other and were both in the area of the crime, getting mixed up — but, in the film’s argument, required an almost willful insistence on turning a blind eye to what was known.Adapting research that is, by now, hardly breaking news, Forbes has some solid strategies for making the material cinematic. Shooting in glossy wide-screen, he uses an effective blend of reconstructions and interviewees to take viewers through the night of the killing. Earlier in the film, he has people involved in the original trial, like a witness, Kevan Baker, and a prosecutor, Steve Schiwetz, discuss details of the case in a courtroom, and even playact versions of their words from the proceedings (the dialogue isn’t verbatim, judging from the trial transcript). A bow-tied, suspendered, haunted-looking medical examiner contributes to the ghostly ambience.The PhantomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      El Paso Walmart Killings Examined in '915: Hunting Hispanics' doc.

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      Charlie Minn’s tactical breakdown zeros in on a mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart that killed 23 people.On the morning of Aug. 3, 2019, a man armed with an automatic rifle entered a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, shooting 46 people in the span of six minutes. Twenty-three people died as a result of their injuries. Many victims of the El Paso shooting identified as Latino, and in a manifesto, the shooter, Patrick Crusius, had explicitly stated his animus against people of Mexican origin. In the documentary “915: Hunting Hispanics” (the number is the El Paso area code), survivors share their memories of that catastrophic morning.The interviews contained in this film are not glossy. Subjects aren’t always wearing makeup, they ramble, they weep. The camera occasionally seems out of focus and the editing cuts from angle to angle with little sense of internal rhythm. At the beginning of the film, this unvarnished approach is disorienting. But the longer the director Charlie Minn pursues his lines of questioning, the more his film coheres as a military history of a domestic terrorist attack.Minn retraces the path of the shooter and the response of those left in his wake as if charting moves on a battlefield. Maps show the path of the attack and the order of the victims. Interviews with survivors add on-the-ground detail to the brutal events, and cellphone footage shows the desperate escape attempts, grievous injuries and efforts to preserve or revive life among the fallen. The events of mass shootings are often presented as devastating clashes of old-fashioned good and evil — complete with heroic martyrs and devilish madmen. The value of this demystifying film is its tactical breakdown of a form of violence that has become increasingly common in the United States. Here, both prevention and survival are a result of communal strategy.915: Hunting HispanicsNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Cousins’ Review: The Ties That Bind

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      This sprawling drama breathes cinematic life into the 1992 novel by Patricia Grace about the diverging paths of three Maori cousins in New Zealand.The Maori family at the heart of “Cousins” greet each other by pressing their foreheads and noses together. The camera does the same: It peers deep into the characters’ faces, as if imprinting them onto its lens.The first face we encounter is Mata’s (Tanea Heke) as she walks dazedly through an unnamed city; the noises and textures around her blur together. With that same sensory dislocation, the film takes us back to her childhood, when she was separated from her family by her white father and placed in an orphanage.This tragedy begets several more in the sprawling “Cousins.” Directors Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith breathe gorgeous cinematic life into the 1992 novel by Patricia Grace (Grace-Smith’s mother) about the diverging paths of three Maori cousins in 1940s and ’50s New Zealand. A few years after Mata disappears, Makareta (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne) flees home to escape an arranged marriage. Missy (Hariata Moriarty), realizing that the wedding is their family’s desperate attempt to consolidate and retain their ancestral lands, takes her cousin’s place.Widespread racism, discriminatory laws and the Maori people’s centuries-long struggle for autonomy bracket the characters’ lives in “Cousins.” The film trembles with sound, color and feeling, deriving much of its power from an excellent ensemble cast (particularly Te Raukura Gray and Ana Scotney as the child and adult Mata). Not only do the actors who play different versions of each character bear striking resemblances to one another, but an ache — for their whānau (extended family), for their home and heritage — carries through their performances. They powerfully embody the Maori belief that genealogical ties can never be severed.CousinsNot rated. In English and Maori, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘No Sudden Move’ Review: Don’t Forget the Motor City

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      Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro star in Steven Soderbergh’s new film, a Detroit-set period thriller with a lot on its mind.On an ordinary Monday morning in Detroit, three masked man show up at a handsome brick house on a tree-lined street. Once inside, two of them hold a mother and her children at gunpoint while their colleague accompanies the man of the house, a midlevel accountant at General Motors, on an urgent errand. It’s the mid-1950s, which means the cars are big and curvy, the men mostly wear hats and neckties, and the women are mostly wives, secretaries or mistresses.Nobody involved — not the intruders or their victims — knows entirely what’s going on. The viewer of “No Sudden Move,” whose comparatively pleasant task is to connect a whole lot of intricately arranged dots, is in good company. The guys who stay behind in the house, Curt (Don Cheadle) and Ronald (Benicio Del Toro), have been hired by an impatient fellow named Mr. Jones (Brendan Fraser) for the supposedly simple job of armed babysitting. Before the morning is over, they learn that other, more elaborate agendas are involved: the petty grudges of organized crime bosses; the voracious ambitions of the automobile industry; the imperatives of American postwar power and prosperity.And also, hovering over all of it, the preoccupations of the director, Steven Soderbergh. In the current phase of his dizzyingly protean career, Soderbergh is both an intrepid genre filmmaker and an impassioned practitioner of the cinema of ideas. “No Sudden Move,” from a script by Ed Solomon (who wrote all three “Bill & Ted” movies), is for the most part a tight and twisty against-the-clock crime caper with an obvious debt to Elmore Leonard (and a family resemblance to Soderbergh’s great Detroit-set thriller “Out of Sight”). It also has things to say — at times a little too speechily — about race, real estate, capitalism and power.Those things are interesting, but maybe not as interesting as the people who say them. The story is about the sometimes lethal pursuit of cash and information, but the film’s single greatest asset is its cast. Curt and Ronald, small-timers who are skilled and smart but also out of their depth, are the focus of the action, which means that you spend a lot of time with Cheadle and Del Toro as they act out a high-stress — and yet low-key — buddy comedy.Ronald, a bit of a drinker and a bit of a racist, moves through the world as if dancing to a sad melody that only he can here. Curt, just out of prison with sorrows of his own, has the quick wit and jumpy intensity of a survivor. Each has fallen afoul of a local crime boss, which is bad for them but lucky for us, since the big shots are played by Ray Liotta and Bill Duke.There’s more, notably David Harbour as the pathetic G.M. accountant and Amy Seimetz as his seething wife. An entire melodrama of marital malaise and sexual secrecy is folded into their scenes, even as “No Sudden Move” suggests a Coen brothers movie with a sincere social conscience in place of the ambient cynicism. Most of the characters are semi-competent players in a game that is rigged against them, and you hope that at least some of them will play their bad hands well enough to break even.The movie itself is nearly flawless in its professionalism, which is both a virtue and a limitation. The costumes (by Marci Rodgers) and production design (by Hannah Beachler) create a museum-quality panorama of the Motor City in its glory years, even as the script points out some of the cracks in the burnished surfaces. The precision and grace of the actors I’ve already named extend all the way through the ensemble — through Jon Hamm (as a skeptical lawman), Frankie Shaw (as a G.M. secretary with skin in the game), Julia Fox (as Ronald’s paramour) — to at least one potential surprise I don’t need to spoil.In keeping with the automotive themes, everything runs like a well-oiled machine, which is also to say that a crucial, hard-to-define element — of soul, of spontaneity, of messiness or inspiration — is missing. The object that sets the plot in motion is a set of highly coveted blueprints, which at one point needs to be torn in half. The schematic for “No Sudden Move” remains perfectly intact, and the thing itself works pretty much according to the specifications. A consumer-rating agency would give it high marks for safety and efficiency, but it never leaves the showroom.No Sudden MoveRated R. Bloodshed and salty talk. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      ‘Being a Human Person’ Review: Watching a Surrealist

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      This documentary on the Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson takes an unexpected turn.The Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson began his feature career in the early 1970s with distinctive but conventionally linear narratives. Interview clips from his early fame, included in “Being a Human Person,” a new documentary directed by Fred Scott, show a fresh-faced, sometimes glib fellow seemingly poised for industry success.In the early ’80s, though, Andersson reconfigured his working method. He bought a townhouse in Stockholm and made it into a studio and a home. In this space he concocted anecdotal, surreal cinematic reflections on not just human absurdity but human suffering, rendering them in single-shot tableaus. This movie tracks the making of what he announced as his last feature, “About Endlessness,” in 2018.The revelation of Andersson’s method, his painstaking use of trompe l’oeil both painterly and cinematic, is fascinating enough. But the chronicle takes an unexpected turn.Working from home has its advantages, but also affords near-instant access to a wine bar next door, where Andersson, now in his late 70s, starts spending what his colleagues consider a concerning amount of time. These artisans of Northern Europe are polite and kind; as much as Andersson’s behavior disturbs them, the film never shows anyone raising their voice. An audio recording of a phone call Andersson makes after walking out of a rehab and having difficulty finding a taxi is intense, and a little scary.“He’s not really a family person,” his own daughter observes. A producer notes, resigned, “He has no intention of stopping drinking.” A trip to Spain for a festival both strokes Andersson’s ego and recharges his batteries — he’s shown looking at the works of one of his heroes, Goya, at the Prado. By the movie’s end, he hasn’t so much pulled himself together as soldiered on — and changed his mind about closing his beloved home studio.Being a Human PersonNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Some of Our Stallions’ Review: At Least They Don’t Shoot Horses

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      The film that poses the cause-and-effect question about toxic masculinity and unhinged behavior.No equine beasts adorn this queasy comedy. Too bad. The title “Some of Our Stallions,” parodies, one presumes, the self-aggrandizing language certain American males apply to themselves. The would-be “stallions” here are a couple of misfits. Carson Mell, a burly, bearded guy who insists on being addressed as “Beautiful Bill,” wrote and directed the movie as well as taking a starring role alongside Al Di, also a producer, who plays the fast-talking Andy. In the opening scene, Bill, in a fast-food restaurant meltdown, dunks his hands into the hot oil of a deep fryer.Soon after this, Bill decides what the two really need are girlfriends. After starting the quest at a mall and predictably striking out, Bill terrorizes a delivery guy, steals his car, and drives himself and Andy to a mental hospital — a place they are both familiar with — and lies to a discharged patient, telling her they’re with the government and providing rides. That woman, Bonnie (Olivia Taylor Dudley) actually takes a shine to Andy and eventually becomes pregnant by him.The movie’s occasional references to “Taxi Driver” suggest that Mell wants to make a statement about loneliness, or something. But the movie also indulges in a glut of stereotypes about mental illness that Mell enacts with an unseemly enthusiasm — like he’s executing an antisocial wish-fulfillment exercise. The sight of Mell running around outside in pajama bottoms brandishing a toy ray gun is neither as funny nor as illuminating as Mell seems to think it is. And the 180-degree move the filmmaker pulls at the denouement isn’t so much a sellout as an opportunistic surrender to hipster sentimentality.Some of Our StallionsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More