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      ‘After Yang’ Review: Do Androids Dream of Sheep, Babysitting, Being?

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      Colin Farrell plays a father who tries to repair the family’s caretaker-android in a science-fiction tale about what it means to be human.“What’s so great about being human,” a character asks in “After Yang.” Fair question! People are trouble, though not as much as usual in this muted, melancholic tale about being and belonging. Set in a future that’s at once recognizable and enigmatic, the movie envisions a world so outwardly peaceful it can be hard to believe that it takes place on Earth. Tears are shed, yes, but nearly everyone is awfully nice and almost always uses indoor voices, including the clones and androids that — or, rather, who — are part of the family.The human-machine interface is teased throughout “After Yang,” which was written and directed by Kogonada and tracks what happens when a family’s android, called Yang, stops working. The shutdown rattles the household, especially the father, who is also the focus of Alexander Weinstein’s original, tart story “Saying Goodbye to Yang.” In both versions, the busted android creates logistical hurdles: The parents work and need a caregiver for their child. But what animates the movie, imbuing it with rueful feeling and nosing it down some lightly philosophical byways, is that the father seems almost as broken as the android.Soon after the movie opens, Yang (Justin H. Min) shuts down, following an amusing, wittily staged and shot family dance contest. A so-called technosapien with a human countenance and — like the people in his life — the tamped-down affect of someone who needs to cut down on his antidepressants, Yang was bought by Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) to care for their young daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). Yang teaches Mika, who was adopted from China, about her heritage, rattling off “Chinese fun facts.” He’s also there for her when she wakes up in the middle of the night.Repairing Yang proves unsurprisingly more challenging than poking around under the hood of a car. Yang is a secondhand model, “certified refurbished,” yet used nevertheless. And while his warranty is still valid, the store where he was procured, Second Siblings, is out of business. “I told you we should have just bought a new one,” Kyra chides Jake with the old I-told-you-so sigh. In the future, men still take care of the big household chores; wives berate their husbands for making foolish decisions; and some families live in swoon-worthy houses with floor-to-ceiling windows and open-floor plans.Kogonada (“Columbus”) has a fondness for 20th-century modernist architecture and a skill for creating a countervailing air of claustrophobia. Much of “After Yang” takes place in Jake and Kyra’s home, a handsome maze of glass that suggests a transparency unmatched by the family’s relationships: There’s no oversharing here. In some scenes, the glass frames the characters as if they were pictures, much like the display boxes in which Yang exhibited his butterfly collection. Throughout, including in the house and costume design, with its robes and black slip-on shoes, there are distinct, meaningful Asian influences and flourishes.The tomorrow of “After Yang” is casually multicultural, visually detailed and at times thematically and frustratingly elusive. The expressive production design mixes old and new, organic and tech, like the surprising bits of wood and green plants inside the family’s driverless vehicle, a pod that suggests a moving terrarium. The family itself always seems caught in a bubble, despite sporadic trips outside and views of their unnamed city, with its dense foliage and far-out buildings. If climate change is a problem you wouldn’t know it, though there’s plenty of grim news cluttering up a bulletin board in a repair shop Jake visits.That bulletin board and the racist anti-Asian messages pinned to it are in the original story, which is set in Detroit and invokes that city’s violent past. Kogonada adds more items to the board, notably headlines referring to a decades-long war and clashes between China and the United States. But the close-up of the board lasts only seconds and its contents are easy to miss. Then it’s back to Jake’s repair journey, a quest that leads increasingly inward. Yet there’s more to this quest than might appear because along the way Kogonada is upending the noxious stereotype of the “stoic” Asian, a familiar cliché, including in science fiction.The effort to fix Yang gives the movie its narrative spine and slow-building emotional punch. Particularly potent is Jake’s discovery of Yang’s memories, which are initially represented as pinpricks of light. Using a viewer, Jake narrows in on different pinpricks, which then expand until they fill the frame, becoming movies-within-the-movie that he can freeze and replay. Some memories last only as long as it takes for a friend of Yang’s, Ada (Haley Lu Richardson), to turn to the camera with a searching look. Others seem like excerpts from a series of disconnected stories, an assemblage of opening, middle and concluding paragraphs that together create a mosaic portrait of Yang that eventually changes Jake.As Yang emerges more clearly, so does Jake. Farrell is the most experienced performer in the main cast, and he’s able to create depths of feeling — as well a sense of untapped mystery — within the largely unmodulated expressive range that Kogonada favors, at times to a fault. With eyebrow flicks, tiny physical modulations and shifts in pitch, Farrell movingly turns a shadow into a recognizable person, while also bringing much-needed humor to the movie. Min has the trickier, less-satisfying role — he is, after all, playing an android — but he does what needs to be done: He makes you see, really see Yang as he was, alive to the world and to love.After YangRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters and on Showtime platforms. More

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      ‘Nightride’ Review: One Last Job

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      The movie is indebted to neon-lit crime thrillers set behind the wheel of an outlaw’s automobile, but it fails to deliver the goods.Stephen Fingleton’s “Nightride” is indebted to a rich tradition of nocturnal, neon-lit crime thrillers set behind the wheel of an outlaw’s automobile, beginning with Walter Hill’s 1978 classic “The Driver” and continuing through Michael Mann’s 1981 heist flick “Thief” and Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 throwback “Drive.”As if to make these connections even clearer, in an early scene a drug-dealing Ph.D. candidate called Scholar (Ciaran Flynn) is speaking to his supplier, Budge (Moe Dunford), and holding forth on the brilliance of Mann, who also directed the 2006 film “Miami Vice.” Scholar believes that “Miami Vice” is “the apex of Mann’s post-celluloid filmography.” But the Mann picture that “Nightride” most resembles is probably “Collateral,” which similarly concerns an all-night criminal odyssey and takes place primarily inside a car. Had Fingleton included a hacker as a character, we could have had a bit of “Blackhat,” too.The plot of “Nightride” is little more than an assembly of stock types: the crook trying to go clean (Dunford), the loan shark feared for his vicious reprisals (Stephen Rea), the well-meaning girlfriend who becomes endangered when the big score goes wrong (Joana Ribeiro). Its distinguishing feature is that the action unfolds in real time, in one (seemingly) continuous 90-minute take, as Budge, the drug-runner played by Dunford, cruises around Belfast trying to pull off one last job.The one-take gimmick — much easier to achieve now thanks to digital cameras —has become common enough that it barely qualifies as novel, having been used in “Birdman,” “Victoria,” and “1917,” among many others. As in those movies, there is a kind of “Look, Ma, no hands!” bluster to this technique that smacks of needlessly showing off, calling attention to the aptitude of the filmmaker at the expense of the characters and the story. It’s worth noting that while Mann’s crime films are aesthetically sumptuous, the images are always in service of the ideas — not the other way around.NightrideNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 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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      ‘Fresh’ Review: First Date? Try the Veal.

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      Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan star in a dazzling (and very funny) cannibal romance from Mimi Cave.Dating is innately predatory in “Fresh,” a wickedly funny cannibal romance and dazzling feature debut from the director Mimi Cave. Even the run-of-the-mill rotten blind date that opens the film has stomach rumbles of menace, with crabs trapped in tanks, chefs slamming knives and ducks dangling in the window. Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a doe-like graphic designer in Portland, Ore., finds herself on the hook to split the check with a dingbat (Brett Dier) who loots her leftover noodles and leaves her feeling chewed up and spat out.This singleton and her cynical best friend, Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs), consider themselves alert to the warning signs of a bad boyfriend. But a charming doctor named Steve (Sebastian Stan), who scores Noa’s number in the produce aisle of a grocery store, manages to earn Noa’s trust, and ours, during two dates and a road trip. It’s a substantial amount of time to savor Stan and Edgar-Jones’s playful chemistry — right up until Steve drugs Noa with a poisoned cocktail, handcuffs her in the basement of his vacation home and announces his hunger for a harrowing dinner. (The screenplay was written by Lauryn Kahn, who cut her teeth writing shorts for the comedy website “Funny or Die.”) Cue the opening credits which, coming 30 minutes into the movie, are effectively a prankish declaration that the film has played its audience for lovesick fools.Now, the real heartbreak (and cleaving) begins. Edgar-Jones, who starred in Hulu’s “Normal People” in 2020 and who leads a feature for the first time here, can let her eyes well with wet vulnerability and, a beat later, burst into giggles at a joke about eating breast meat. She plays Noa’s predicament straight. Yet the frame around her performance is marvelously askew. Cave, the director, is a sharp observer of details: wet lips, nervous feet, the cocky way Stan plays air guitar on a severed thigh. Comedy sharpens the film’s fangs, as do Martin Pensa’s witty edits and Pawel Pogorzelski’s bold, intelligent camera movements, which stumble and swoon and occasionally somersault to make it truly feel like Noa has gone through the looking glass of terrible dates. (As a grace note, the score includes a warbling ballad played on a musical saw.)“Fresh” wants to do — and say — everything. As a result, it can feel overstuffed with ideas. In addition to demonstrating a fluency in horror tropes, Kahn’s script pokes at a dozen modern mating stereotypes, even getting in an elbow at how today’s internet-savvy woman needs just five minutes of social media sleuthing to become a 21st-century Columbo. Cave lets the tone waltz from silly to sad and back again, but neither she nor Kahn buy into lazy fictions about girls who confidently transform into vengeful killers. Instead, they maintain a conviction that men have the same exploitable soft spots. “Giving yourself over to somebody, becoming one with somebody else forever,” Steve purrs to Noa, “that’s a beautiful thing, that’s surrender, that’s love.” No, that’s a predator’s dream — and not all predators brandish forks.FreshRated R for coarse language, coarse meat and hazy sex. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Huda’s Salon’ Review: The Services Are Not What You’d Expect.

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      In Hany Abu-Assad’s pulpy thriller, two Palestinian women are trapped between political enemies that are united in their misogyny.“Huda’s Salon” opens with an audacious rug-pull. Behind an unassuming storefront in Bethlehem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the middle-aged Huda (Manal Awad) attends to a young mother Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi), as they gab about Facebook, frenemies and Reem’s controlling husband.Reem suddenly collapses, and event take a shocking turn. Huda has drugged her, and proceeds to strip Reem and stage compromising pictures of her with a man who had been hiding in the back room. When Reem awakens, Huda reveals that she’s an informant for the Israeli Secret Service. Unless Reem wants the pictures to be released, she must become one, too.This is the first of many twists in Hany Abu-Assad’s pulpy thriller, which cuts between two tinderbox scenarios. As soon as Reem leaves the salon, Huda is captured and interrogated by the other side, Palestinian fighters hunting down the many women Huda has recruited to spy for the Israelis. Reem, realizing that they are on her tail, paces around her tiny apartment, desperately contemplating her options: tell her husband and risk his wrath, or turn to the Israelis.As convoluted as it gets, “Huda’s Salon” makes a simple and forceful point: Caught between political enemies united in their misogyny, Palestinian women have no way out. Where Abu-Assad falters is in turning Huda into a didactic mouthpiece for the very themes that Reem’s tribulations, filmed up-close with a jerky camera, convey effortlessly.Pitted against a Palestinian leader, Hasan (Ali Suliman), in an extended interrogation, Huda offers smug, simplistic retorts: “It is easier to oppress a society that’s already repressing itself.”Awad’s formidable swagger notwithstanding, Huda’s back story as a denigrated divorcée is sketched too thinly for her self-righteousness to be convincing. That she somehow manages to rattle her ruthless interrogator — and contrive a sentimental out for Reem — takes the sting out of the film’s critique.Huda’s SalonRated R for nudity and graphic violence. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 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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      ‘Mother Schmuckers’ Review: Dumber and Dumbest

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      In this atrocious comedy, two boneheaded brothers search for a lost dog.The title is bad enough, but it’s all downhill from there in the revolting Belgian farce “Mother Schmuckers.” I would say words fail me, but they don’t. It’s just that most of them are unprintable.Written and directed by the siblings Lenny and Harpo Guit, this tasteless first feature presents the appalling adventures of Issachar and Zabulon (Maxi Delmelle and Harpo Guit), adult brothers who reside in Brussels with their permanently distraught mother, Cachemire (Claire Bodson). A prostitute who is equally fed up with her job and her idiot offspring — who are introduced frying up feces for breakfast — Cachemire issues the dolts an ultimatum: Find the family dog they recently misplaced, or get out.What follows is an odious odyssey from one dust up to another as these two public menaces gobble trash, shoot a homeless man and, in one especially loathsome sequence, gate-crash a private bestiality club. Encounters with acquaintances — most only marginally less moronic than themselves — pad a screenplay with no apparent notion where it’s going, or how to get there. (The inexplicable slumming of Mathieu Amalric, as the men’s befuddled father, is another matter entirely.)Ugly to look at and puerile to listen to, “Mother Schmuckers” makes 70 minutes feel like as many hours. Despite claiming inspiration from Italian comedies and the Farrelly brothers, the filmmakers seem unable to construct a truly funny joke or coherent story. We do eventually learn that Issachar and Zabulon believe themselves unloved; as far as this viewer is concerned, they’re absolutely right.Mother SchmuckersNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Asking for It’ Review: A Few Rude Men

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      An all-female gang of vigilantes pursue despicable men in this oppressive revenge fantasy.Subtle as a sledgehammer and shallow as a saucer, “Asking for It” is painted in such broad strokes that — with just a smidgen of humor — it would pass for satire. Yet this grim face-off between monstrous men and damaged women unspools with so much self-righteous swagger that the earnestness of its writer and director, Eamon O’Rourke, is never in doubt.After Joey (Kiersey Clemons), a sunny waitress, is sexually assaulted by an old friend, her shock is catnip to Regina (Alexandra Shipp) and the band of punk feminists — all survivors of some form of abuse — who have made it their business to punish errant males. Led by Sal (Radha Mitchell) and armed with grenades, guns and chemically castrating gas, these vengeful vigilantes roam their state (the movie was filmed in Oklahoma), meting out punishment to variously vile white men. Prominent among these is the repellent Mark Vanderhill (Ezra Miller), a top-hatted twerp whose Men First Movement preaches an ‘if you want it, take it’ philosophy to would-be alpha males.As the women battle fraternity bros, human traffickers and the racist police who enable them, this mirthless tale hinges on Joey’s unconvincing transformation from gentle homebody to violent avenger. On-the-nose dialogue (“Black and sweet, just like God made you,” responds one of Joey’s customers when asked how he likes his coffee) and distracting flash cuts substitute for back story in a film that cares little for differentiating one violated woman — or one pasty-faced jerk — from another. Instead, “Asking for It” is all about the trauma: Its heroines have nothing in common but suffering and nothing on their minds but revenge.Asking for ItRated R for racist attitudes and misogynist philosophy. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Long Walk’ Review: A Ghostly Future in Laos

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      This Laotian drama from Mattie Do presents a world where spirits linger on into a future that has been shaped by technology.The Laotian drama “The Long Walk” takes a languid look around a near-future dystopia where fighter jets leave smoke trails in the sky and government authorities track missing people using microchips embedded in their bodies. In this reality, a spiritual, occult world exists underneath the noses of officials.The movie follows an unnamed protagonist (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy), an isolated older man known by the people in his town as someone who can communicate with the dead and find people who have gone missing.But what the medium’s clients don’t know is that he also helps women who are sick and desperate for relief from life’s hardships facilitate their own deaths. When a young woman (Vilouna Phetmany) seeks him out for guidance in finding her missing mother, she doesn’t know that the body he leads her to is one he buried himself.The hermit travels along the road connecting life and death, accompanied by ghosts and in possession of powers that allow him to visit and potentially alter his own past. Yet despite the high concepts that drive the film’s story, its writer and director, Mattie Do, does not overburden the movie with exposition or explanations.She sets a leisurely pace, pausing to watch how the humid air interacts with the smoke from the shaman’s vape pen. The atmosphere here is dense with textural detail and requires patience to sift through the layers of meaning that are packed into each frame. The reward for waiting for the fog to lift is a movie that presents a unique take on science fiction, one that looks for the ghosts that linger on in a world that has been shaped by technology.The Long WalkNot rated. In Lao, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      French Female Directors Continue Hot Streak at Rendez-Vous Festival

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      The series returns in-person with an especially strong slate of work by Frenchwomen — fitting, given their run of honors at top festivals.Sex and the city, false identities and love triangles feature prominently in this year’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema, an annual showcase of contemporary French filmmaking held by Film at Lincoln Center.Since last year’s virtual edition, female directors from France have been making headlines, with two major European festivals awarding their top prizes to Frenchwomen: Julia Ducournau took home the Cannes Palme d’Or for her gender-bending love story “Titane”; and Audrey Diwan nabbed Venice’s Golden Lion for “Happening,” about a young woman in the 1960s seeking an abortion. Even the master filmmaker Claire Denis received one of her only competitive awards when she won best director for “Fire” last month at Germany’s Berlinale.“Fire,” a brooding melodrama, will be the opening-night film when Rendez-Vous make its return to in-person screenings on Thursday in New York. A pared-down pandemic production stocked with booming performances by Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon and Grégoire Colin, the film is Denis’s second collaboration with the screenwriter and novelist Christine Angot. Unlike their first effort, “Let the Sunshine In” (2018), a sly romantic comedy in which Binoche played an artist drifting through a succession of frustrating relationships, “Fire” is all Sturm und Drang. It focuses on the love lives of a late-middle-age couple with the kind of tempestuous passion befitting an adolescent affair. Though Denis obliquely weaves in broader social commentary with a subplot involving a troubled mixed-race son, the film’s shambolic qualities stoke the erotic follies at its core with transportive delirium.Anaïs Demoustier as the title character opposite Christophe Montenez in “Anais in Love.”Danielle McCarthy-Bole/Année ZéroAt Rendez-Vous, Denis is joined by other established French directors like Arnaud Desplechin (“Deception”), François Ozon (“Everything Went Fine”) and Christophe Honoré (“Guermantes”). But a newer generation of filmmakers is making a strong showing as well, and many of them are building on the great promise of the festival-winning streak for Gallic women.Three of the four feature debuts in the program are by women, including Constance Meyer’s “Robust,” a handsome-looking dramedy about an aging actor (Gérard Depardieu) who strikes up a friendship with his female bodyguard (Déborah Lukumuena). Though significantly less flamboyant, “Robust” takes cues from the 2012 interracial buddy blockbuster “Les Intouchables.”What may be the strongest debut in the lineup is Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “Anaïs in Love,” which would make a fine double feature with “The Worst Person in the World”; both are about impulsive 30-somethings who fall in love and lust at the clip of a pop song. “Anaïs,” a jaunty summer story full of droll chatter and sparkling countryside vistas, follows its capricious heroine as she enters into an affair with an older man, only to find herself more interested in his novelist wife.Films like “Anaïs in Love” that relish the frisky humor and whimsy of modern romance without moralizing guilt would seem to fit squarely in the sexually liberated tradition that many see as central to France’s artistic heritage. The debate between a younger generation of feminists spearheading the country’s #MeToo movement, which has been gaining momentum after a feeble start, and elite figures who denounce the movement as extreme and puritanical continues to cast a shadow over the French film industry. This year’s Rendez-Vous selection certainly straddles the old and the new — though conspicuously absent is the Rendez-Vous regular Jacques Doillon, whose strong, if thorny, new film, “Third Grade,” concerns the playground intrigue between two children, one of whom sexually harasses the other. Nevertheless, the program keeps in step with the national penchant for sexual audacity.Jade Springer as the daughter of divorcing parents in “Petite Solange.”Aurora FilmsMale directors have rarely had any qualms about examining the intimate lives of women, and Jacques Audiard’s “Paris, 13th District,” a punchy drama in slick black and white about the messy dating lives of young Parisians, continues that tendency. It’s a pleasant surprise, though the auteurist theory explanation for a film’s success (or failure) is particularly questionable here. Consider the compelling performances by the film’s lead actresses: Noémie Merlant plays a law student whose life is thrown into shambles when her classmates mistake her for a popular camgirl; and Lucie Zhang makes her auspicious debut as a first-generation Franco-Chinese immigrant, a punkish, bedraggled young woman with a self-sabotaging romantic streak. Complex and not necessarily likable without falling into the “messy woman” archetype of so many pop feminist characters, the women of “Paris, 13th District” must have benefited from the august scriptwriting team — Audiard, Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) and Léa Mysius — who temper the director’s penchant for vacuous stylization with grounded humor and pathos.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More