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      ‘False Positive’ Review: Pregnancy Scares

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      This Hulu horror movie is a tepid, scattered look at the dark side of childbirth starring the “Broad City” co-creator Ilana Glazer.In recent years, mainstream horror movies like “Hereditary” and “It Follows” have embraced a seemingly more sophisticated form that unites social and psychological drama with a sleek visual sensibility. But possessing these ingredients does not a winner make. Case in point: “False Positive,” a handsome new Hulu feature that aspires to be a modern version of “Rosemary’s Baby,” but that ultimately lands somewhere between tepid and confused.Directed by John Lee from a screenplay he wrote with Ilana Glazer, his “Broad City” collaborator and the star of the film, “False Positive” explores the dark side of pregnancy in the age of fertility treatments.The concept, at least, is promising. After two years of attempting to conceive, Lucy (Glazer) and Adrian (Justin Theroux), a wealthy Manhattan couple, turn to John Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), a debonair fertility doctor with a menacing glint in his eyes. The oddly simple procedure works and soon Lucy is carrying not one, but three babies.To prevent future complications, however, she is forced to undergo “selective reduction” that will either destroy her male twins or her single girl. Against Hindle’s recommendation and her husband’s desires, she chooses the girl, unfurling what may or may not be a conspiracy to wrest control of Lucy’s pregnancy from her.That women continue to lack autonomy over their own bodies is indeed a horrifying reality. But Lee and Glazer, torn between the impulse to satirize an upper-crust milieu of would-be parents and the desire to depict a complex mental breakdown, unleash a watered-down and occasionally contradictory critique of, well, just about everything — white liberals, the health care system, the patriarchy.And despite its vaguely unsettling clinical ambience, very little about the film as it makes its way to an ultimately flat and predictable final twist, manages to feel tense or thrilling. Or even funny for that matter.False PositiveRated R for disturbing/bloody images, sexual content, graphic nudity and language. Running time: 1 hours 32 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide’ Review: Outlasting an Art Scene

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      A new documentary co-directed by the artist’s daughter shows how Scharf, a poster boy for downtown New York art in the ’80s, is hard at work decades later.The condition of being an artist and the significance of what an artist produces are two distinct things. The post-pop artist Kenny Scharf, who came out of the same downtown art and music scene as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Klaus Nomi, is someone whose critical and material stock has risen, fallen and risen again over decades. The documentary “Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide,” directed by Max Basch and the artist’s daughter Malia Scharf, makes a considered and not entirely uncritical case for Scharf’s relevance.Unlike the three other artists grouped with him above, Scharf is still alive and working. This, as some observers of the art world have noted, can be a career disadvantage. The movie’s canny assemblage of archival footage from Scharf’s early New York ascendancy in the late 1970s puts across what made his scene both exhilarating and, to many within and outside it, insufferable. (In early interviews Scharf often sounds like a snooty teenager being forced to make conversation with his boring parent.)Scharf’s stories of meeting up with Haring (they were roommates for some time) are evocative and moving. “This was the person I’ve been looking for,” he said, still in awe of his friend. Malia is actually on-camera, comforting her father, during a searing recollection of Haring’s death from AIDS. The range of Scharf’s work is intriguing — beyond his familiar cartoon-junkyard aesthetic, paintings from a dark period in his life have echoes of trenchant Surrealists like Yves Tanguy.In recent years Scharf has taken up new forms of street art, in a way carrying the torch of his fallen comrades Haring and Basquiat. The movie shows him decorating the denim jacket of a young man who had just been passing by while Scharf was working on a mural. The gesture shows an admirable generosity of spirit.Kenny Scharf: When Worlds CollideNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Rebel Hearts’ Review: Sisters Act Up

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      This flashy, feel-good documentary follows a group of progressive Catholic nuns in 1960s Los Angeles.Few institutions notoriously resist change like the Roman Catholic Church, which to this day upholds rules of celibacy and continues to forbid the ordination of women. So for some, it may be surprising to learn that the church’s iron-fisted rule has long been met with resistance.Such a struggle is captured in “Rebel Hearts,” Pedro Kos’s feel-good documentary about a particularly gutsy group of nuns who took inspiration from the social upheavals of the 1960s to fight against exploitation by their male superiors.Combining archival footage with paper doll-esque animation and a flurry of talking-head interviews gathered over two decades by Shawnee Isaac-Smith, one of the film’s producers, this documentary traces the controversies and trailblazing feats of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, whose social activism and participation in civil rights and workers protests upended notions of the fragile, cloistered nun.Led by Anita Caspary, these women — and the liberal college they ran in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles — were considered dangerous by Catholic hard-liners like Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, the entrepreneurial head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese who the documentary claims staffed his many religious schools with unpaid, unqualified young nuns. Caspary and her unruly flock (including the pop artist Corita Kent, whose screen prints and drawings were often the cause of scandal) collectively sought autonomy — voting, for instance, to rescind the habit requirement.An unrelenting pop music soundtrack vests the story with a cheesy rah-rah sensibility, while the film’s breakneck pacing hinders proper reflection of any single event or anecdote. The onslaught of information certainly impresses by illuminating a rich and not-often-discussed slice of feminist history, but the execution is distractingly flashy and gratingly unfocused.Rebel HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lourdes’ Review: Pilgrims Find Fellowship on Quest for Miracles

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      This intimate documentary reveals the hopes and fears of those seeking healing.Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai start their documentary with imagery that is as elemental as it gets. A stone wall, slate gray, its surface sheathed, it seems, in clear water. Then, human hands, some gnarled with age, others smooth and childlike, touch the wall, sometimes with fingertips, sometimes palms.This wall is at the shrine of Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, where in 1858 a young woman saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary and discovered a spring of reputedly curative water. The town is now host, between the months of March and October, to pilgrimages by thousands of people seeking physical and spiritual healing, and their families. The movie takes an intimate look at a few who visited the shrine of Lourdes in 2017.There’s a lot heartbreak to be seen here. A teenage girl with a skin condition, accompanied by her father, seems just as riven by the school mockery she endures as by her ailment itself. A male prostitute, whose tortured musings we hear in voice-over, assists some priests in preparing communion. A devoted mother transports her adult son, who had a brain injury in a road accident, “to see the Virgin,” as he puts it. One very young child, too sick to even travel, is prayed for by his father and brother.The movie also shows the volunteers and health care workers who look after the pilgrims during the devotional season. The movie allows these figures moments of frankness — there’s much about their jobs that’s tiring and unappetizing — but the viewer will be mostly impressed by their compassion.What do the pilgrims want? By this late date in the history of the place, few expect a cure. “There aren’t that many miracles, if you think about it,” Lydie, the aforementioned mother, admits. They seek the possibility of miracles — and hope and fellowship and understanding.LourdesNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I Carry You with Me’ Review: When You Can’t Go Home Again

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      The documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing dramatizes a gay immigrant love story in this empathetic portrait.Iván Garcia, an undocumented immigrant living in New York City, has a sad, strong face and eloquent eyes. Having risen, astonishingly, from dishwasher to chef to successful restaurateur in little over a decade, he still dreams of his home in Puebla City, Mexico, and the son he left behind. Iván has changed countries, but he hasn’t moved on.Turning time and memory into an elliptical portrait of what it means when borders become barriers, “I Carry You With Me,” the first narrative feature from the documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing, trades distance for empathy. Dramatizing Iván’s story, and his longtime relationship with his partner, Gerardo Zabaleta (both men are friends of the director), Ewing and her co-writer, Alan Page, paint a journey — and a love story — defined by compromise. As Iván and Gerardo (beautifully played for most of the movie by Armando Espitia and Christian Vázquez) work to build new lives, what they have left behind tugs insistently on what they have gained.This gives even the movie’s warmest scenes — like the couple’s first meeting, or Iván’s early bonding with his son — a poignancy that bleeds into Pablo Ramírez’s softly intimate images. Intercutting several timelines, Ewing alights pointedly on the homophobia and familial disapproval that helped propel Iván across the border. Her hybrid, impressionistic style leaves details fuzzy and leans too easily on sentiment; yet it also understands immigrant longing as more complex and elusive than economic imperative.To Iván, “crossing over” was both an irresistible force and a double-edged sword. After closing a door he may never be able to reopen — and exchanging one source of anxiety for another — he knows there is nothing to do but endure.I Carry You with MeRated R for mature themes and a little nudity. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To’ Review: Bound by Blood

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      Two siblings struggle to provide for their freakish brother in this pitch-black family drama.In “My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To,” director Jonathan Cuartas teams up with his brother, the cinematographer Michael Cuartas, and father, the production designer Rodrigo Cuartas, to make a film about a household of murderers. This may be dark fodder for a family project, but the result is a visually striking meditation on obligation and complicity.The main character Dwight (Patrick Fugit) drifts from scene to scene, halfheartedly abducting victims to feed to his vampiric brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell). Meanwhile their sister Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), the family breadwinner, works tirelessly to keep Thomas out of the sunlight and away from prying eyes. Because we are aligned with Dwight’s perspective — he gets the most screen time — the film undersells Jessie’s efforts, casting her more as her brothers’ warden than their surrogate mother. This feels like a noteworthy choice, given that Jessie is the film’s most prominent female character aside from a one-dimensional prostitute.That’s not to say that Jessie is an angel, just that her humanity deserves as much attention as her rigidity. Jonathan Cuartas said in a statement that “My Heart Can’t Beat” was inspired by his grandmother’s death in hospice, but the film also presents a strong allegory for addiction. Jessie and Dwight both mistake the act of enabling for love, molding their lives around Thomas and denying him agency in the process.In an early scene, Jessie sings the film’s titular line, a lyric from Helene Smith’s “I Am Controlled by Your Love.” Those words could apply to any combination of the three siblings, as they all suffocate in mutual martyrdom. After all, Thomas is not the superpowered, predatory vampire we’re used to in horror flicks. No matter how much blood Dwight and Jessie fetch, he is slowly wasting away.My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It ToNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 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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      ‘God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya’ Review: Her Cross to Bear

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      An unemployed historian living with her parents in a Macedonia town crashes an all-male Orthodox Christian ceremony and enacts a one-woman feminist resistance.In another world, the rebellious title character of “God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya” might have been a contented free spirit in a John Waters movie. But Petrunya lives in the conservative town of Stip, Macedonia, and she seems dulled into a standstill by patriarchal rules and motherly interference. That starts to change when she crashes an all-male Orthodox ceremony — every year, a priest lobs a cross into a river and men scramble to grab it — and takes the prize.Many townspeople throw a Stip fit over Petrunya’s feat, and at the behest of outraged priests, she’s pursued and detained by the police. Petrunya (Zorica Nusheva, with an eye-flashing frustration just short of antic) rises to the occasion by standing up to the intimidation and condescension. It wasn’t always thus: she starts off the movie stuck in bed, a 30-something unemployed historian living with her mother.The director, Teona Strugar Mitevska, draws on actual events for this good-humored story of occupation and resistance. The independent streak was clearly present in Petrunya somewhere: we’ve seen her fending off a sleazy garment-factory boss and walking off with a mannequin, which she totes everywhere in what feels like a naturally punk move. Mitevska and the cinematographer, Virginie Saint Martin, lend Petrunya’s external world some further off-kilter flair and eye-catching patterns.But the standoff with authorities dawdles and languishes, and a side plot with a TV journalist (Labina Mitevska) feels one-note. Still, we should all look forward to seeing what Petrunya does next.God Exists, Her Name is PetrunyaNot rated. In Macedonian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Lansky’ Review: A Mobster Burnishes His Legacy

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      Harvey Keitel stars as the underworld financial wizard in this dramatization.The best thing in “Lansky” is Harvey Keitel’s turn as the gangster Meyer Lansky. Eager to change the popular perception of his career, and dying of lung cancer, he agrees to tell his story to a writer in 1981.The way Keitel plays Lansky makes it difficult to distinguish cordiality from coldbloodedness. In a delicatessen on his home turf in Miami, Lansky orders tongue sandwiches and quickly lays out the rules for the writer, a fictional character called David Stone (Sam Worthington): He can’t use a recorder. Everything is off the record unless he is told otherwise. And making clear that he knows all about the writer’s life and family, Lansky warns Stone that if he violates their agreement, “there will be consequences.”The heart of this movie, directed by Eytan Rockaway, is the relationship between the writer and his subject. So it’s dismaying when “Lansky” turns out to include flashbacks, with John Magaro (“First Cow”) playing a much flatter version of the mobster as a young man.In his obituary, Lansky, who died in 1983, is described as the “reputed financial genius of the underworld,” with his fingers presumed to be in bootlegging, gambling in Cuba and other rackets.The gangland clichés can be cringe-worthy at times, particularly when the film emphasizes Lansky’s Jewish background. “If you need any weapons or ammunition, you let me know,” he says after slipping cash to an emissary for the future state of Israel. And no one should ever again score a montage of killings to “Hava Nagila,” as Rockaway does at another moment.The 1981 scenes without Keitel are similarly useless. F.B.I. agents search for hidden money. Minka Kelly plays a guest at Stone’s motel with obvious ulterior motives. And the ending, in which Stone ponders what he learned from Lansky — “We measure ourselves through the eyes of the ones we love” — is a baffling detour into soppiness. Like “Bugsy” (1991), “Lansky” concludes with bizarrely upbeat onscreen text noting the positive economic impacts of the gambling industry.LanskyRated R. It’s not personal; it’s only business. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More