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      ‘Dear Mr. Brody’ Review: Spreading the Wealth Doesn’t Go Smoothly

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      The scion of a margarine empire says to ask him for money. And many, many people asked.In January 1970, Michael Brody Jr. announced he’d share his $25 million inheritance. All people had to do was ask — and ask they did. Archival news footage in “Dear Mr. Brody,” a documentary directed by Keith Maitland, shows a line of hopefuls outside and inside 1650 Broadway where Brody, 21, the groovy scion of the Jelke margarine empire, opened an office.Journalists were drawn to his peace-love-and-understanding worldview. Filmmakers, too, among them the movie producer Ed Pressman, who had hoped to make a fiction film. People also wrote letters: tens of thousands of them.“Dear Mr. Brody” invites timely thoughts about the wealthy and income disparity. While Brody leverages his stunningly brief moment in the limelight — appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” securing a record deal, finding quite the platform for his messages — a scene of him tossing cash out a window to a crowd below hints at an underlying ugliness. “Food. Shelter. Love,” he snappishly tells a reporter later. “They don’t need money.”“Dear Mr. Brody” nods to and teases the era’s psychedelic tendencies. (“Brody Says Drugs Inspired Giveaway,” reads a New York Times headline.) Interviewees who had been on the journey — among them, wife, Renee Brody, and friend Michael Aronin — share some of its vexing details. Brody died in 1973. But the film’s exquisite pathos comes as Melissa Robyn Glassman, a producer, discovers a cache of unopened letters in Pressman’s storage unit. Her sleuthing leads to letter writers — or their children — and those interviews are quietly stunning. It might be hard to upstage Brody, yet they do.Dear Mr. BrodyNot 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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      Farrah Forke, Who Played a Helicopter Pilot on ‘Wings,’ Dies at 54

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      Forke, the namesake of a not-yet-famous family friend named Farrah Fawcett, played Alex Lambert on three seasons of the popular sitcom, a fixture of the NBC schedule in the 1990s.Farrah Forke, the actress who catapulted to fame playing a helicopter pilot on the NBC sitcom “Wings,” died at her home in Texas on Friday. She was 54.Her death was confirmed by her mother, Beverly Talmage, who said in a statement that her daughter had had cancer for several years.Forke played the alluring pilot Alex Lambert on three seasons of “Wings,” which aired from 1990 to 1997 and followed the adventures of the offbeat characters at a small airport on Nantucket.Her character’s affections were battled over by Joe and Brian Hackett (Tim Daly and Steven Weber), brothers who ran a one-plane airline.On Instagram, Weber described Forke as “every bit as tough, fun, beautiful and grounded as her character ‘Alex’ on Wings.”Farrah Rachael Forke was born on Jan. 12, 1968, in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Chuck Forke and Beverly (Mendleski) Forke. She was named after Farrah Fawcett, a family friend who wasn’t a well-known actress at the time Forke was born.“They just liked the name,” Forke told The Dallas Morning News in 1993.Forke began her acting career with a role in a Texas production of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” In 1989, she moved to New York, where she studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute in Manhattan.Her acting career took off when she joined “Wings” as the smart and saucy Alex.“I don’t mind playing pretty women,” Forke told The Dallas Morning News. “But I do mind playing bimbos. Alex is definitely a sexy woman. But she’s also focused, and there’s a lot of qualities about her that people will admire.”The show, which was created by the “Cheers” and “Frasier” writers David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee, ran for 172 episodes and was a mainstay of the NBC schedule for years. The show also starred Crystal Bernard, Tony Shalhoub and Thomas Haden Church.From 1994 to 1995, Forke had a recurring role as the lawyer Mayson Drake on “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” on ABC.Her other television acting roles included “Dweebs,” “Mr. Rhodes” and “Party of Five.” After making her film debut in “Brain Twisters” in 1991, she appeared in “Disclosure” (1994), directed by Barry Levinson, and “Heat” (1995), directed by Michael Mann.Later in her career, she supplied the voice of Big Barda on the DC Animated Universe television series “Batman Beyond” and “Justice League Unlimited.”Forke had health problems related to leakage from her silicone breast implants, which she had implanted in 1989. She had them removed in 1993 and then filed a lawsuit a year later against the manufacturer and her doctor for damages, noting that neither the implant makers nor her doctor properly warned her of possible complications, according to The Associated Press.In addition to her mother, Forke is survived by her twin sons, Chuck and Wit Forke; her stepfather, Chuck Talmage; and three sisters, Paige Inglis, Jennifer Sailor and Maggie Talmage.Kirsten Noyes More

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      ‘Great Freedom’ Review: Unbroken

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      In this moving period drama, a German gay man repeatedly declares his independence in a country that criminalizes his desire and his identity.The first time you see the exhilaratingly stubborn hero of “Great Freedom,” he is moving around a grubby public bathroom. Fit and jaggedly handsome, with short hair and sideburns, he looks coiled with impatience, restless yet confident. A trim mustache frames his sensual mouth, and his biceps are set off by his short sleeves. He paces, occasionally drawing on a cigarette, and at one point stands in the open doorway looking out, as if waiting for someone.Other men soon enter the bathroom and with shared, feverish purpose and practiced gestures, they and Hans (the indispensable Franz Rogowski) have sex, a basic human act, if one that challenges the state. It’s 1968 and the West German law known as Paragraph 175 prohibits sex between men, with offenders subject to imprisonment. Incorporated into the German criminal code in the 1870s, the law was expanded and viciously enforced by the Nazis; shockingly, a version remained on the West German books for decades after the war.Low key, affecting and insistently unsentimental, “Great Freedom” is a fictional story of resistance against this inhumane law, a story of salvation told one caress and sexual encounter at a time. For Hans, the bathroom is a refuge, a necessity, a pleasure zone and merely one of the many restricted, otherwise unloved spaces — almost all in prison — that he occupies and, in his way, liberates. Shortly after the movie opens, he is sentenced to two years without probation, a penalty that he doesn’t bother to challenge in court. Hans has his own way of protesting: He loves and has sex with who he wants, when he wants, how he wants.And he does so again and again as the years and prison terms slip into one another. He falls in love, has different partners and lives his life. There are beautiful, ugly and nondescript men, alternately caring and cruel lovers. Hans opens himself to these different souls even as he keeps to himself, generally revealing little to others. He’s beaten and abused, and keeps on going. He paces and smokes in the yard, and is repeatedly thrown into solitary to languish in a hellish, unlit pit. As the punishments and years mount and his hair turns gray, you wonder how he can stand it. Until, that is, you remember that outside is a type of prison, too.The director Sebastian Meise, who wrote the script with Thomas Reider, tells this story with open feeling and steady, emphatic calm. Emotions run predictably hot in the prison — there are beatings and a horrible death — but Meise doesn’t amp the violence or use it as a crutch. Instead, he uses the prison’s claustrophobia, its confining rooms and darkness, and Rogowski’s immaculately controlled performance to create an aura of intimate reserve that draws you to Hans, though at a slight remove. You grow fond of Hans, but you also remain an outsider, watching as he weathers prison, faces existential threats and finds furtive joys.These hard-won pleasures are sprinkled across the story’s two well-paced episodic hours, which jump around in time and span several decades. Kinked timelines have become a wretched cliché, but here the jumbled chronology expresses the associative flow of memory, how one face evokes another and one touch summons up a lost world. In one flashback, Hans appears as a wincingly thin captive who, after serving time in a Nazi concentration camp, has now been imprisoned by the Allies. In another flashback it’s 1957 and Hans is now buoyed by his relationship with Oskar (Thomas Prenn), who’s nowhere as resilient.There are other men and other entanglements, including with a sweet-faced young schoolteacher (Anton von Lucke), whom Hans meets in that bathroom in 1968 and later poignantly serves time with. Hans’s most consistent if unlikely relationship, though, is with Viktor (a fantastic Georg Friedrich), a rough, brutishly charismatic slab of a man serving a life sentence for murder. Covered with jailhouse tattoos and plagued by a series of sad, greasy haircuts, Victor is at once repulsed and transparently captivated by Hans. For his part, Hans carefully navigates the other man with his well-honed faculty for self-preservation.“Great Freedom” is an unexpectedly tender movie. This gentleness is a welcome relief — narratively, emotionally — from the canned barbarism of many prison movies, with their exploitative jolts, their shanks, cruelties and grim, casual sexual violence. It’s also fundamentally political. The inmates brutalize one another, but there’s love here, too; the most horrific violence originates from the prison itself and, by extension, the state that dehumanizes these men (or tries to), criminalizing both their desires and their very personhood.Meise and Reider don’t burden the characters with chest-thumping or expository speeches; there are no title cards crammed with encyclopedic histories or triumphant flag waving. One of the few nods in the movie toward the future (though this may be a matter of translation) is tucked into a prisoner’s plaintive question: “Why do you always act up, Hans?” He does, unreservedly, but part of his appeal is that he doesn’t always say what he thinks, which intensifies your interest. Other people are invariably a mystery, but one thing you do know: Even as the world closes around him, legally and physically, Hans remains free.Great FreedomNot rated. In German and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ Review: A Cosmic View of Hawaii

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      This experimental documentary takes viewers on a psychedelic tour of Hawaii, exploring the tension between scientific inquiry and Indigenous preservation.Fern Silva’s debut feature “Rock Bottom Riser,” an experimental documentary that explores humans’ relationship to nature in Hawaii, brings awareness to how the planned construction of a 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, the archipelago’s most sacred mountain, could have damaging effects on Indigenous communities.The film is a psychedelic tour of the islands, jumping from image to image and interweaving voice-overs or scenes with lectures on the cosmology, astronomy, history and science of Hawaii. Through some of its images and narration, it urges viewers to consider the ways in which science can be a colonizing force, further marginalizing native Hawaiians and their traditional modes of inquiry while helping to criminalize their dissent. In one scene, an unidentified narrator says that attempts by Indigenous people to guard the mountain have been reported as “threatening violent acts” by astronomers, leading to police intervention.Silva presents a Hawaii likely unfamiliar to tourists, relying not on beach landscapes but on volcanic lava, mountainscapes and dense forests. Viewers can hear a car rev offscreen while palm trees swing at sunset. Elsewhere, two men fill a smoke shop with oversized Os created with the smoke from their vapes. Silva jumps from the cosmos, to a surfer catching a wave, to historical documents and equations. These visuals, which sometimes clash, show humans’ tenuous relationship with nature.The film is sometimes hard to follow, because the connection between the images and the voice-overs is not always clear. But taken as a whole, “Rock Bottom Riser” leaves viewers with a strong sense of how native Hawaiians view themselves and their future, and encourages inquiry into how their land might be preserved.Rock Bottom RiserNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lucy and Desi’ Review: Love in the Time of Television

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      This documentary, directed by Amy Poehler and about the dynamic duo behind “I Love Lucy,” favors the good times over the difficult ones.The filmmakers of the lightweight documentary “Lucy and Desi” benefited from an embarrassment of riches. Over many years, in hundreds of hours of footage, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz enacted a simulacrum of their domestic life in “I Love Lucy.” In her chronicle of the duo’s romance and work, the director, Amy Poehler, draws liberally from this trove.These television clips are the most evocative and transporting elements of the documentary, which in spite of its material offers limited insight into its central couple. Talking-head interviews with historians and children of the pair’s collaborators usher us through the decades at a clipped pace that, along with the distance of elapsed time, gives the story an impersonal feel. Joyful periods take heavy precedence over misfortunes, and some difficult topics, such as Arnaz’s womanizing, come up only obliquely.But the movie’s most frustrating choices concern Ball’s registration with the Communist Party, a scandal that takes center stage in the biopic “Being the Ricardos.” Poehler merely touches on the episode’s most familiar details before using it as a jumping off point to describe Arnaz’s escape from Cuba. We learn that Arnaz’s father, a wealthy mayor under the Gerardo Machado administration, was arrested during the revolution. Rather than demystify these politics or investigate where Ball’s views differed from Arnaz’s, the movie takes pains to underline Arnaz’s disdain for Communism and appreciation for the United States.Here is a documentary that invites us to delight in the unexpected pairing of a famed funny lady and a hunky musician — but without analysis or nuance. Better to flip on a few “I Love Lucy” reruns instead.Lucy and DesiRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      At New York Children’s Film Festival, the Films Come First

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      The New York International Children’s Film Festival returns with a diverse, sophisticated slate, including Richard Linklater’s animated take on the 1969 moon landing.When Chloé Zhao won the Academy Awards for best director and best picture for “Nomadland” last year, some who felt special pride were neither her relatives nor her film industry collaborators. These delighted fans were the team behind the annual New York International Children’s Film Festival, which in 2011 showed one of Zhao’s earliest projects: “Daughters,” a 10-minute short about a 14-year-old Chinese girl being forced into an arranged marriage.The festival, whose 25th-anniversary edition begins on Friday evening at the SVA Theater in Manhattan, has long showcased filmmakers who either go on to distinguished careers or have already achieved them. This year’s opening-night titles include “Where Is Anne Frank,” a haunting animated feature about children affected by wars past and present, from the award-winning Israeli director Ari Folman (“Waltz With Bashir”). On March 19, the festival will close with “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood,” an animated examination of the 1969 moon landing by the acclaimed American filmmaker Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”), who will conduct a livestreamed Q. and A. with the audience.“We are a film festival first,” Nina Guralnick, the organization’s executive director, said in a video interview. In choosing sophisticated works, she added, “we want the program and the experience to be part of a continuum of film appreciation and film discovery, and not kind of segmented as something for kids.”This year, Guralnick and Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, are confronting the challenges of the pandemic by presenting both in-person screenings — almost all at the SVA Theater — and virtual offerings. Although the 20 features and more than 60 shorts make up a robust and global slate (this year includes the festival’s first film from Kyrgyzstan), the programmers will host fewer screenings, showing some titles in the theater only once, and others only online.“Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood” is an animated examination of the 1969 moon landing by Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”).NetflixThe streaming works, which will be available through April 3 — past the festival’s official end date — will include all those for children under 5, who are still too young to be vaccinated against Covid-19. This year, however, also gives children ages 3 to 5 a broader range of short films than in the past, as well as a feature: the Swedish director Michael Ekblad’s “Best Birthday Ever,” an animated tale about a kindergarten rabbit who must cope with a baby sister.“We really wanted to get back into the theater this year, if we could safely,” Guralnick said. And while circumstances won’t allow in-person award festivities, the festival will still feature its audience-choice and jury prizes. (It is one of the few Oscar-qualifying children’s festivals, meaning that its prizewinning shorts are eligible for Academy Award consideration.)This year, one of the programming highlights is animation, which Villaseñor described as a way to give young audiences “a different point of access” to subjects that might otherwise be too harsh.“Charlotte,” for instance, a feature by the Canadian directors Tahir Rana and Éric Warin, uses painterly animation to illuminate the life and work of Charlotte Salomon, a young German Jewish artist — voiced by Keira Knightley — who died at Auschwitz.Folman also chose intricate animation for “Where Is Anne Frank” because, he said in a phone interview, it offers “endless opportunity to do crosses between reality and imagination, between conscious and subconscious, between dreams and true stories.” Folman undertakes all of these in the film, which focuses not on Anne but on Kitty, the imaginary friend to whom Anne’s diary was addressed. Kitty emerges from the journal as a girl in contemporary Amsterdam, traveling across time to learn what happened to her friend. During her quest, she encounters refugee children who reflect Anne’s legacy.“I don’t look at it as a Holocaust movie,” Folman said. “I look at it as a coming-of-age movie.”The festival, however, does not neglect animation’s affinity for the wildly comic. In Domee Shi’s “Turning Red,” from Disney and Pixar, a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl transforms into a big red panda whenever she’s too excited.“Oink,” Mascha Halberstad’s stop-motion feature about a pet piglet.Viking Film/A Private ViewOther boisterous travails occur in “Oink,” the Dutch director Mascha Halberstad’s stop-motion feature about a little girl with an imperiled pet piglet. But this is no “Charlotte’s Web.” Oink, the piglet, makes an indelible mark in not always welcome ways — housebreaking is an issue — and Babs, his owner, has her hands full, especially with a visiting grandfather obsessed with a sausage-making contest. Halberstad, who will attend the festival with the producer Marleen Slot for a Q. and A. on Friday, explained in a video interview that she was aiming for a tone like that of Roald Dahl because “he doesn’t underestimate children.” Though the film ends happily, “it has a bit of an edge,” she said.The festival also offers titles that capture an interplay between art and science. “I wanted to eliminate the divide between them,” Villaseñor said, “and have people realize how vitally important the creativity in the arts is to innovating in the sciences.”“Gagarine,” for instance, a poignant, inspiring movie that was selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, mingles a teenager’s passion for space exploration with his desire to have a home. The first feature from the young French directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, the film was shot at the real Cité Gagarine, a housing project outside of Paris that was torn down in 2019.“We were really roommates with the demolition team,” Trouilh said as he sat next to Liatard in a video call from Paris. Their fictional protagonist, Youri (Alséni Bathily), refuses to leave, constructing for himself an elaborate kind of secret space capsule in the shadow of the wrecking ball.“Because of the empty space left by the absence of his parents,” Liatard said, “we imagine that space is the thing that is a refuge for Youri.”Alséni Bathily in “Gagarine,” about a teenager’s passion for space exploration. It was shot at a Paris housing project that was torn down in 2019.Cohen Media GroupMore technology-fueled dreams appear not only in Linklater’s “Apollo 10½,” in which another boy imagines himself lifting off, but also in the festival’s annual shorts program “Girls P.O.V.,” which this year features young female science pioneers, real and imagined. Still other budding innovators occupy the spotlight in Thomas Verrette’s documentary “Zero Gravity,” about diverse middle school students in a NASA coding competition.Such films capture the enduring principles of the festival, which was founded by Eric Beckman and Emily Shapiro, parents who in 1997 made a commitment to offering children more independent and less commercial fare.“We’ve wanted to help kids dream beyond the limitations of their own reality,” Guralnick said. Through the festival’s many iterations, she added, “we’ve been trying to be a gateway for children for 25 years to what they envision the future to be, to what they envision their world to be — should be, can be.”The New York International Children’s Film FestivalMarch 4-19; 212-349-0330; nyicff.org. More

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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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      ‘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