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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

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      ‘Against the Ice’ Review: Snow Buddies

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      A hard-core first half is deflated by sleepy melodrama and a formulaic script in this adventure film about the Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen.Streaming on Netflix, “Against the Ice” gives the mission to secure Denmark’s claim to Greenland the survival flick treatment, and the explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen a glow up in the form of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (“Game of Thrones”).Though set in the early twentieth century, this Danish production by the filmmaker Peter Flinth has a slick digital sheen that makes the absence of technology feel like an accident. This anachronism looks cheap, and the script by Coster-Waldau and Joe Derrick (based on Mikkelsen’s memoirs) checks all the boxes you might expect from an arctic adventure story — polar bear showdowns, starvation blues, yearning hallucinations of a woman.In other words, it’s perfectly formulaic.The film opens jarringly when a comrade returns to base camp from a failed expedition with his feet grossly frostbitten and swollen like plums, to which the steely Mikkelsen takes a machete. Dashing patriot that he is, Mikkelsen refuses to abandon the cause, though none of his men care to join him aside from Iver Iversen (Joe Cole), a chipper volunteer who doesn’t know what he’s in for.In an effective, if transparently manipulative narrative element, the duo’s sled dogs are the prime casualties, and we witness their ranks whittle down in a variety of horrifying ways. Dog lovers beware: In one scene, a fazed Iversen must sacrifice one of the pups to provide food for the rest. Mikkelsen embodies this unapologetic survival instinct, and he’s not impressed with his sentimental partner.The saintly younger man, however, puts up with his captain when he experiences visions of his girlfriend, and Flinth confusingly skips past swaths of time to cram in more moments of brotherly friction. Disappointingly, this shift from a relatively hard-core first half to a second bogged down by desultory dramatic beats significantly lowers the stakes. It’s a known fact that Mikkelsen and Iversen made it home, but “Against the Ice” doesn’t succeed in making us feel anything when they do.Against the IceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Bong Joon Ho and Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Oscar Surprise ‘Drive My Car’

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      The Korean filmmaker and the Japanese director have long admired each other. The two explain why Hamaguchi’s best-picture nominee resonates.In January 2020, just weeks before his film “Parasite” would make Oscar history, the director Bong Joon Ho was in Tokyo doing a magazine interview. By that point in what had become a very long press tour, Bong had dutifully sat for dozens of profiles, but at least this one offered a little bit of intrigue: Bong’s interviewer was Ryusuke Hamaguchi, a rising director in his own right.For Bong, a fan of Hamaguchi’s films “Asako I & II” and “Happy Hour,” this was a welcome chance to mix things up. “I had many questions that I wanted to ask him,” Bong recalled, “especially since I’d been doing many months of promotion and I was very sick of talking about my own film.”But Hamaguchi would not be deterred. He was a man on a mission — “pleasantly stubborn and persistent,” as Bong remembered him — and every time a playful Bong tried to turn the tables and ask the younger director some questions about his career, Hamaguchi grew ever more serious and insisted that they speak only about “Parasite.”“I really wanted to know how he made such an incredible film, even though I knew how tired he was of talking about ‘Parasite,’” Hamaguchi said. “I felt sorry for him, but I still wanted to ask him questions!”Now, two years later, Bong has finally gotten his wish: The 43-year-old Hamaguchi is the man of the moment, and Bong is only too happy to jump on the phone and discuss him. Hamaguchi’s film “Drive My Car,” a three-hour Japanese drama about grief and art, has become the season’s most unlikely Oscar smash, receiving nominations for best picture and international film in addition to nods for screenplay and directing.Hidetoshi Nishijima, left, and Toko Miura in “Drive My Car.”Bitters EndThose happen to be the same things “Parasite” was honored for two years ago, when that South Korean class-struggle thriller collected four Oscars and became the first film not in the English language to win best picture.Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.“‘Parasite’ pushed open that very heavy door that had remained closed,” Hamaguchi told me through an interpreter this week. “Without ‘Parasite’ and its wins, I don’t think our film would have been received well in this way.”Called a “quiet masterpiece” by the Times critic Manohla Dargis, “Drive My Car” follows Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater director grappling with the death of his wife, as he mounts a production of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima. The theater company assigns him a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who ferries him to and from work in a red Saab while holding back vast emotional reserves of her own. Though Yusuke at first resents Misaki’s presence, a connection — and then a confession — is finally made.“There are many directors that are great at portraying characters, but there is something peculiar and unique about Hamaguchi,” Bong said via an interpreter by phone from Seoul. “He’s very intense in his approach to the characters, very focused, and he never rushes things.”And though that unhurried approach can result in a long running time, Bong felt that the three-hour length of “Drive My Car” only enriched its eventual emotional impact.“I would compare this to the sound of a bell that resonates for a long time,” he said.Perhaps it’s fitting that the film’s awards-season journey has been slowly building, too. Unlike “Parasite,” which rocketed out of the Cannes Film Festival after winning the Palme d’Or, the intimate “Drive My Car” (adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami) emerged from Cannes last summer with a screenplay trophy and little Oscar buzz. But after critics groups in New York and Los Angeles both gave their top film award to Hamaguchi, the movie’s profile began to steadily rise.From left, Choi Woo Shik, Song Kang Ho, Chang Hyae Jin and Park So Dam  in “Parasite.”NeonStill, the road to Oscar is littered with plenty of critical favorites that couldn’t go the distance. When I asked Hamaguchi why “Drive My Car” had proved to be his breakthrough, the director was at a loss.“I honestly really don’t know,” Hamaguchi said. “I want to ask you. Why do you think this is the case?”I suggested that during the pandemic, it affects us even more to watch characters who yearn to connect but cannot. Even when the characters in “Drive My Car” share the same bed, the same room or the same Saab, there’s a gulf between them that can’t always be closed.Hamaguchi agreed. “We are physically separated and yet we’re able to connect online,” he said. “It’s that thing of being connected and yet, at the same time, not.”To illustrate what he meant, Hamaguchi recalled that 10 years ago, while working on a documentary about the aftermath of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, he traveled through eastern Japan interviewing survivors. As he lent those people a camera and his trust, deeply buried thoughts came spilling out of them.“After the interviews, I wrote out the words, and I realized that the ones that really shook me were the words that were quite normal or ordinary,” he said. “They were things that perhaps these people had already thought but had never thought to verbalize until that moment.”The same is true when it comes to the “Drive My Car” characters, whose internal struggles can only reach the level of epiphany when they find someone to confide in.“It’s possible that when the characters say what they’re thinking, the audience could think, ‘Oh, they didn’t actually know this?’ But it’s about the journey of being able to get to a place to verbalize that, and for that journey to happen, it’s because someone is there to witness it,” Hamaguchi said. “Somebody being there to listen has an incredible power.”And Hamaguchi wouldn’t mind some company himself, if only to help him process all those Oscar nominations. When I spoke to him last week, he was quarantining in a Tokyo hotel after returning from the Berlin Film Festival. “I haven’t seen anyone, so no celebration for me,” he said.As the Oscar nominations were announced on Feb. 8, Hamaguchi was flying to Berlin; when the plane landed hours later, he turned on his phone and was flooded with text messages. Even now, recounting the story, he remains in a state of disbelief.“To be honest, I don’t think I’ll feel like all of this is real until I’m actually at the awards ceremony,” he said. “No matter how many congratulations I get, it’s hard to believe, especially when I’m confined to a narrow, small hotel room. Perhaps when I’m at the awards ceremony and I see directors like Spielberg there, reality might kick in.”Bong, center, onstage at the Oscars when “Parasite” won best picture in 2020.Noel West for The New York TimesBong was less gobsmacked by Hamaguchi’s nominations. “I knew ‘Drive My Car’ was a great film, and I didn’t find it surprising,” he said. “And since the academy lately has been showing more interest in non-English films, I expect that the film will do well at the awards.”His own Oscar ceremony was a whirlwind experience — “I can’t believe it’s been two years already,” Bong mused — but he declined to offer advice to Hamaguchi on how to navigate the night.“I’m sure he will do well,” Bong said. “He is someone who is like an ancient stone — he has a very strong center.”Instead, Bong extended a request. When they first met in Tokyo, and again last year during a panel discussion at the Busan Film Festival in South Korea, there wasn’t much time for the two men to hang out. “So this year, I hope we will be able to get together either in Seoul or Tokyo and have a delicious meal,” Bong said. And after the Oscars, surely they would have plenty of notes to compare.Hamaguchi was eager to accept the invitation. “I’m truly delighted to hear that,” he said, though he cautioned that Bong might not like the topic of dinner conversation: “I would really love to keep asking questions about how he makes such amazing films. I want to keep asking him until he’s sick of me asking!” More