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      Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Champion of Indigenous Peoples, Dies at 85

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      As a teenager, she was the star of a film about an Aboriginal girl raised by a white family. As an adult, she fought discrimination in Australia against her people.Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, who as a teenager was believed to be the first female Indigenous person to star in a feature film in Australia and later became an Aboriginal rights activist, died on Jan. 26 in Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory. She was 85 and had been living in Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland.Her daughter, Ngarla Kunoth-Monks, said the cause was a stroke. Her family gave permission to use her name and image.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was cast in the title role of “Jedda,” a film directed by Charles Chauvel, which he wrote with his wife, Elsa. The story is about a teenager who is raised apart from her Aboriginal culture by a white woman after her mother dies in childbirth. Eventually, she is abducted by an Aboriginal man (played by Robert Tudawali).The Chauvels had come to her school in 1953, chosen her for the lead and taken her to locations around the Northern Territory and in Sydney. Away from her family and school, she recalled being lonely and scared. She said Mrs. Chauvel bullied her and, on several occasions, she tried to escape but did not succeed. She did not know how to be an actor, so she did as she was told, speaking the words she was fed.“I was in a state of confusion, a state of trauma,” Mrs. Kunoth-Monks said in an interview with Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive in 1995. “I really didn’t want to ask questions about what I was doing there, or what they were going to do with me. I was quite literally petrified that I wasn’t going to see my family, or my country, again.”She attended the premiere in the summer of 1955 at a segregated theater in Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, but was allowed, she said, to sit in the whites-only section.In a review of “Jedda” in The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, the critic Brian McArdle wrote that despite some rough edges to Mr. Chauvel’s direction, “It is easily the most significant film to have emerged from an Australian studio in the past two decades.”Mrs. Kunoth-Monks recalled being horrified when she saw the sexual context of scenes with Mr. Tudawali in which he touched her. But looking back as an adult, she recognized in her character’s assimilation into her white foster mother’s world a subject that was not only true to life for people like her in Australia but one that would animate her future activism.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks in 1955, the year her movie, “Jedda,” was released. “It is easily the most significant film to have emerged from an Australian studio in the past two decades,” one critic wrote at the time.History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock PhotoRosalie Lynette Kunoth was born on Jan, 4, 1937, in Utopia. Her father, Alan, sheared sheep. Her mother, Ruby Ngale, was a homemaker, and was an Aboriginal of the Anmatjere group. Her father’s parentage was mixed: his father was German and his mother was part-Aboriginal.Five years after the release of “Jedda” — the only movie she acted in — she joined an Anglican order in a suburb of Melbourne, where she took her final vows as a nun in 1964. But she recalled feeling sheltered from the travails of Aboriginal peoples, which she followed on television, and left the order in 1969. The next year, she married Bill Monks, whose sister had known Mrs. Kunoth-Monks while she was still a nun.She soon joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, where she persuaded college students to help young Indigenous students with their school work, and set up what she said was the first group home for Aboriginal families in Victoria whose goal was to keep children from being separated from their parents.She left in 1977 to run a hostel in Alice Springs; started the social work section at a hospital there; was the chairman of the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service; a commissioner of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, an adviser on Indigenous affairs to the chief minister of the Northern Territory and chairman of Batchelor Institute, a school for Aboriginal students, also in the Northern Territory.Malarndirri McCarthy, a senator in the Australian parliament from the Northern Territory, in a statement after Mrs. Kunoth-Monks’s death, praised her “quietly spoken yet determined focus on challenging institutional racism.”In 2008, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was elected to a four-year term as president of the Barkly Shire, a local governmental entity in the Northern Territory. It was a year after the Australian government’s imposition of a series of laws on the Northern Territory that were, in part, designed to crack down on child sexual abuse and alcoholism in Indigenous communities.The government’s raft of measures — referred to as the Intervention — included the compulsory acquisition of dozens of Aboriginal communities under five-year federal leases; restricting the sale, consumption and purchase of alcohol in certain areas, and linking income support payments to school attendance for people on Aboriginal land.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks opposed the Intervention as discriminatory because it so clearly targeted Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. As part of her protest, she and the Rev. Dr. Djiniyini Gondarra, a clan leader and ceremonial lawman in the Northern Territory, met in 2010 in Geneva with the United Nations’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.The two later issued a report which said: “Ordinary Australians can see this injustice in a democratic country and know that it shouldn’t be happening. When you share with a body such as the U.N.,” they wrote, “straight away they see that Australia is racist and that the Government does not govern with the spirit of peace and order.”In addition to her daughter, she is survived by many grandchildren; her sisters Teresa Tilmouth and Irene Kunoth; her brothers, Don Kunoth and Colin Kunoth; her foster daughters, Elaine Power, Natasha Adams and Patrice Power, and her foster son, Mathew Adams. Her husband died in 2011.In 2014, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was a featured voice in “Utopia,” a documentary by John Pilger about the mistreatment of First Nations peoples, as Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders are called.In a panel discussion on Australian television after the film’s release, she articulated her opposition to the federal government’s policies toward her people and any attempt to forcibly assimilate them.“This is the country I came out from,” she said. “I didn’t come from overseas. I came from here. My language, in spite of whiteness trying to penetrate into my brain by assimilationists — I am alive, I am here and now — and I speak my language.”She added, “I practice my cultural essence of me.” More

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      ‘Top of the Heap’: Is It Blaxploitation? Avant-Garde? Afrofuturism? All Three.

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      Released in 1972 and now rediscovered, the movie is as ambitious as “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and even weirder.The tale of a tightly wound Black police officer whose identity crisis leads to an action-packed nervous breakdown, “Top of the Heap” makes a statement — not least in that its writer-director, Christopher St. John, is also the star.Hardly seen since its initial 1972 release, “Top of the Heap” was rediscovered about a decade ago by the determined programmer of Chicago’s Black Cinema House. Now restored, it’s getting a theatrical run at BAM in Brooklyn.The movie, which appeared a year after Melvin Van Peebles’s one-man show “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” rocked the world, is nearly as confrontational and no less ambitious. Uptight and disagreeable, St. John’s George Lattimer isn’t a conventional hero; nor, as The Amsterdam News dryly noted in a generally favorable review, “the stuff of which positive images are made.”George has every problem a white cop would have and many more. Universally suspicious, he is subject to racial epithets by Black drug dealers and roughed up by a white cop only too eager to mistake him for a criminal. His crisis begins when he learns that, after 12 years on the Washington, D.C., police force, he has been passed over for sergeant and his mother in Alabama has died.“Top of the Heap” devotes considerable time to George’s compensatory fantasies, mainly daydreams of being the first Black astronaut. The New York Times critic Roger Greenspun, who found the movie uneven, wrote that these excesses allowed it to “develop a measure of genuine interest.” If it were an avant-garde film, “Top of the Heap” would be considered a psychodrama, with the artist turning the camera on himself.As replete with zappy flashbacks as an Alain Resnais production, “Top of the Heap” is stabilized by its fiercely alienated central performance. St. John, an Actors Studio member who had recently played a Black militant onscreen (“Shaft”) and onstage (“No Place to Be Somebody”), intentionally makes no effort to woo the spectator. Consequently the film is stolen by the singer-dancer Paula Kelly.Identified in the credits as only the Black Chick, Kelly has a comic scene in which she confounds George by setting his complaints to music, and another in which, sheathed in gold lamé, she parodies Tina Turner with the cyclonic spin she puts on the plodding country-western gospel song “Put Your Hand in the Hand.”Very much of its moment, “Top of the Heap” begins with a hippie-hardhat mud-wrestling riot and ends with a sniper assassination; it was topical enough to snag J.J. Johnson’s first score after “Shaft” and provide a popular Nixon impersonator his movie debut. At one point, George and his nerdy white partner (Leonard Kuras) discuss the possibility of U.F.O.s. George says he would caution the aliens to stay away: “We got Richard Nixon here.”George’s dreams of escaping Earth are almost a metaphor for the movie — the only commercial feature that St. John would ever make. If this intimation of Afrofuturism suggests that the “Top of the Heap” was a bit ahead of its time, so, too, was its critique of blaxploitation, delivered even before the clichés had hardened.Top of the HeapFeb. 18-24 at BAM in Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      ‘Uncharted’ Review: Steal, Fight, Repeat

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      This inaptly titled treasure-hunt adventure recycles all the familiar clichés while giving Tom Holland a strenuous physical workout.At least give Sony credit for recycling. That is the best that can be said for its nitwit treasure-hunt movie “Uncharted,” an amalgam of clichés that were already past their sell-by date when Nicolas Cage plundered the box office in Disney’s “National Treasure” series. Now, it is Tom Holland’s turn to cash in with a musty story about ancient loot, old maps, lost ships, invisible ink and a wealthy scoundrel with disposable minions. But while he’s following in Cage’s inimitable footsteps, Holland also seems in training to become Tom Cruise 2.0.The similarities between “Uncharted” and the first “National Treasure” are notable, with both movies adhering to the same booty-questing template. Each opens with a flashback of the protagonist as a wee lad eagerly being primed for adventure by an older male relative, a misty rite of passage that seems calculated to put a family-friendly stamp on an otherwise greed-driven setup. In “National Treasure,” the kid soon becomes a character played by Cage, whose singular, offbeat performance style can elevate and disrupt crummy material.In “Uncharted,” the boy grows up to become a neo-buccaneer played by the boyish Holland, a likable, exuberantly physical performer who has traded his Spider-Man responsibilities for more old-school heroic duty. The Hollywood action movie seems an open field right now partly because most of the male stars who headline non-comic-book blockbusters are middle-aged or older. Holland is 25. He’s cute without being threatening or distractingly, Chalamet-esquely beautiful, and has enough presence and training (dance, gymnastics, parkour) that he can bluff and breeze past clichés while gracefully bouncing through fights and obstacles.Cruise will be 61 when the next “Mission: Impossible” finally (maybe) opens in July 2023. He’s likely to keep going Energizer Bunny-style for years to come. Still, the paucity of young male actors who have the profile, credits and skill set to sell studio goods like “Uncharted” may prove a lucrative opportunity for Holland and his treasure-seeking handlers. At any rate that may explain the images of his character, Nate Drake, a thief who moonlights as a bartender (or vice versa), pulling some smooth moves on the job, a bit of juggling tomfoolery that instantly triggers images of Cruise in “Cocktail.”Soon enough, though, Nate leaves behind his gig and his New York pad for an international escapade that he embarks on in tandem with Mark Wahlberg’s Sully, a more experienced, openly untrustworthy thief. A veteran of workaday blockbusters, Wahlberg serves twinned functions here as a presold pop-culture brand and an archetypal mentor for Nate. Sully can sprint, fight and trade unfunny quips without breaking a sweat, and Wahlberg is just fine delivering the same gruff, regular-guy performance that he always does. He shares top billing with Holland, but Wahlberg is largely onboard as training wheels for the younger actor.“Uncharted” is based on a PlayStation game of the same name that first hit in 2007 and that tracks the globe-trotting doings of its Everyman hero, said to be descended from the British privateer Sir Francis Drake. The movie, directed by Ruben Fleischer, nods to the game and Sir Francis, who circumnavigated the globe in the 16th century and was instrumental in England’s challenge to Spain. Given the current climate, though, it’s a surprise that the movie didn’t quietly ignore Sir Francis, who participated in establishing the slave trade. In 2020, a statue of Sir Francis in Britain was draped in chains with a sign reading “decolonize history.”Hollywood’s penchant for ignoring inconvenient historical truths means that the movie leans into Sir Francis’s globe-trotting and plundering as well as his fight against the Spanish, in this case through the proxy figure of Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas). A Barcelona moneybags, Santiago is out to enhance his fortune with the same treasure that Nate and Sully are chasing. It’s a bit of a bummer to see Banderas back in this type of throwaway role, though presumably stars can’t live on Pedro Almodóvar movies alone. Mostly, Banderas handsomely scowls, barks orders and helps keep the machinery chugging.For his part, Nate grins and grimaces, runs and leaps, nimbly going through many of the same action-movie paces that heroic avatars have long gone through. He also types on a computer keyboard, wears a tux at a fancy party à la James Bond and flirts with a romantic foil, Chloe (Sophia Ali). Like the movie’s scariest baddie, Braddock (Tati Gabrielle), Chloe is one of those tough — but sexy! — female characters who’s more physically in the mix than she would have been in the past, back when the love interest was played by the blonde du jour. But while Chloe and Braddock are clearly adding something new to the same old story, they’re still performing the same old roles for yet another Hollywood male contender.UnchartedRated PG-13 for relatively bloodless death and violence. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Downfall: The Case Against Boeing’ Review: Behind Two Fatal Crashes

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      This documentary on Netflix leaves the impression that the 737 Max’s entire existence is rotten.Regardless of any changes that Boeing made to the 737 Max, regardless of the clearance the revised plane received from the Federal Aviation Administration in late 2020, “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” leaves the impression that its entire existence is a mistake: that it was cobbled together for the wrong reasons, to boost short-term stock gains and to avoid the time and costs of engineering a new, non-737 plane.The problems of the Max, and how its flawed design was implicated in the crashes of flights on Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, killing hundreds, have been well-aired, and this documentary, directed by Rory Kennedy (“Last Days in Vietnam”), does not break news or break ground cinematically. (We don’t need to see filler footage of a reporter making calls.) But it is likely to leave viewers shaken, and it is always comprehensible, even in sequences that illustrate what the pilots saw in the cockpit. As the movie explains, in the first crash they were put in the position of having seconds to beat back a system that Boeing had never told pilots was on the aircraft.“Downfall” features interviewees who have gotten lost or abstracted in all the coverage, including the wife of the Lion Air captain, family members of the passenger victims and former Boeing employees. “How many times have you heard companies say, ‘We’re committed to excellence, we’re committed to safety, we’re committed to our customers’?” asks Andy Pasztor, who reported on the story for The Wall Street Journal, in summation. His verdict: “We should be skeptical.”Downfall: The Case Against BoeingRated PG-13. Upsetting material involving the crashes. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Strawberry Mansion’ Review: Adventures in Slumberland

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      A taxman lives in a future world that evokes the disarray of dream logic in this creative and surreal sci-fi movie.“Strawberry Mansion,” a soulful sci-fi oddity from Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley, is a dollhouse constructed on a fault line. Birney and Audley, who both directed and edited the film, evoke the disarray of dream logic: The sets shift, the sound effects heighten and the props grow and shrink. Initially, the style is stifling, giving the sense that the wallpaper might matter more than the plot. One room is painted solid pink, with matching pink house plants and a pink broom. Another room houses a machine covered in incomprehensible widgets and tubes, plus a turtle named Sugar Baby. But oh, how the two filmmakers enjoy knocking down the walls of their own creation. This is a movie about letting the mind roam.The setting is 2035. James Preble (Audley), an unsmiling bureaucrat played with the gentle flatness of worn shoe leather, wakes up to start his dreary job as a dream auditor. In this near future, there’s a 52-cent charge for imagining a hot-air balloon, he notes in his report on an older artist, Bella Isadora (Penny Fuller), who hasn’t paid taxes in years. Bella’s recorded subconscious, accessible through the many virtual reality tapes stacked around her home, stars her younger self, an exaggerated romantic (Grace Glowicki) who frolics with caterpillars and smiles when she sees her father’s friendly stop-motion skeleton dancing on his grave. By contrast, the only joy in Preble’s miserable, monochromatic dreams is when his fantasy friend (Linas Phillips) appears with a bucket of fried chicken.The story arc is obvious: Entering Bella’s brain will awaken Preble’s own. What’s startling is Audley and Birney’s playful, handmade ingenuity. To fully describe it would spoil the surprises. (As a teaser, one 15-second gag involves Preble and Bella transforming into beets.) Suffice it to say that the filmmakers’ reveries are so meticulously designed that the audience trusts their steady vision even when Birney, in a cameo, shows up as a saxophone-playing frog.Strawberry MansionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Now in theaters, on demand beginning Feb. 25. More

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      ‘Inspector Ike’ Review: A Murder Mystery Send-Up, ’70s-TV style

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      This microbudget comedy, an affectionate parody of old-time television “mystery movies,” is an often-inspired goof.Cinephiles tend to associate American microbudget filmmaking with raw, edgy earnestness, but some aspirational indies are very much into knowingly silly comedy — see, for instance, the 2017 short “Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone.”“Inspector Ike,” directed by Graham Mason from a script he wrote with the comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu, who stars in the title role, is almost as daffy as they come.The movie is an affectionate parody of TV-made murder mysteries of the 1970s, specifically “The NBC Mystery Movie,” the umbrella under which, among others, Peter Falk’s beloved Lieutenant Columbo operated.Ufomadu’s Inspector Ike is not Columbo-esque. Far from shambling, like Columbo, he’s ceaselessly cheerful and confident. In every “episode” he stops the action to present a recipe, which viewers are asked to copy onto special “Inspector Ike” cards. (I was not provided with a card.)But the plot — in which a couple of theater types in turtlenecks and corduroy blazers banter before one of them hoodwinks the other into recording a videotaped suicide note of sorts — is very much like one of those “Columbo” stories in which a mad quasi-genius overestimates his criminal acumen.To establish an alibi, the villainous Harry Newcombe (Matt Barats) takes a date to an avant-garde theater performance. “How long is this play,” the date asks. “Well, let me ask you this,” the pompous Harry replies. “How long is the workday of the average American?” Once she dozes off, he slips out to do his evil deeds.Mason and company did not have the means to accurately recreate the mise-en-scène of the real deal, but they maintain credibility in the writing and acting departments. The long-pause humor here is the opposite of the barrage we expect from “Airplane!”-style genre goofs. It’ll work best with viewers whose funny bones are of the dry varietyInspector IkeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dog’ Review: Man and Beast Hit the Road

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      In his directing debut, Channing Tatum plays an Army Ranger on a healing journey with a canine comrade.Road comedies that pair an animal and a movie star are a minor genre unto themselves. The best examples, in my opinion, involve Clint Eastwood and an orangutan named Clyde, though the recent one with Eastwood and a rooster wasn’t bad. Channing Tatum is a different kind of screen presence — sweeter, chattier, bulkier — and in “Dog,” which he directed with Reid Carolin, he amiably shares the screen with (spoiler alert!) a dog.She is a Belgian Malinois named Lulu (played by three talented canines), and she has served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. So has Tatum’s character, Jackson Briggs, a former Army Ranger living in a cabin in the Northwest. A history of brain injuries has kept him out of action, but he hopes that a good word from his commanding officer will give him a chance to go back overseas.To make that happen, Jackson agrees to accompany Lulu from Fort Lewis, Ore., to Nogales, Ariz. The reason for the road trip is the funeral of her handler, a Ranger whose death in a car crash haunts Jackson and the film. While “Dog” is a man-beast buddy movie, it’s also preoccupied with grief, trauma and the challenges of post-combat life. Lulu and Jackson are both wounded warriors who must learn to trust each other and help each other heal.Though much is made of Lulu’s ferociousness, the film’s humor is gentle and mostly unthreatening. She chews up the seats in Jackson’s already battered Ford Bronco, disrupts his potential threesome with a pair of Tantra practitioners in Portland and causes an unfortunate ruckus in a San Francisco hotel. Jackson has variously awkward, hostile and touching human encounters, notably with New Age cannabis growers and a resentful, racist police officer.“Dog” is unabashedly sentimental. A movie about a dog and a soldier could hardly be otherwise. Luckily, Tatum’s self-deprecating charm and Carolin’s script keep the story on the tolerable side of maudlin. It’s also circumspect about Lulu and Jackson’s experiences of war, which is vaguely understood as something horrible but also glorious. Neither one is as complex as a real dog or a real man would be, which makes the movie an easy watch, but at the cost of some credibility. It’s friendly and eager to please, but it won’t quite hunt.DogRated PG-13. More barking than biting. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ted K’ Review: An Eerie Descent

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      Tony Stone directs an expressionistic portrait of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber.Shot largely in the secluded mountains outside Lincoln, Mont., where the real Theodore J. Kaczynski lived before his arrest by the F.B.I. in 1996, “Ted K” is a blinkered portrait of the infamous domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.The director Tony Stone — whose 2016 documentary “Peter at the Farm” also put the spotlight on a mean (if far less sinister) recluse — dramatizes Kaczynski’s psychological state throughout the 17 years he spent building and sending bombs that killed three and injured dozens more. Sections from Kaczynski’s extensive writings are narrated in voice-over like drifting thoughts by Sharlto Copley (“District 9”), who takes on the titular role with vulnerability and palpable fury. As Kaczynski learns how to construct more sophisticated weapons, we observe his brief interactions with the outside world — his perpetual struggle with a finicky public phone booth, his irregular conversations with his concerned mother and the brother whose marriage he resents.The film is a tad reductive, leaning too heavily on currently fashionable explanations for why lonely white men resort to violence. But Stone makes up for it with some magnificently eerie moments.An original score by the electronic artist Blanck Mass, anachronistically interwoven with classical numbers by Vivaldi, certainly helps, creating a mood of grandiose delirium. Filled with menacing slow zooms and fade transitions, the film nevertheless feels inconsistent when it jerks back and forth from stylized depictions of Kaczynski’s crimes, building him up as a kind of anti-villain badass, to a tone of gentle, ultimately sympathetic mockery — as when Kaczynski begins courting an imaginary girlfriend.The script’s emphasis on Kaczynski’s relentless bachelorhood and his feelings of castration is too neat an explanation. More convincing is the film’s expressionistic fixation on the technologies that torment Kaczynski — the ugly roar of dirt bikes, snowmobiles and tree-razing bulldozers. In one remarkable dream sequence, we see Kaczynski seemingly shooting through the space-time continuum, looking small and terrified and like the kind of man who would kill to feel a sense of control.Ted KRated R for nudity, language and stylized violence. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More