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      Jean-Jacques Beineix, ‘Cinema du Look’ Director, Dies at 75

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      His first feature, “Diva,” a visually unusual tale, is credited with starting a new, style-focused genre of filmmaking in France.Jean-Jacques Beineix, a French film director whose debut feature, the eye-popping, droll thriller “Diva,” was much acclaimed, especially outside of France, in the early 1980s and is often credited with starting a genre of French filmmaking known as the cinéma du look, died on Jan. 13 at his home in Paris. He was 75.His family announced his death to Agence France-Presse, saying Mr. Beineix (pronounced Beh-nix) died after a long illness. Unifrance, the organization that promotes French film, issued a statement praising “his innovative, intensely visual, iconic cinema.”In “Diva,” a fan surreptitiously tapes the performance of a renowned American soprano who has forbidden any recordings of her singing, setting off a chain of complications, including blackmail. One unusual aspect of the film was that the title character was played by a real-life opera singer, Wilhelmenia Fernandez. But the most unusual thing about the movie, for that time, was its look, full of color, references to other films and odd camera angles.“Everything is seen through glass, in mirrors or as reflected from the surfaces of mud puddles,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in 1982, when the movie, which had opened in France the year before, played in New York. “If a scene isn’t shot from a low angle, it’s shot from a chandelier.”Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, was also struck by the visual bravura.“It’s a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky,” she wrote of the film, “but it’s also genuinely sparkling. The camera skids ahead, and you see things you don’t expect. Beineix thinks with his eyes.”Its style was also sometimes called the new New Wave.“In contrast to the old New Wavers,” Manohla Dargis of The Times explained in 2007, when a new print of “Diva” was shown at Film Forum, “who sought to interrogate the relationship between the real and the image, the new New Wavers seized on the unreality of cinema, underscoring its falsity, its theatricality, its surface.”Luc Besson and Leos Carax were among the other directors often included in the genre, although that was not always a compliment; some critics faulted the films for emphasizing style over substance. Certainly Mr. Beineix’s subsequent movies — he made only a few more features — were greeted with mixed reviews at best.The best known of those was “Betty Blue” (1986), a drama about an obsessive love affair. Sheila Benson, in The Los Angeles Times, named it one of the year’s 10 best.“Beineix’s power is to draw us to the center of this tempestuous love affair, to feel its magnetic pull as strongly as we sense its imminent doom,” she wrote.But Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, said that the film “has a shallow, sunny prettiness and little more.” Its two leads, Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade, spent quite a bit of the film unclothed.“If either of them made it through the filming without catching a bad cold, it’s a miracle,” Ms. Maslin wrote.Mr. Beineix accepted that his films might inspire ridicule as well as praise.“That’s the risk you take,” he told The Gazette of Montreal in 2001. “But if an artist doesn’t take risks, what’s left? There has to be at least a minimum of provocation in art. That’s what films should do.”Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle in the 1986 film “Betty Blue,” which divided critics. The Los Angeles Times named it one of its top 10 of the year, but The New York Times described it as having a “shallow, sunny prettiness.”Cinema Libre StudioJean-Jacques Beineix was born on Oct. 8, 1946, in Paris. He loved movies from an early age, he said, but didn’t immediately pursue a career in filmmaking.“I was never the kind of cinephile who belonged to any club,” he told The International Herald Tribune in 2006. “I didn’t get down on my knees at the Cahiers du Cinema altar” — a reference to the famed film magazine.Instead, after earning a degree in philosophy and then studying medicine for several years, he took a leap of faith.“I finally left the university when I was 24,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1982, “to take a job as an assistant film director at the lowest level. I brought coffee to people and enjoyed every minute of it because I didn’t have to study anymore.”Throughout the 1970s, he worked his way up from second assistant director (including on the 1972 Jerry Lewis film “The Day the Clown Cried”) to first assistant director on films by Claude Zidi, Claude Berri and others. He gained valuable experience, but by the end of the 1970s was beginning to chafe at being an understudy.“I was seeing things done one way, and I wanted them to be done differently,” he told The Tribune.So he made “Diva,” though the film was not an instant success — largely, he thought, because it could not be easily pigeonholed. Critics in France didn’t like it, and promoters didn’t know how to promote it.A film still from “Diva.” Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, was struck by the visual bravura, describing it as “genuinely sparkling.”Rialto Pictures“Eventually, though, word of mouth turned everything around,” he said. And foreign audiences began discovering the movie. At the 1981 Festival of Festivals in Toronto it finished second in the audience voting for the event’s most popular film, behind “Chariots of Fire.”His follow-up, “The Moon in the Gutter,” did not fare as well. It was booed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 and flopped.Mr. Beineix’s films after “Betty Blue” included “IP5: The Island of Pachyderms” in 1992. The cast included the revered actor and singer Yves Montand, who died of a heart attack in November 1991 near the end of the filming. Mr. Beineix felt that people blamed him for the death. Shortly afterward, both his mother and his press agent, a close friend, also died. He didn’t make another feature film for almost a decade.“It’s like you’ve been punched and punched and punched,” he told the film website Nitrate Online in 2001. “It built up, and suddenly I couldn’t make a picture.”His return to filmmaking, with the comic thriller “Mortal Transfer” in 2001, was not successful.Mr. Beineix’s survivors include his wife, Agnes, and a daughter, Frida. More

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      BAFTA Nominations List: ‘Dune' and ‘The Power of the Dog’ Lead Awards

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      Dennis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic and Jane Campion’s western secured the most nominations in a lineup notable for its diversity.Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Power of the Dog,” which was nominated for eight BAFTA awards on Thursday.Kirsty Griffin/Netflix, via Associated PressLONDON — The unpredictability of this year’s award season continued on Thursday when the nominees were announced for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic “Dune” was nominated for best film at the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, as was “Don’t Look Up,” the climate change satire starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jane Campion’s tense western “The Power of the Dog.”Those films will compete against “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s black and white movie based on his childhood in Northern Ireland, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ’70s coming-of-age romance “Licorice Pizza.” But of those movies’ directors, only Campion and Anderson were also nominated for the best director prize. They will compete in that category against several directors lesser known in the United States: Aleem Khan, the director of the British movie “After Love”; the French director Julia Ducournau for her Cannes-winning horror movie “Titane”; Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the Japanese director of “Drive My Car”; and Audrey Diwan, the French director of the abortion drama “Happening,” which was the unexpected winner of the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival.The BAFTA nominations, which were announced in a YouTube broadcast, are often seen as a bellwether for the Oscars, because of an overlap between the voting constituencies for both awards.Learn More About ‘Don’t Look Up’In Netflix’s doomsday flick, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth.Review: It’s the end of the world, and you should not feel fine, writes the film critic Manohla Dargis.A Metaphor for Climate Change: With his apocalyptic satire, the director Adam McKay hopes to prompt the audience to action. Meryl Streep’s Presidential Turn: How the actor prepared to play a self-centered scoundrel at the helm of the United States.A Real-Life ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment: The film revives memories of a nail-biting night in the Times newsroom two decades ago.“Dune” secured 11 BAFTA nominations, the most overall, although many are in technical categories like costume and production design. “The Power of the Dog” secured eight nominations, the second highest, with three of those in the acting categories.This year’s list also includes some acting nominees that may not be to be on the Oscars’ radar. The nominees for best actor, for instance, include Stephen Graham for “Boiling Point,” a British movie set behind the scenes in a restaurant, and Adeel Akhtar for the British romance “Ali & Ava,” as well as big names like Will Smith (“King Richard”), Benedict Cumberbatch (“The Power of the Dog”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“Don’t Look Up”) and Mahershala Ali (“Swan Song”).The nominees for best actress similarly include the British actress Joanna Scanlan for her role in “After Love,” about a white Muslim convert who uncovers her husband’s secret past, as well as Lady Gaga (“House of Gucci”), Alana Haim (“Licorice Pizza”), Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) and Tessa Thompson (“Passing”).Amanda Berry, the chief executive of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which gives out the awards, said in an interview that the diversity of this year’s nominees was partly down to changes introduced in 2020 to encourage voters to watch more widely among the nominated movies. Before they cast their ballots, voters must now watch a random selection of 15 films via an online portal, to ensure they don’t just focus on the most-hyped movies, Berry explained. How much overlap there is between the BAFTAs and Oscars nominees will soon become clear. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science is scheduled to reveal the nominees for this year’s Oscars on Tuesday.The winners of the BAFTAs are set to be announced on March 13 at a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and Berry said she expected the event would return to its usual, pre-pandemic format. Last year, nominees attended via video link, but Berry said she expected the awards to be given out in person in March, and that the glamour of the red carpet would be back. More

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      ‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’ Review: An Overdue Close-up

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      In this new documentary, Poly Styrene’s daughter grapples tenderly with the legacy of her punk rock mother.Marianne Joan Elliott-Said found her stage name, Poly Styrene, running her finger through the yellow pages, she says in an on-camera interview circa 1976. The lead singer-songwriter of the British punk band X-Ray Spex and the first woman of color in Britain to front a successful rock band, she looks and sounds impossibly, wonderfully young. She has a mouth full of braces, soft eyes and an open smile. The name appealed because it suggested a kind of plastic, she said. Yet there was little synthetic about the rebellious performer with the startling voice. Nor are there any false notes in “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché,” a documentary directed by her daughter, Celeste Bell, and Paul Sng.Five years after her mother’s death in 2011, Bell, though emotional, was able to face a cache of photos, flyers, diaries, poems and lyrics. More than a journeyman rockumentary, “Poly Styrene” is a thoughtfully finessed filial reckoning: a daughter’s journey toward understanding her mother as a young artist and as a young woman of color. Styrene’s mother, a legal secretary who was white, met Styrene’s father, a dapper Somali dock worker, at a club. She and her sister grew up in a Brixton estate.Bell provides the film’s contemplative narration. The actress Ruth Negga (“Passing”) reads Styrene’s diaries and poems, as well as interview transcripts. Recollections from her X-Ray Spex bandmate Paul Dean and other musicians, including Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, give a sense of time, place and, occasionally, bad-lad culture. But it’s the female rockers who pay resonant tribute: the X-Ray Spex saxophonist Lora Logic; Kathleen Hanna; and Neneh Cherry, who credits Styrene for her sense that a woman of color has a place in rock and punk.Poly Styrene: I Am a ClichéNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Jackass Forever’ Review: A Visit From the Goon Squad

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      Sharp cinematography and enviable camaraderie continue to hoist Johnny Knoxville and friends above their many imitators in this deceptively kindhearted sequel.The Jackass guys have gotten older but, thankfully, their maturity levels have stayed the same. Over 22 years, three television seasons and movies on screens big and small, Johnny Knoxville’s lovable goons have been whacked so often that their orchestra of moans could play “O Fortuna.”In “Jackass Forever,” the director Jeff Tremaine’s original cast — now solidly middle-aged war horses — expands to include younger, more elastic bodies like the rapper Jasper Dolphin (real name: Davon Wilson); an adult man who calls himself “Poopies” (Sean McInerney); and the stand-up comic Rachel Wolfson, the franchise’s first girl, who is dared to lick a stun gun. (The end credits honor the crew’s old comrade Ryan Dunn, who died in a car crash at 34 in 2011. Another original member, Bam Margera, was fired by Paramount in 2020 for breach of contract. He has since filed a lawsuit claiming wrongful termination.) Knoxville, 50, has said that this will be his final film — he sustained a brain hemorrhage from getting flipped upside-down by a bull during filming — and his swan song is not for the bashful. Nether regions are pummeled with softballs, hockey pucks, flip-flops and pogo sticks. They’re bedecked with live bees and painted to look like Godzilla. One willing victim, the performer and punishment glutton Ehren McGhehey, better known as Danger Ehren, is restrained and coated in honey to attract a bear.“Jackass” remains the most shocking theatrical experience since the mythic mid-1890s screening of the Lumière brothers’ “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.” As a test of resolve, it has no rivals. The performers fling themselves into dumb and painful stunts on purpose, and blissfully weak-willed audience members cackle knowing that their laughter is proof that they haven’t grown up either. Two things continue to hoist “Jackass” above its legion of imitators, many of whom are now found on TikTok. First, the razor-sharp slow-motion cinematography, which immortalizes writhing men in wet underpants with the devotion of Michelangelo sculpting “The Pietà.” Second — and more important — is the crew’s friendship, which is evident as they egg on the wounded and apply a healing salve of applause in nearly every scene. Bones get brittle. The heart muscle remains strong.Jackass ForeverRated R for raw language, rawer nudity and real pain. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Breaking Bread’ Review: Peace Meals

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      This documentary follows the preparations for a food festival at which chefs from Arab and Jewish backgrounds team up to create dishes together.“Breaking Bread” opens with a quote from Anthony Bourdain, who said that “food may not be the answer to world peace, but it’s a start.” The premise underlying this documentary, directed by Beth Elise Hawk, is that all cultures can unite over the spectacle of mouthwatering food on camera.The movie follows preparations for the 2017 A-Sham Festival in Haifa, Israel, an event that celebrates the cuisine of a region where geopolitical boundaries are more defined than culinary ones. At the film’s start, the festival’s founder, Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, identifies herself as a Muslim, an Arab, an Israeli, a Palestinian, a woman, a scientist and a cook (she won the Israeli version of “MasterChef” a few years ago). She says in the film that borders “mean nothing to hummus.”The contestants live in Israel but come from diverse backgrounds. At the festival they are generally paired with someone whose origins differ from their own to create an assigned dish. For example, Ali Khattib, from an Alawite village in the Golan Heights, and Shlomi Meir, who runs an Eastern European restaurant in Haifa, work together to make a traditionally Syrian soup with a base of bulgur wheat soaked in yogurt.A lot of the observations in “Breaking Bread” — the repeatedly offered notions that food is a common language or that politics has no place in the kitchen — seem trite and perhaps overly optimistic. The movie would ideally be shown with an accompanying tasting menu.Breaking BreadNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Last Looks’ Review: A Hollywood Murder Mystery Full of Clichés

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      A former police officer is drawn back into duty in a case involving a drunken TV star, played by Mel Gibson, and the plot thickens.Latter-day Hollywood murder mysteries, from “The Long Goodbye” to “The Dead Pool” to “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” provide filmmakers welcome outlets for both showbiz sensationalism and a little (at least) biting of the hand that feeds them. Oh, and sometimes cliché-mongering. “Last Looks,” directed by Tim Kirkby and based on a novel by Howard Michael Gould, opens with an ex-cop living in self-imposed ascetic exile, a circumstance that now feels as old as time, if not older.The former officer, Charlie Waldo (Charlie Hunnam), is called upon at the top of his personal mountain by a former partner, who asks Waldo to look into the death of the wife of a drunken TV star named Alastair Pinch, played by Mel Gibson.Soon all heck breaks loose as a few toughs invade Waldo’s sanctum and kick the stuffing out of him while yelling stereotypical trash talk. (Throughout the movie, it seems that almost every character who commits violence against Waldo is Black or Latino.) Waldo then bikes down to a studio lot and reluctantly begins his investigation.And then it only gets more odd. Gibson sports Colonel Sanders-like facial hair and crafts a character who’s kind of a hybrid of Oliver Reed and Rich Little (lot of accents). Edgy.In the course of his inquiries, Waldo meets the attractive kindergarten teacher of Pinch’s child, played by Lucy Fry. This is the kind of movie in which it’s a matter of when rather than if the two characters fall into bed with each other. Tiresome.Kirkby does keep up a jaunty pace. But he also seems preoccupied with impressing his inner hipster, as with an attitude toward race that dares you to call it cavalier. And his again edgy music choices. I, too, like the new post-prog rock group Squid, but putting their song “Sludge” over the end credits is a non sequitur. This is a picture that could have benefited from the (relatively) finer hand of Shane Black of “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.”Last LooksRated R for violence, sexuality, language, adult-oriented cliché-mongering. Running time: 1 hour 50 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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      These Talkies Star Complicated Women You Might Well Recognize

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      A MoMA series puts the spotlight on a Hollywood era when actresses broke free of stereotypes that would later dominate movies for decades.In that all-too-brief period in Hollywood between the silent era and the summer of 1934, when the puritanical Production Code Administration began to put a stranglehold on the industry, the women of the silver screen came into their own.Sure, this was the stretch of time that saw the rise of legendary leading ladies like Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and Marlene Dietrich. But female star power in pre-Code Hollywood went far beyond these big names.Take it from “Dames, Janes, Dolls and Canaries,” a fine series starting Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art that offers a small but rich sampling of pre-Code titles, several rarely screened. This selection, programmed by the writer and film historian Farran Smith Nehme, showcases the abundance of actresses whose singular presences helped stake out complex understandings of womanhood in unexpectedly modern ways.Pre-Code films have a reputation for being salacious. That was not exactly a product of progressive ideals but a business tactic meant to draw in Depression-era audiences with sheer titillation.Hobart Henley’s mesmerizing 1932 ensemble film, “Night World,” is filled with leggy chorus girls, broom-closet makeouts, scandal and murder, while King Vidor’s “Bird of Paradise” from the same year, an adventure romance with a deliriously racist understanding of Pacific native culture, features an extended underwater scene in which a nude Dolores del Río swims away from her white beau.Yet in “Night World,” Mae Clarke, who plays a dancer with a knack for nursing drunkards back to health, cuts through the hedonism and anarchy with her grounded intelligence and low-key charm. And del Río — a Mexican actress regularly handed the role of forcefully sexual foreigner during her time in Hollywood — brings to her island princess a vibrancy and solemn romanticism that deepens an otherwise two-dimensional part.Dolores del Río with Joel McCrea in “Night World.”via The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchivePre-Code actresses no longer played merely vamps or ingénues, those twin feminine archetypes that dominated the silent era. And without the kind of Production Code meddling that would eventually regulate and censor, among other things, the expression of female desire and sexuality, their characters were often ahead of their time, undermining the notion that American movies have gotten progressively more open-minded since then. The women of pre-Code Hollywood were not only more sexually liberated than their Code-bound successors, they were also unapologetically independent and skeptical or outright dismissive of norms and institutions like marriage in ways that went unpunished.Frank Borzage’s 1931 drama “Bad Girl,” for instance, opens with a bait and switch. We see Dorothy (Sally Eilers) in a white gown, nervously clutching a bouquet as a wedding march swells in the distance. But as the procession makes its way through a bustling dining room, we realize Dorothy’s not a jittery bride but a first-time model selling the fantasy of matrimony to an audience of starry-eyed gals and leering bachelors.“The law makes us a bunch of puppets on strings, like Punch and Judy,” says Ruth (Mae Clarke again) in James Whale’s 1932 “The Impatient Maiden.” Ruth is an assistant to a divorce lawyer who regularly witnesses marriages fraught with abuse, abandonment and betrayal. (This is in no small part because of the country’s economic precarity, a reality that factors into a number of films in this series.)A practical gal nevertheless filled with quiet yearning, Ruth suggests a reasonable course of action when she falls for Lew Ayres’s Dr. Brown: wait to tie the knot until his medical practice takes off. Scandal and hardship ensue when Dr. Brown rejects Ruth’s proposition, yet we sense that the root of the lovers’ problems lies not in a woman’s apprehension about marriage, but in the inert ideals that cloud the minds of men.Other films in the series take marriage lightly, to self-affirming and playfully joyous effect.In “One Hour With You” (1932), a musical comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch with the assistance of George Cukor, the stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald play a married couple, Andre and Colette, who are first seen canoodling in a park — a place regularly reserved for illicit lovers. Colette’s bestie, a bona fide homewrecker named Mitzi (a delightfully lusty Genevieve Tobin), takes a liking to Andre, prompting a night of infidelity from both sides that is conclusively brushed under the rug when the couple decide they love each other too much to let such trivial pursuits ruin them. As for Mitzi, she responds to her own husband’s divorce request with suave nonchalance, driving off with a risqué self-portrait in tow.Particularly touching are the moments in these films when women stand up for each other in the face of gendered moralizing.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Sundance Wrap-Up: 6 Movies We Like and One We Disagree on

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      Even virtual, the festival gave our chief film critics a lot to talk about.For the second year in a row, the Sundance Film Festival canceled its in-person plans and went virtual, wrapping up on Sunday evening. It was quite a feast, with more than 80 documentary and narrative features. Here are six our chief film critics especially liked, and one they disagree about.Manohla Dargis‘All That Breathes’Directed by Shaunak Sen, “All That Breathes” is an immersive, haunting documentary portrait of two Muslim brothers in New Delhi who have dedicated their lives to rescuing birds, many affected by humans and climate change. With intimacy, a great score and some fantastic macro cinematography — the birds loom large here — the movie pays tribute to the brothers even as it underscores that individuals alone can’t save nature.At times, Sen’s emphasis on visual lyricism over information opens up unanswered questions. And while he draws attention to anti-Muslim sentiments, it is never clear how Sen would like viewers to connect these terrifying threats with the grim specter of species extinction. Even so, there is no denying the movie’s power or its subject; there’s also no denying the heartbreak of its images. The raptors perched on mountains of garbage, the monkeys navigating overhead tangles of wires, the solitary turtle struggling to ascend a mound of debris — in the story of interspecies coexistence, the animals have already lost.‘Descendant’Emmett Lewis in “Descendant,” about the discovery of the last recorded American slave ship.Participant, via Sundance InstituteIn her latest documentary, Margaret Brown tells the story that begins — though doesn’t end — with the discovery of the Clotilda, the last recorded American slave ship. In 1860, decades after the importation of enslaved peoples had been made illegal in the United States, the ship sailed to Alabama. The men who owned and operated the Clotilda arrived at night and, after bringing their captives ashore, torched the ship to hide their crime. The ship sunk, disappearing from view.Brown tracks the fascinating efforts to recover the Clotilda, but her truer, more vivid subjects are those who survived slavery. Some helped establish Africatown, a community north of Mobile where much of the documentary takes place. There, Brown visits with descendants, people for whom slavery isn’t an abstraction but a living memory that generations have carefully preserved and passed down. The movie loses some of its focus midway, but the story of the Clotilda and where Brown takes this documentary are very moving.‘Dos Estaciones’Teresa Sánchez plays the owner of a tequila factory in “Dos Estaciones.”Gerardo Guerra, via Sundance InstituteFor much of this elliptical, visually arresting Mexican drama, María García (Teresa Sánchez), a stolid and stoic loner, holds the center. María, a monument to an old-fashioned way of life, if one who presents as nonbinary, owns the Jalisco tequila factory that gives the movie its title. But times are tough: a fungus is ruining the agave crops, and foreign-owned companies pose a threat to artisanal producers like María, who’s alone physically and existentially.The director Juan Pablo González immediately grounds you in María’s life both with the seductive, velvety beauty of the cinematography and by focusing on the material conditions of her everyday life, including the mesmerizing, labor-intensive production of tequila, which you follow from field to bottle. At one point, romance looms, and for a time the story shifts to a hairdresser, Tatín (Tatín Vera) a transgender woman, who with María, and several other characters, creates a vivid, textured, altogether unexpected world.A.O. Scott‘Leonor Will Never Die’Sheila Francisco plays a local filmmaker coming out of retirement.Carlos Mauricio, via Sundance InstituteThe titular heroine of this wonderfully unclassifiable movie — played by the Filipino singer and theater actress Sheila Francisco — is a sweet-natured, absent-minded woman of around 70. She lives (and frequently squabbles) with her grown son, stays on (mostly) friendly terms with her former husband and is haunted by the memory of her other son’s death. She is also a locally renowned action filmmaker, whose complicated emergence from retirement frames the director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s heartfelt, zany tribute to the magic of movies and the power of love.Leonor’s final script becomes a movie within the movie, but Ramirez Escobar’s metacinematic shenanigans don’t stop there. I counted at least four distinct layers of reality in “Leonor Will Never Die,” but there might be more. In any case the fun lies in the ways they collide and overlap. This may sound like a too-clever postmodern genre mash-up, but somehow the combination of family melodrama, pulpy violence and surreal comedy add up to the disarmingly tender portrait of an artist on the edge of the afterlife.‘A House Made of Splinters’Children in a temporary shelter in Ukraine, in the documentary “A House Made of Splinters.”via Sundance InstituteThe reality that Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary explores is almost unbearably heartbreaking. In Lysychansk, in eastern Ukraine, an institution provides temporary shelter for children whose lives have been disrupted by alcoholism, domestic violence and unemployment, social problems that war with Russia has made worse. The children find safety and companionship with one another and an endlessly patient staff while waiting to return to their parents or, more likely, to be transferred to orphanages or foster care.Granted extraordinary access to his subjects, Wilmont proceeds with exemplary tact and sensitivity, weaving a heartbreaking tapestry that also glows with empathy and even shows glimmers of mischief and delight. To be reminded of the vulnerability of young bodies and souls is wrenching, but there is also something thrilling about the honesty and tenacity of the kids and the dedication of their caretakers. It’s as if a Frederick Wiseman film had been reimagined by William Blake.‘Marte Um (Mars One)’Cícero Lucas in a scene from “Marte Um (Mars One).”Leonardo Feliciano, via Sundance InstituteThis Brazilian charmer isn’t especially flashy, buzzy or provocative. It’s a gentle, closely observed family drama, shot in warm colors in Contagem, a city in the state of Minas Gerais. The main characters — Wellington (Carlos Francisco), Tercia (Rejane Faria) and their children, Eunice (Camilla Damião) and Deivinho (Cícero Lucas) — each contend with crises that test their individual sense of identity and their bonds with one another.Unfolding in the wake of Jair Bolsonaro’s election to Brazil’s presidency in 2018, their stories brush against social and political sore spots (involving race, work, sexuality and religion) that will hardly seem foreign to North American audiences. But “Marte Um,” beautifully directed by Gabriel Martins, isn’t a culture-war polemic or an ideological fable. It’s a stirring example of — and a passionate argument for — the kind of humane realism that keeps movies alive, and that never goes out of style.Dargis vs. Scott‘Sharp Stick’Kristine Froseth plays a naive Angeleno opposite Jon Bernthal’s married man in “Sharp Stick.”via Sundance InstituteDargis I was looking forward to Lena Dunham’s “Sharp Stick,” about the sexual coming-of-age of Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), a woman in her mid-20s. But the only thing that kept me watching is Dunham; if anyone else had directed it, I would have bailed.There’s no point in enumerating all the reasons I dislike it — OK, the unfunny Los Angeles stereotypes were exasperating. But my biggest issue was the cloying and childlike Sarah Jo, whose narratively expedient naïveté worked my last frayed nerve. When I wasn’t overwhelmed with irritation, I did appreciate that Dunham has revisited the vexing, oft-troubling figure of the desiring, desirable young woman, a character that evokes Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll and so on.Scott My position in arguments about Lena Dunham is always “yes, but.” Yes, Sarah Jo’s unworldliness is overstated, some aspects of her sexual awakening seem like wishful thinking, and the tonal shifts from silly to sexy to earnest to icky can be a lot. But “Sharp Stick” is interesting to think about partly because Dunham herself is thinking, rather than (as so many of her Sundance peers and followers have done) recycling clichés about lust, female empowerment and family dysfunction. The unstable, scattershot quality of this movie is to me evidence of her curiosity and a willingness to push out of her own comfort zone, if she even has one. More