Movies
Subterms
More stories
- in Movies
Hollywood Journalist Prepares for a Surreal Oscar Night
A Times journalist gives a sneak preview of the Academy Awards on Sunday and offers insights on a changing film industry. More
- in Movies
‘Sisters With Transistors’ Review: How Women Pioneered Electronic Music
This far-reaching documentary from Lisa Rovner looks back at the female composers and artists who shaped modern music.This documentary from Lisa Rovner, about women and electronic music, is hardly as goofy as its title makes it sound. Many of the innovating individuals profiled here contend that women have an affinity for digital technology. And that technology had, and still has, the potential to “blow up the power structure.”Then again, discussing her theremin — an electronic instrument that creates sound via hand movements through what looks like empty space — the performer Clara Rockmore says: “You cannot play air with hammers. You have to play with butterfly wings.” By the same token, Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, 1950s and ’60s pioneers of synthesizers and tape loops who both worked for the BBC, are conventionally proper and polite as they explain their innovations in archival interviews.Narrated by the avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson in a vocal timbre that blends her performance mode with a more conversational one, this film is informative and often fascinating. It is invigorating to hear the great performer-composer Pauline Oliveros ask, “How do you eliminate the misogyny of the classical canon?” — pointing to a tape recorder as a potential tool. (Oliveros, who died in 2016, also discusses her 1970 New York Times Op-Ed titled “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady’ Composers.”The short shrift the movie gives to Wendy Carlos is puzzling. The very brief segment allotted to her begins with a French television clip about “Switched-On Bach” and its high sales. This segues into the composer-performer Suzanne Ciani’s dismissal of Carlos’s work: “The way it impacted the public’s consciousness of what a synthesizer was, was completely retroactive.” Rovner sees no irony in then chronicling Ciani’s work in television advertising.Sisters with TransistorsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch through Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More
- in Movies
‘Tu Me Manques’ Review: Traces of a Lost Love
A conservative father who could not accept his son’s sexuality is led on a contemplative tour of queer life in New York in this Bolivian film.The Bolivian film “Tu Me Manques” begins with a fight for an absent man’s affection. Jorge (Oscar Martínez) was the father of Gabriel, the former lover of Sebastian (Fernando Barbosa). When a chance phone call makes it possible for Jorge and Sebastian to meet, Sebastian is quick to hurl accusations at Jorge, who wouldn’t accept his son’s sexuality. Jorge has only tragedy to fling back: Gabriel died by suicide upon returning from New York City to Bolivia.What follows is an exploration of grief and adoration, as both men try to find a way to honor Gabriel’s memory. Jorge travels to New York looking for answers, and in response, Sebastian gives him a tour of Gabriel’s life in the city, introducing him to queer friends and gay nightclubs. The reminiscences lead Sebastian to write a play about his lost love, and the movie uses his theatrical ideas as an interesting, if somewhat alienating, reason to experiment with editing and form. Sebastian hires 30 actors to perform the role of his beloved — a gimmick that is mimicked in the film’s flashback sequences, which rotate in different performers as Gabriel.The film was written and directed by Rodrigo Bellott, who adapted the story from his play of the same name, based on similar events in his own life. Though the movie’s aesthetics are tepidly pleasant, Bellott’s biggest success is freeing his film’s relationship to time. In this sense, the movie retains some of the vitality of theater, where the characters invite the audience into reverie. Sebastian’s past, present, future and his fantasies of all three interact through flash-forwards and flashbacks, weaving together to create a moving and intellectually rewarding testament to queer life and loss.Tu Me ManquesNot rated. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on virtual cinemas. More
- in Movies
‘Paris Calligrammes’ Review: Recalling the 1960s With Fondness and Passion
The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger takes us on an unhurried journey through her past.The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is not nearly as well distributed in the United States as it ought to be, is not generally known for sentimentality. Her long, searching films are elaborately costumed and visionary not-quite allegories of queer radical feminism. Representative titles include “Madame X: An Absolute Ruler” (1982), “The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press” (1984) and “Joan of Arc of Mongolia” (1992). She can’t be blamed for getting at least a little wistful, though, in her new “Paris Calligrammes,” an autobiographical documentary. It’s about Paris, after all — her Paris, first experienced in the early 1960s.After the film opens with footage that Ottinger shot in the Paris of today, we’re swept back in time, aurally and visually: Notably by the singers Juliette Gréco and Jacques Dutronc, and a clip from Marcel Carné’s immortal 1945 “Les Enfants du Paradis.” But “Paris Calligrammes” consistently mixes what’s familiar to the Francophile with much that isn’t. The movie takes its title from a bookshop Ottinger frequented as a young woman. She had been enchanted by French culture growing up in occupied Germany, and sought out a connection home once she landed in the City of Lights to study. The bookstore Calligrammes, run by the German-born Fritz Picard, served German expatriates. It was a place where, Ottinger puts it, “The Dadaists encountered the Situationists.” It became a formative aesthetic home for the young artist.Ottinger’s account of a reading at the store by Walter Mehling is one of the movie’s high points. The filmmaker has what seems like a torrent of anecdotes and attendant ideas to impart, but the movie never feels rushed. She created three different narrations, those in French and English read by the actors Fanny Ardant and Jenny Agutter, and one in German, read by Ottinger herself. This U.S. release features the Agutter narration. This reading is as crucial in conveying the mood of Ottinger’s story as the film’s unhurried pace is.We see Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Signoret and Nico, but also now-obscure figures including Raymond Duncan, the dancer Isadora Duncan’s eccentric brother, who stalked the Paris streets in a toga and philosophized at the famed cafe Les Deux Magots. Ottinger’s account of the riot-provoking 1960s Paris premiere of Jean Genet’s play “The Screens” emphasizes how that production’s use of costuming and makeup influenced Ottinger’s own future film aesthetic.Ottinger also remembers alienation: Her account of a strike in May 1968 is less-than utopian. And she is pointed when recalling how when the activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit was agitating in Paris, it wasn’t just the right wing that dismissed him with the categorization “a German Jew.”When she ends the movie by putting Édith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” on the soundtrack, you may think Ottinger has finally succumbed to the sentimentality she’s kept mostly in check. But wait. Just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, “Paris Calligrammes” has a mid-credits stinger — this one about Piaf’s dedication of the song.Paris CalligrammesNot rated. In English, German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema. More
- in Movies
‘Wet Season’ Review: Teacher’s Pet
An immigrant schoolteacher finds solace in a relationship with one of her students in this suggestive drama from Singapore.A beacon of Southeast Asian prosperity and a haven for the ultrarich, Singapore represents a promised land for migrant workers. In “Wet Season,” a Malaysian schoolteacher named Ling (Yann Yann Yeo) seems to enjoy comfort and stability in her adopted country, yet life in Singapore gnaws away at her dignity. This conflict sets the stage for a reckoning and rebirth by poignant, if morally objectionable, means.When we first meet our heroine, a soft-spoken but resilient 40-something, she’s friendless and taken for granted by just about everyone, which the director Anthony Chen subtly links to her immigrant status. Ling teaches Chinese, but no one seems to take the subject seriously, while a haughty administrator lords his superiority over her by speaking exclusively in English.Struggling to conceive through in vitro fertilization, Ling privately anguishes as her businessman husband grows conspicuously absent. The couple’s relationship screams divorce, but the two stick it out — if only because Ling is her ailing father-in-law’s caretaker.Shot in melancholy blues and greys — and proceeding through Ling’s many small tragedies with cool, measured restraint — the film receives a jolt of teenage hormones with the entry of affable remedial student, Wei Lun (Koh Jia Ler), a competitive wushu practitioner obsessed with Jackie Chan. The two — a neglected child and childless woman — circumstantially hang out outside of class, as Chen patiently, if predictably, builds toward an abrupt and rather shocking consummation.Wei Lun comes off as one-dimensional in his brash, immature pursuit of Ling, yet their illicit relationship is portrayed in an anti-sensationalist light, blurring the lines between maternal and romantic love. Nevertheless “Wet Season” focuses less on the scandal than what the inevitable fallout can achieve for its floundering protagonist: a bittersweet second shot at life.Wet SeasonNot rated. In Mandarin, Hokkien and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. More
- in Movies
‘My Wonderful Wanda’ Review: The Secret Life of a Caretaker
The writer/director Bettina Oberli weaves a satirical family drama knotted with infidelity, among other complications.Though this film is set against a beautiful and placid Swiss lake, the happenings inside the wealthy Wegmeister-Gloor residence reveal a tangled web of relations that unravels into the droll drama, “My Wonderful Wanda.” Wanda (Agnieszka Grochowska) is a Polish caretaker who looks after the house’s aging patriarch, Josef (André Jung). She bathes and changes him, but at night, she sleeps with him for extra cash that she saves for the two sons waiting for her in Poland. Her stony face never betrays any sign of pleasure, but Josef is clearly satisfied; by the second act, Wanda is pregnant with his child.Bettina Oberli’s “My Wonderful Wanda” is, ironically, best when the focus is off Wanda, whose woodenness remains unreadable throughout. The supporting cast does the heavy lifting: There is Josef, the deceptively vivacious father, and the children, Gregi, the aviphile son, who is as fascinated with Wanda as he is with birds, and Sophie, the uptight, impertinent daughter. The film’s emotional anchor is the matriarch, Elsa (Marthe Keller, who most deserves the title of “Wonderful”). Elsa appears to be welcoming and generous but plays hardball with Wanda over money.The film, written by Oberli and Cooky Ziesche, satirizes class divides and xenophobia (“the Pole” constantly carries a derogatory connotation here), but never takes the satire far enough to be memorable, challenging or anything beyond whimsical, as Wanda and the Wegmeister-Gloors negotiate the future of the unborn child. The story also suffers from its division into three acts and an epilogue; it loses emotional momentum with each new section.My Wonderful WandaNot rated. In German and Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More
- in Movies
‘Together Together’ Review: A Conceivable Plan
A man and his surrogate navigate a bumpy road to fatherhood in this endearing dramatic comedy.Sweet, sensitive and surprisingly insightful, Nikole Beckwith’s “Together Together” fashions the signposts of the romantic comedy — the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the mutual acceptance — into a wry examination of a very different relationship.A dialed-down Ed Helms plays Matt, a middle-aged app designer as square as his name and with an air of touching loneliness. Matt’s longing to have a child, previously stymied by uncooperative girlfriends, is about to be satisfied by Anna (a wonderful Patti Harrison), a 26-year-old barista who has agreed to be his surrogate. A contract has been drawn up and a fee agreed upon; what hasn’t been settled is how they will manage the next nine months.For Anna, who plans to continue living as usual until she delivers, there’s no need to make a fuss. But a hands-off pregnancy is not in Matt’s playbook, and an awkward celebration dinner is only the beginning of his well-meaning intrusions. Soon he’s showing up at her work bearing special tea and comfy clogs; not even her sex life is sacrosanct. (“So did you guys just do it?” he blurts, catching her with a man as they leave her apartment.)Remarkably, none of this comes across as creepy or offensive, simply as Matt’s bumbling attempts to be a caring expectant father. He may have the financial power, but she’s in charge, and he’s trying to temper his anxieties and respect her boundaries. And while the movie is hardly immune to the cute and the quirky — like Julio Torres’s witty turn as Anna’s bizarre co-worker, or the awesome Sufe Bradshaw as a seen-it-all ultrasound technician — the two leads, who have an easygoing affinity, never allow the tone to stray too far from its bittersweet roots.Gently funny and disarmingly poignant, “Together Together” is unusually attuned to the isolation of single fathers. At a baby shower, Matt looks on enviously as guests encircle Anna; in his surrogacy support group, he’s the only person without a partner. A scene where he struggles alone to tie a baby sling is one of the saddest sights I’ve seen all year.Refusing to turn cartwheels to make us laugh, Beckwith’s script can be at times a little bland. Yet its key conversations feel authentic in a way that’s rare in movies of this type, its restraint ceding ground to the movie’s soothing platonic rhythms as Matt and Anna figure out how to grow a life and a friendship at one and the same time.Together TogetherRated R for anatomical accuracy. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More
