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      ‘There’s Still Tomorrow’ Review: An Updated Italian Heroine

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      Set in Rome after World War I, this black-and-white feminist film directed by (and starring) Paola Cortellesi tells a nuanced story about domestic abuse.“There’s Still Tomorrow” is set in Rome after World War I, but it unfolds with timeless verve and romanticism. It’s the directorial debut of the Italian singer and comedian Paola Cortellesi, who also stars. This feminist dramedy tells a story about domestic abuse — echoing still-timely concerns about violence against women and toxic masculinity in Italy — in captivating, unexpected ways.Shot in silky black-and-white and paying homage to the stylized working-class films of Federico Fellini, “There’s Still Tomorrow” follows Delia (Cortellesi), a doting mother of three who is regularly beaten and surveilled by her husband Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea). The cash she gets from her various odd jobs goes straight into Ivano’s pocket, and should she drop a dish, leave the house without asking, or accept favors from the American soldiers stationed around town, there’s hell to pay.The film never shows the batterings directly. In one scene, it’s choreographed with the drama of a tango, and in most others, we take the perspectives of Delia’s children or the group of gossiping housewives perpetually stationed in the courtyard.Cortellesi, as both director and performer, doesn’t sink into miserabilism. The beautifully built-out sense of place, populated by memorable personalities (Ivano’s bedridden father; Delia’s best friend, who runs a vegetable stand; the mechanic with whom Delia is in love), demonstrates the richness of Delia’s life in an effortless balance of humor and tragedy. Bursts of slick contemporary pop music give an edge to her plight.Crucially, the plot revolves around the future of Delia’s teenage daughter Marcella (Romana Maggiora Vergano), who dreams of getting married to her wealthy boyfriend and leading a life unlike her mother’s. Delia, whom Cortellesi plays with weathered charm, strives to save Marcella — and ultimately herself. This struggle is carried out with larger-than-life dramatics and touches of fantasy that make the film, for all its grim, real-life parallels, something of an escapist pleasure.There’s Still TomorrowNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Seven Veils’ Review: Private Anguish in Public View

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      Atom Egoyan’s latest film, starring Amanda Seyfried as a director of an opera, could only have come from him, in ways both good and bad.Only the Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (“Exotica,” “The Sweet Hereafter”) could have made the movie “Seven Veils.” His signature obsessions — the ripple effects of trauma, the use of video as evidence, private anguish played out in public view — pervade every frame.The film centers on a theater director, Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried), who is remounting a production of Strauss’s opera “Salomé” that she had worked on as a student with a mentor, Charles, who is never seen. The new assignment comes from Charles’s widow, Beatrice (Lanette Ware), who manages the opera company and surely knows that Jeanine and Charles were having an affair back then. What’s more, during the old production, Charles had exploited Jeanine’s experience of childhood abuse, vampirically drawing out her memories of being terrorized by her father and integrating those details into “Salomé.”The restaging requires Jeanine to faithfully replicate a troubling production while contradictorily making it her own, to expel her demons — all without disclosing her personal stake to the cast. She also has to manage present-day problems, notably a baritone (Michael Kupfer-Radecky) who is a liability around women. There’s more than a hint of self-reflexivity to “Seven Veils,” which incorporates Egoyan’s own remounting of “Salomé” for the Canadian Opera Company from 2023. That production’s singers play fictionalized versions of themselves.In short, “Seven Veils” offers plenty to think about. But fans who mourn that Egoyan’s dramatic instincts have slipped in recent years won’t quite be getting a return to form. Seyfried in particular seems out of place, and although the apparent miscasting might be intentional (Jeanine, giving an interview to a podcaster, pointedly explains that she is older than she looks), certain plot points and motifs, such as home movies featuring a blindfold and tangerines, approach self-parody.Seven VeilsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Rule of Jenny Pen’ Review: More Than the Usual Nursing Home Horrors

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      A bully with a baby doll makes life distressing for all.The philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Arguably, then, old age warps us even further. This certainly seems to be the case at the Royal Pine Mews Care Home, the fictional New Zealand setting for much of “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” a new film from the director James Ashcroft.Ashcroft, who adapted the film with Eli Kent from a short story by Owen Marshall, begins the tale with Geoffrey Rush as Stefan Mortenson, an imperious judge. He excoriates a young woman connected with a criminal case: “You’re not a victim here.” These words will come back to haunt him.During his final ruling, he suffers a stroke, which lands him in Royal Pine Mews. While he’s partially paralyzed, he’s still mentally sharp enough to be able to correct a fellow patient who misquotes Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” But he’s not quite prepared to handle another patient, Dave Crealy (played by a purposefully twitchy John Lithgow), who intimidates Stefan and other patients with the help of a puppet he’s made out of a baby doll (from which, among other things, he’s removed the eyes, to make it even more creepy) that he calls Jenny Pen.Ashcroft’s prior feature, “Coming Home in the Dark” (2021), was a relentlessly discomforting and ultimately harrowing tale of a family vacation gone wrong. With this film he expands his palette, serving up a double dose of horror: Crealy’s torture of Stefan, and Stefan’s seemingly inexorable mental deterioration. The director remains near-merciless in his approach, never shying away from showing his vulnerable characters (and the tormentor played with twisted relish by Lithgow is, ultimately, as unprotected as any of the others) in states of utter abjection.The Rule of Jenny PenRated R for themes, language, intense horror. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rule Breakers’ Review: Afghanistan’s First Robotics Team

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      Based on a true story, this wholesome movie centers on four girls who make it to a worldwide competition in Washington, despite the odds.The underdog sports drama receives a wholesome twist in “Rule Breakers,” a movie based on the experiences of Afghanistan’s first competitive robotics team. This is a story of heartening firsts: Roya Mahboob, who spearheaded the initiative for schoolgirls, is the first woman to own a tech company in Afghanistan. The director Bill Guttentag and his cast get the can-do spirit at its core, as well as the societal constrictions that make such perseverance especially impressive, but it’s also a story that could have been told with more concision and subtlety.In the movie, Roya (Nikohl Boosheri) assembles the Afghan Dreamers, a group of schoolgirls from Herat Province: Esin (Amber Afzali), Taara (Nina Hosseinzadeh), Haadiya (Sara Malal Rowe) and Arezo (Mariam Saraj). With Roya’s brother Ali (Noorin Gulamgaus) as the coach, the team weathers a series of setbacks and breakthroughs. Getting to their first match, in Washington, involves considerable bureaucratic red tape that leaves them a ridiculously short window of time to build their robot. Their challenging journey becomes international news.Back home, the girls’ fame draws the wrath of the Taliban. Undaunted by threats and slurs, they press on, their return to the competition circuit captured in music-fueled montages that feel like raves for science geeks, with a high-spirited turn from Phoebe Waller-Bridge as an emcee and event judge.But beyond the celebratory energy is something more urgent: the teenagers’ commitment to cooperation and connectedness in a world too often defined by war and, in Afghanistan’s case, a long history of occupation. In the movie’s most searing moment, the Afghan Dreamers explain the land mine detector they’ve built, an antidote to the horror of living in a place filled with unexploded ordnance. A girl on the Vietnamese team listens. “My country too,” she says.Rule BreakersRated PG. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Queen of the Ring’ Review: Fighting for Respect

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      A waitress becomes a wrestler in this sports drama, based on the true story of the champion Mildred Burke.In “The Queen of the Ring,” an overlong sports drama based on a true story, Mildred Burke (Emily Bett Rickards) is a waitress in the 1930s aspiring to something more. She overcomes the odds to become a champion wrestler in an era when American women were largely confined to cooking and cleaning. It’s a middling entry into the biographical sports movie genre, and the director, Ash Avildsen, cannot resist pummeling his audience with a simplistic girl-power message.Rather randomly, Mildred stumbles upon a wrestling match in Kansas City and proclaims the sport her destiny. The story continues chronologically, tracking Mildred and her manager turned husband Billy Wolfe (Josh Lucas) as they graduate from circus sideshows to professional matches to national renown.The screenplay, featuring dialogue exchanged in varying degrees of Southern drawls, is stuffed with spunky speeches about wrestling being a boys club. These moments amplify drama, but the script’s greater feat is a quiet attention to how women flocked to wrestling for its performative possibilities. It posits that “lady wrestlers,” as they called themselves, saw the ring as a stage, and the sport as an escape from dull domesticity.In its plot-heavy second half, “The Queen of the Ring” loses coherence when it speeds through a storyline about rival women’s leagues and sidelines characters it had only recently introduced. The muddle causes any sincere emotion to turn into schlock. One senses that Avildsen was desperate to pack an emotional punch, but he could have pulled a few instead.Queen of the RingRated PG-13 for violence, in and out of the ring. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘In the Lost Lands’ Review: A Postapocalyptic Romance

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      Dave Bautista and Milla Jovovich lack chemistry in this action film, based on a short story by George R.R. Martin.The dystopian action movie “In the Lost Lands,” based on a short story by George R.R. Martin, is a threadbare film that barely resembles an idea.Dave Bautista plays Boyce, a taciturn body hunter hired by a sorceress named Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) to pursue a shape-shifter for their kingdom’s young queen (Amara Okereke). Boyce and Alys are pursued by a zealous soldier known as Ash (Arly Jover), a leader of a religious royal guard dressed like Knights Templar intent on killing Alys.This lackluster script struggles to build a captivating story to match the allure of its expansive desert setting. Instead, Boyce’s tragic origins are kept hidden by the director Paul W.S. Anderson in order to spring a hokey third-act twist. Another issue is that Alys seems to exist solely as Boyce’s lovesick romantic interest. Neither Bautista nor Jovovich can cobble together anything resembling chemistry, and this isn’t helped by Bautista consistently overacting.After making the equally garish “Monster Hunter” in 2020, somehow “In the Lost Lands” is Anderson’s least imaginative film. Though Anderson and his trusted cinematographer Glen MacPherson remain capable of framing and lighting engrossing shots, the cheap effects used for the film’s many firefights and explosions look like a flurry of pixels. The editing attempts to hide these shortcomings, cutting around the action to the point of being incomprehensible. And maybe that’s for the best.In the Lost LandsRated R for violence and being an eye sore. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Empire’ Review: Star Tangled

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      In Bruno Dumont’s sci-fi farce, an alien conflict disrupts a sleepy French village.Reveling in galactic absurdity, “The Empire,” the latest from the fiercely unconventional French filmmaker Bruno Dumont, plunks us down in a fishing village in Northern France to witness an extraterrestrial war for control of humankind.What that looks like, however, is less a space opera than a banal, metaphysical farce — a “Star Wars” parody of increasing daftness and diminishing fun. As two alien races known as One and Zero vie for mastery over a handful of unexceptional locals, Dumont’s screenplay stirs simplistic notions of good and evil into a plot that goes nowhere except — literally — down its own black hole.Until then, we are distracted by two minimally clothed young women: Line (Lyna Khoudri), part demon and all pout, who prefers to sunbathe in the nude; and Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei) a beautiful, bikini-clad alien princess. (One gets the impression Dumont is not unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Russ Meyer.) Both women are inexplicably turned on by the perpetually surly Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), an evil Zero and father to a satanic toddler who must be killed before puberty — a stage that, parents will agree, can turn even human offspring demonic.This sci-fi twaddle, soothingly framed by rolling sand dunes and a slash of crystal coastline (dreamily photographed by David Chambille), eventually tests our patience. Lightsaber tomfoolery and Lynchian interludes — like a bizarre musical scene featuring a clownish alien leader (Fabrice Luchini) and a writhing, callipygian dancer — embellish Dumont’s awkward merger of the terrestrial and the star-bound. The church-versus-state symbolism in the design of the rival mother ships, however, is a cool touch.With a little tweaking, “The Empire” could have been an amusing interspecies love triangle, as the Zero attempt to weaponize our “natural turpitudes.” Though, given the quantities of tongue involved in each libidinous encounter, I’d expect dehydration to be a far greater threat than an alien invasion.The EmpireNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Mickey 17’ Review: Bong Joon Ho’s Latest Dystopian Romp

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      In Bong Joon Ho’s latest dystopian romp, Robert Pattinson plays a hapless underdog whose work aboard a spaceship requires him to die, over and over.The world is at once scarily familiar and thoroughly, enjoyably loony tunes in “Mickey 17,” the latest Bong Joon Ho freakout. Bong is the South Korean filmmaker best known for “Parasite,” a ferocious 2019 comedy about class relations that spares no one, including viewers whose laughs eventually turn into gasps of visceral horror. Few filmmakers can shift moods and tones as smoothly as Bong, or have such a commensurately supple way with genre. You never know what to expect in one of his movies other than the unexpected, although it’s a good guess that, at one point, something monstrous will show up.Opening in 2054, “Mickey 17” takes place in an uneasily recognizable future that holds a cracked mirror to the present. It’s a very funny yet utterly serious story about ostensible winners and losers and about how, when money-grubbing push comes to power-hungry shove, heroes have it tough. That is the case with the title schlimazel, Mickey, a guy with a confused smile and a kick-me sign on his back. Played with soulful haplessness by Robert Pattinson, Mickey is a nice, not especially sharp guy who, having signed up with a space expedition, is in the wrong place at the wrong time for foolish reasons. He’s to blame, sort of.Bong wrote the screenplay, adapting it from Edward Ashton’s 2022 science-fiction novel “Mickey7.” The science in the movie is fairly minimal as such futuristic stories go; it includes a souped-up printer that Mickey becomes intimately familiar with during his wiggy adventures in inner and outer space. Following a disastrous business venture, he and his feckless friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), have fled Earth to work on a spaceship run by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a congressman turned megalomaniacal cult leader whose acolytes like red hats. Marshall and his wife, a scary slinkstress, Ylfa (Toni Collette), plan on colonizing what he believes is an uninhabited new world, a snowy white “planet of purity.”By the time you have entirely grasped what Marshall and Ylfa are up to, who and what they are, the ship is on the planet, and Mickey has died — 16 times, to be exact — in his role as the ship’s “Expendable.” Used to test viruses and other threats, Mickey undergoes brutal trials, and ends up dying on the job only to be reprinted in externally identical form. As with any software update, there are bugs, along with routine mishaps. When the movie opens, Mickey 17 has just plunged into a planet crevasse. Timo, who’s zipping nearby, isn’t interested in rescuing Mickey, who is, after all, disposable. All Timo wants to know is, What’s it like to die?It’s a question that others on the ship like to ask Mickey, which adds to the melancholia that hangs over this movie even during its bounciest, most carnivalesque moments. As he does, Bong takes a while to fully show his hand. Instead, working swiftly, he introduces this future with characteristic visual flair, flashes of beauty, spasms of comically couched violence and a palpable warmth that attenuates the more abject turns. He also gives Mickey a shipboard romance with Nasha (a lovely Naomi Ackie), a security agent who becomes his protector, an affair that heats up the story. Nasha is normal, just and true, and she helps humanize Mickey. Bong often plays Mickey’s deaths for laughs, but he wants you to feel them.And you do feel them, at times deeply, amid the flashbacks, pratfalls, peppy edits, roving camerawork and the images of one after another Mickey being dumped like garbage. These scenes can be rightly grim, yet they have a queasily amusing kick because of Bong’s lightness of touch and Mickey’s deadpan fatalism. One of Bong’s undersung strengths is that he’s great with actors, and the work that he and Pattinson do with the character’s voice and silent-clown physicality is crucial to pulling off the movie’s tonal expansiveness. Mickeys come and go, but the one you come to know best is No. 17. He has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler) that, as humor gives way to anguish, becomes a clarion call for decency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More