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      ‘They Say Nothing Stays the Same’ Review: Crossing a Modern River

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      Two events disturb the placid surfaces of a boatman’s world: the building of a nearby bridge, and his discovery of a young woman floating in the water.Directed by the actor Joe Odagiri, “They Say Nothing Stays the Same” is a postcard-pretty film about a boatman in Meiji-era Japan. For years, Toichi (Akira Emoto) has ferried people back and forth on a river amid unspoiled beauty. A large part of the film’s appeal comes from that natural splendor and the lives Toichi glimpses while making one trip after another.Two events disturb the placid surfaces of Toichi’s world: the construction of a nearby bridge, and his discovery of a young woman (Ririka Kawashima) floating in the water. One development underlines Toichi’s haplessness, the other his decency, when the woman turns out to be alive and in need of care. Otherwise, the movie floats along pleasantly enough for much of its 137 minutes, with nice period detail, such as a scene with a colorful band of troubadours.But monotony sets in, beyond Toichi’s routine. Too often Odagiri can’t resist adding one more shot to a montage, or one more vignette. He doesn’t quite reduce Toichi to being a noble mascot for the film’s nostalgic setting (shot by Christopher Doyle), but anyone to do with the bridge (or modernity in general) tends to be portrayed as vulgar or destructive.The landscape can go only so far in expressing Toichi’s mind-set, and the movie turns hokey when it dramatizes Toichi’s inner thoughts: a repeated voice-over of insults that torment him, for example, or two hectic sequences that resemble something out of a zombie movie. When he finally, awkwardly, voices his insecurities at length, his particular twist on humility defies expectations but comes too late.They Say Nothing Stays the SameNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas, and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Julia’ Review: She Changed Your Life and Your Utensil Drawer

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      An invigorating new documentary looks back on Julia Child and her influence on how Americans cook and eat.According to this movie, if you own a garlic press, you probably have Julia Child to thank for it. The opening scenes of “Julia,” a lively documentary directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, paint a dire picture of suburban American home cooking in the post-World War II era: frozen entrees and Jell-O molds and Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam — an ethos that put convenience ahead of delectability.With the double-whammy of an unlikely best-selling cookbook and a series that helped put public television on the map, Child changed all that.Her story has been told, in fictionalized form, in the charming Nora Ephron film “Julie & Julia.” That 2009 picture commemorates Child’s impact on food culture through a parallel story, also fact based, of a blogger, Julie, making the recipes in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which Child wrote with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholie.This documentary is a conventional one, replete with archival footage and talking heads. Child, born in Pasadena, escaped an affluent and conservative upbringing by serving in World War II. Her husband, Paul Child, was both helpmeet and soul mate, supporting her when she enrolled in the exalted Cordon Bleu cooking school on the G.I. Bill — the only woman in her class.Their marriage here is presented as an ideal stew of sex, food and intellectual compatibility. Among the many still photos here chronicling their love is a nude portrait of Julia, something you probably never thought you’d see.The movie doesn’t shy away from Child’s personal shortcomings, touching on a casual homophobia she renounced when the AIDS crisis hit, pouring her energies into raising money to fight the disease. “Julia” is an apt tribute to a life well-lived and well-fed.JuliaRated PG-13 for salty language and one artful nude. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Paper & Glue’ Review: A Sequel of Sorts to ‘Faces Places’

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      JR, plying his art of making and displaying gigantic portraits, carries on, this time without the inimitable Agnès Varda.In “Paper & Glue,” a young Hispanic man stands in the yard of a sprawling prison in Tehachapi, Calif., talking about taking part in a photographic project by the French artist JR.With a group of fellow prisoners, he posed for and then helped paste up the impressive result of their work, which spanned the expanse of the yard. Drone footage shows the men looking up out of a huge group portrait to meet the gaze of the eye in the sky. After helping dismantle the temporary display, the prisoner says with a hint of melancholy, “The process is what matters.”This handsome documentary confirms that sentiment repeatedly as the artist-director recounts two decades of his travels. In 2017, JR was half of the delightful tag-team of “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary he and the groundbreaking director Agnès Varda made in the French countryside. “Paper & Glue,” while not as tender a romp, is a sequel in spirit. Faces and their places continue to matter. JR’s always-on sunglasses remain a coy trademark (after all, his own work relies on people showing their faces), but it’s clear strangers respond to him. The incarcerated men laugh at his stories. The women of Morro da Providência, a favela outside Rio de Janeiro, make introductions that ease his entry into their community. The French filmmaker Ladj Ly looks to him to help with a school for budding artists in a Paris suburb. A young mother in Tecate, Mexico, allows him to snap photos of her infant. In 2017, an enormous image the baby’s beatific face towers above the fence at the United States border with Mexico. Her thoughts about JR’s work are so celebratory yet nuanced, she could be his gallerist.Paper & GlueNot rated. In English, Portuguese, French and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Uppercase Print’ Review: Between the Lines

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      Radu Jude’s rousing, form-bending new feature rails at the power of propaganda to suffocate people’s freedoms.“Uppercase Print” opens with a fragment of a quote from the philosopher Michel Foucault: “the resonance I feel when I happen to encounter these small lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down.” The film, a rousing, form-bending new feature by the Romanian auteur Radu Jude, rails at the tyrannical potential of language — particularly when backed by government power — to suffocate people’s freedoms.The movie braids together two accounts of life under the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceausescu: a filmed play about the 1981 investigation of a teenager who graffitied slogans about democracy and workers’ rights in the city of Botosani; and advertisements, educational programs and newsreel footage from state-sanctioned Romanian television of the same era.A queasy sense of party-line artifice haunts both the theatrical performance and the TV footage, which the film’s archival opening telegraphs strikingly. Three well-dressed presenters praise Ceausescu’s Romania enthusiastically, until a teleprompter malfunction renders them awkward and speechless. Without its scripted cues, they have no idea what to say.The play, originally written for the stage in 2013 by Gianina Carbunariu, repurposes text from the files of Romania’s Communist-era secret police. Actors read these lines with deadpan intonation, making vivid the dehumanizing effects of bureaucratic jargon. “Reforming the objective” is a dry euphemism for the repression of dissidents; “youth protection” is code for surveillance.Jude’s genius lies in his ability to turn these words against themselves — to render them absurd through canny juxtapositions of text and image, documentary and fiction. And if the film draws on the past, it’s as a warning for the present: A closing exchange about Ceausescu-era phone-tapping slyly references Cambridge Analytica.Uppercase PrintNot rated. In Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love Is Love Is Love’ Review:Aging Too Gracefully

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      The characters in this idle drama, directed by Eleanor Coppola, seem mostly content. That’s the problem.One of the great comforts in life is the assurance that misery can be interesting. Contentment doesn’t necessarily provide onlookers (or audiences) with the pleasure of great gossip, drama or insight, and the characters in the idle drama “Love Is Love Is Love,” directed by Eleanor Coppola, mostly seem like content, happy people.The film is a collection of three largely unrelated short stories, which are each marked with their own title cards. First there is “Two For Dinner,” in which a filmmaker (Chris Messina) who is on location in Montana meets his wife (Joanne Whalley) for a remote date over video chat. In “Sailing Lesson,” Kathy Baker and Marshall Bell play a long-married couple who rekindle the fantasy of romance by playacting as the kind of people who might set sail for a daytime tryst.The final short story in this modest collection is “Late Lunch,” which is also the longest sequence of the film. In it, Caroline (Maya Kazan) holds a dinner in remembrance of her late mother, attended by all of her mother’s nearest and dearest friends.Coppola, 85, focuses her camera on characters as they reminisce in long monologues, which are clearly relished by the film’s accomplished cast, including dinner guests Cybill Shepherd, Rosanna Arquette and Rita Wilson. The tone and pace of the movie corresponds to these sedentary conversations among people who acknowledge their age, and who have had time to find peace.But the cumulative effect of so much enlightened sitting around is that the movie doesn’t move. There is a lack of action, both visually and emotionally. The characters are never unseated by a revelation. When they speak, it feels like they have waited their turn.Love Is Love Is LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘3212 Un-Redacted’ Review: Trying to Solve a Mission’s Mysteries

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      The documentary looks into the complex circumstances involving four American soldiers who were killed in an ambush in Niger in 2017.For anyone confused about the circumstances in which four American soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger in 2017, the documentary “3212 Un-Redacted” clearly lays out the geography and complicated timeline. It also suggests that confusion is understandable: The movie argues that the Pentagon’s official investigation, which placed the bulk of the blame on junior-level officers, unfairly characterized the events and went out of its way to protect high-ranking officials.“3212 Un-Redacted,” produced by ABC News with the investigative reporter James Gordon Meek serving as a writer and an onscreen presence, visually plays more like a television special than a feature documentary. It devotes much of its first half-hour to remembering the fallen men — we learn, for instance, about how Sgt. La David T. Johnson rode a single-wheeled bike around the Miami area — and introducing their families, no strangers to military culture, who feel betrayed. “The army let me down,” says Arnold Wright, the father of Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright. “They let my son down. And then they lied about it.”Meek is particularly interested in why higher-level officials might have proceeded with the operation, after pushback from the ground; the answer he proposes suggests complex motives that probably couldn’t be fully assessed without more information than is publicly available. But at times, the filmmaking itself could be clearer. Meek indicates that he was first contacted about the project around 2018, but the movie shows footage of an American-Nigerien military meeting in September 2017, the month before the ambush. (A representative for the film says it comes from “Chain of Command,” a series by National Geographic, which isn’t credited until the end.) The lack of labeling only raises questions, slightly marring what otherwise plays like a thorough, outraged exposé.3212 Un-RedactedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Home Sweet Home Alone’ Review: A Winter With Plenty of Falls

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      Dan Mazer’s film, streaming on Disney+, is a painful spiritual sequel to the 1990 hit.Burglars roasting on an open fire. Adults taking a pool ball to the nose. So go the Christmas caterwauls of Dan Mazer’s “Home Sweet Home Alone,” a painful spiritual sequel to the 1990 hit that made a meme of the child star Macaulay Culkin. Culkin’s Kevin McCallister does not appear, though his older brother Buzz (Devin Ratray) cameos to mention that the scamp has matured into a security alarm impresario.Apt timing as now two homes are in peril: the Mercers, who, because of a rideshare mix-up, have jetted to Tokyo sans Max (Archie Yates), their 10-year-old son with a mouth like Don Rickles; and the McKenzies (Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney), who suspect Max of stealing an heirloom they need to pay off their mortgage.This leveling of the moral stakes reveals that Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell’s script is aimed at nostalgists, not children. It’s hard to imagine any grade schooler chuckling at a runner about the proliferation of alt-milks at the grocery store, even with the desperately whimsical woodwind score. And when the darts (and kettlebells and fishing lures) start flying, it’s the grown-ups who learn a lesson about the meaning of family. Max’s emotional revelation happens mysteriously offscreen midway through the film, minutes after he dresses like Scarface and inhales whipped cream.Who’s the real victim here? The audience — yet Kemper’s no-nonsense pixie who suffers a dozen thumbtacks to the face runs a close second.Home Sweet Home AloneRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘7 Prisoners’ Review: Survival at Any Cost

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      Alexandre Moratto plunges into the psychological traumas of human trafficking in this gripping Brazilian drama on Netflix.Deep into “7 Prisoners,” the protagonist stares up at the labyrinthine electrical cables of the transformers that power the city of São Paulo. He is Mateus (Christian Malheiros), a human trafficking victim from the Brazilian countryside. He works in a filthy junkyard for long hours without pay, stripping cables for the copper that helps these very towers run. A wave of wounded anguish percolates under Mateus’s eyes, as his boss, Mr. Luca (Rodrigo Santoro) says, “Your work powers the whole city.” The camera shifts to electric train lines next to slums and the glittering skyline of the city lit up at night. Mateus’s exploitation is so profound, an entire metropolis vibrates with complicity.It is moments like these that reveal the strengths of Alexandre Moratto’s social thriller “7 Prisoners”: Rather than being a simple examination of a social problem, the film excels at excavating the deep-rooted, sprawling violence that affects everyone living under hierarchies of power.Mateus arrives in São Paulo with a few others from his village, in search of a better life. But they quickly realize they are cogs in a trickle-down machine of exploitation that includes Mr. Luca, the police and politicians.Santoro and Malheiros deliver excellent performances, their initially sparse interactions and facial contortions raising the stakes at every turn. At first, Mateus and the crew battle to escape, but Mateus soon realizes that obedience and collusion with Luca may be the only path to freedom. That sense of moral ambiguity propels this gripping drama, plunging us into the psychic depths of the traumas that accompany survival.7 PrisonersRated R for language and violence. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More