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      Review: ‘The Visitor’ Lags Behind the Times

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      The new musical, based on the 2008 film and delayed by the pandemic, debuts at the Public Theater. But its story of a white professor helping immigrants feels out of step with the moment.What comes to mind when you think about immigration, ICE and deportation? I’m willing to bet more than a few George Washingtons that it’s not “musical.” Perhaps it is doable to respect the politics around these issues and the immigrants trying to build a life in the United States in this format, but it’s tough. Which is why the new musical “The Visitor” feels so obtuse and helplessly dated.Dated because it is based on Tom McCarthy’s 2008 film, a well-meaning artifact of the post-9/11 years about a couple of undocumented immigrants helping a white middle-aged professor get a new lease on life. The film resonated in a time before we had a president who fiercely fought to keep immigrants out, and before calls for diversity echoed throughout our institutions.In the film, an economics professor named Walter Vale travels to New York City from Connecticut to attend a conference, but while there, he finds a young couple living in his long-neglected apartment: Tarek, a drummer originally from Syria, and Zainab, a Senegalese jewelry designer. He lets them stay, and Tarek teaches him the drums. They live there until Tarek is unfairly picked up by the police for an infraction he didn’t commit and put in a detention center for being undocumented.The musical, which opened on Thursday at the Public Theater, is directed by Daniel Sullivan and has a book by Kwame Kwei-Armah and Brian Yorkey, who also wrote the lyrics. Tom Kitt (who also teamed up with Yorkey for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Next to Normal”) adds music to this story, which arrives onstage with only minor changes.Long in the works, “The Visitor” was scheduled to begin its performances in March 2020 — practically a century ago in Pandemic Time. To stage the project now without a more significant overhaul of the story was a bold choice, especially with masking and quarantining coinciding with a reckoning about how people of color and their stories are — or, more often, are not — represented in theater and the arts.That’s not to say there haven’t been any modifications. First, previews were pushed back a week last month after cast members raised issues around depictions of race and representation. Then the departure of one of the leads, Ari’el Stachel, was announced in what the theater called “a mutual decision,” and last-minute edits were made in an attempt to refigure the way whiteness was centered in the production.David Hyde Pierce stars as Walter, a widower whose career and emotional life are as stagnant as a glass of lukewarm milk. Ahmad Maksoud, who was Stachel’s understudy, takes on the charming Tarek, and Alysha Deslorieux is the firm and guarded Zainab. Jacqueline Antaramian rounds out the central cast as Mouna, Tarek’s concerned mother.Alysha Deslorieux, left, as Zainab and Jacqueline Antaramian as Mouna in the 90-minute show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHyde Pierce delivers the most subdued version of his usual awkward nebbish with the occasional cantankerous quip. (“Wake up, you little snot rags,” he thinks while teaching his students in an early scene.) But there isn’t much setup for Walter; perhaps intentionally, given how much the show goes on to focus on its white protagonist.Part of it is Sullivan’s brusque direction, which speeds through some character-building dialogue then lingers on scenes that have the clunkiest exposition. And it’s also partly because of the congested score. While the film is quiet and pensive, the show is overstuffed — with seemingly every second of its 90 minutes filled with music.Kitt’s music has a generic pop sound that sometimes works, as in “Drum Circle,” a Disney-esque tune chock-full of lively, layered percussion; and “Heart in Your Hands,” a rather maudlin song with angelic harmonies. (Kitt’s score, particularly “Heart,” is further enlivened by Jessica Paz and Sun Hee Kil’s ethereal sound design.) But most of the time it doesn’t work; upbeat songs or soft, slowed-down percussion feel at odds with the heavy subject matter.This is especially baffling in the energetic “World Between Two Worlds” number, in which detained immigrants perform a “Stomp”-style stepping and clapping routine that abruptly ends when a guard takes one of them away. That said, at least the show moves; Lorin Latarro’s choreography animates even the most mundane scenes, say, in a classroom or on a New York City street. (The ensemble members enter and exit via doorways and a balcony platform in David Zinn’s confined set design of oppressively gray walls that transform into various spaces and institutions that may exclude individuals — an apt metaphor.)Yorkey’s clunky lyrics are what ultimately do the songs in; some are attempts to add introspection to a deeply withdrawn protagonist with a wooden disposition. So we’re treated to obvious lines like, “Here I am in a suit at this conference,” or clichés like, “Find the rhythm within,” and, “You join the [drum] circle and it joins you.”Hyde Pierce speak-sings his way through the score, or spastically works himself up into the bravado needed for the nauseatingly cheesy “Better Angels,” which is meant to be a triumphant showstopper. As Tarek, Maksoud gives an earnest performance but never seems to plumb any emotional depths — or vocal ones either. Deslorieux has the strongest voice of the main cast, crooning with delicate rolling r’s for her character’s accent. As Mouna, Antaramian’s voice is inconsistent, and she has a loose grasp on her character’s accent.Maksoud with ensemble members in the musical. The ensemble etches “small but remarkable performance moments, even in the background and during the fleeting transitional numbers,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe ensemble, however, often upstages the main cast members, etching small but remarkable performance moments, even in the background and during the fleeting transitional numbers.In one, Katie Terza nearly blows off the walls of the Public with a brief yet transcendent Arabic song, and the professional drummer Takafumi Nikaido (also the production’s djembe coach) could easily steal the entire production.The few attempts at nuance — a comment from Walter showing how he’s also guilty of racial stereotypes, a mention of him as a white savior, and an added back story about Zainab’s abuse-ridden immigration journey — cannot change the story that’s being told or how uncomfortably it sits in our current moment. Even with the additions, the immigrant characters still ultimately function as markers of Walter’s emotional growth and development; they have bits of personality and back stories but can’t stand on their own in a plot without him.So what does one do with a work of art that, by the time of its premiere, has already been outpaced by the moment? How can you contemporize a work whose very conceit — its whole plot, its central perspective — will land like a well-meaning but ignorant cousin’s comment in a conscientious cultural conversation?These questions, of course, are larger than what the Public has on its stage right now. “The Visitor” proves that we can’t always pick up exactly where we left off. Sometimes that’s a good thing.The VisitorThrough Dec. 5 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘North by Current’ Review: The Mornings After a Family Nightmare

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      In this documentary, the filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax reckons with the loss of his niece, his vibrant sister’s rocky recoveries and being transgender in a traditional, Mormon environment.“How did you become who you became?” asks Angelo Madsen Minax in the opening voice-over to “North by Current.” It’s one of many searching questions in Minax’s restless personal essay film about his family, himself and the ways in which we understand each other. Interlacing his visits to his folks in a Michigan lumber town with his reflections, the filmmaker reckons with the unfathomable loss of his niece, his vibrant sister’s rocky recoveries and being transgender in a traditional, Mormon environment.Any one of these subjects would be enough for a single film, but part of Minax’s point and method is how these experiences can illuminate one other. About ten years ago, his sister’s toddler daughter, Kalla, was found dead, a tragedy compounded by allegations of child abuse. But instead of a whodunit unraveling some fixed truth, Minax confronts the grief and guilt felt by all involved, even as he works through his own hurt over his parents’ evolving treatment of his identity.There’s an alchemy to what he accomplishes here, threading everyday scenes of parenting with fugues of home video and classic rock, and a bold double voice-over: his own, and a wise child persona that offers a cosmic perspective. This kind of personal film has often been attempted (even before “Tarnation” made waves), but rarely with this insight. Minax succeeds, even as he includes a deeply conflicting revelation about himself that he could do more to address. Out of the fractured family documentary, what emerges finally is a drama of self-realization.North by CurrentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on PBS platforms. More

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      ‘Hive’ Review: In the Aftermath of War, a Survivor Finds Herself

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      In a tough, taut drama, the director Blerta Basholli explores the lives of women whose husbands went missing in the Kosovo War.The spare, tightly wound drama “Hive” opens with the movie equivalent of a hand grabbing your throat. An unsmiling woman with a hard, monumental profile stands alone next to a truck. People mill around nearby, murmuring indistinctly. Abruptly, the woman ducks under some police tape and into the truck, where she hastily begins unzipping one white body bag after another and just as quickly scanning their contents, her nose wrinkling at the exposed bundles of tattered clothing, remnants of missing persons. She’s soon ejected by a worker, but her search continues.The woman, Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), is looking for her husband, one of the missing, who disappeared years ago during the Kosovo War. Now, with her two children and a disabled father-in-law, she struggles to keep the family going. She labors with the beehives that her husband once managed, selling jars of honey at a local market. Sales are modest and sometimes close to nonexistent, but the bees are her only means of scraping together a meager living. Every so often, she meets up with a women’s collective whose members face the same hurdles under the unhelpful watch of the town’s men. And she keeps looking for her husband — a haunting, troubling phantom.A liberation story told with easy naturalism and broad political strokes, “Hive” tracks Fahrije on her path to independence. (It’s based on the experiences of an Albanian Kosovo woman of the same name.) Like its protagonist, the movie is stern, direct and attentive to ordinary life. The writer-director Blerta Basholli doesn’t bludgeon you with the character’s miseries, or hold your emotions hostage. Fahrije isn’t lovable; sometimes she’s scarcely likable, which means she’s more of a human being than an emblem of virtuous suffering. She has her charms, though these tend to emerge in the intimacies she shares with her family and female friends like Naza (a piquant Kumrije Hoxha).With her husband presumably dead but with no corpse in the graveyard, Fahrije is stuck in a cruel limbo, an uncertain status shared by others in the collective. Prevailing norms mean that these women aren’t allowed to remarry, and they’re not allowed to do much of anything else, other than care for their families, socialize with other presumptive widows and display subservience to men. Even Fahrije’s more seemingly innocuous efforts to support her family — selling her husband’s old table saw, for one — are treated like scandalous affronts to him, their life and their world. She’s shamed at home and in public, harassed and demoralized, simply for stepping into the role of provider.Basholli doesn’t revisit the Kosovo War in documentary detail or dig into its geopolitical backdrop; she also doesn’t illuminate the cultural and social practices that so harshly circumscribe the lives of these widows. She isn’t interested in partisan politics, nor is she waving any obvious flags. Instead she concentrates on the textures, gestures and practices of everyday life, lingering over how Fahrije tends the hives, tries to fix a leaking faucet, bathes her son, feeds her family and painstakingly processes ajvar, a hot pepper sauce that she cooks, bottles and hopes to sell. Yet in focusing on this one woman, Basholli is making an argument about what types of war stories are worth telling.There’s little doubt where Fahrije is headed, and the movie sometimes tries a bit too strenuously to brighten her difficult journey. Even so, “Hive” seizes and holds your interest simply through the drama created by sympathetic characters trying to surmount awful, unfair hurdles. Mostly, though, what holds you rapt is Gashi’s powerful, physically grounded performance, which lyrically articulates her taciturn character’s inner workings. Together, the performer and her director reveal the arc of a life through Fahrije’s gestures and in the hard lines of her jaw, in her unsmiling lips and in her quickly lowered gaze. And while the character’s stoicism seems like an unbreachable wall, these two women dismantle — and rebuild it — to stirring effect.HiveNot rated. In Albanian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Man Named Scott’ Review: Bending Genres, Coping With Struggles

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      This film about Kid Cudi is that rare musician-focused documentary, one as sensitive, fully formed and noble in its intentions as the artist himself.In “A Man Named Scott,” a documentary about Kid Cudi, the genre-defying rapper’s longtime friend, Shia LaBeouf, and one of his superfans, Timothée Chalamet, are among the men who say Cudi helped them open up emotionally. They acknowledge Cudi for reshaping hip-hop on his own terms.But the director Robert Alexander’s documentary doesn’t only remind you that the artist (whose real name is Scott Mescudi) revolutionized the genre, softening its conventional definition of masculinity by simply being himself. The film additionally presents a moving rumination on art and individuality, and the invaluable connection between both.Through the biographical self-reflective framework of the doc, Alexander leads the viewer to examine art from a psychological and representational perspective. The significance of Black visibility in the arts is a prominent thread, and watching Willow Smith dance like no one is watching to one of her favorite Cudi songs, “Sky Might Fall,” expresses Cudi’s profound influence on the youth who were led by him in their own dismantling of social constructs.More broadly, this is a film about the music that makes us, but Alexander poses a fundamental concern as he explores that topic: What toll does the development of this work take on its creator?Cudi opens up about his struggles. Actually, he divulges a lot — though he stops short of detailing the process of making his 2015 album Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven,” admitting it was “a really dark time” for him. Thanks to its perceptive insights and a range of interviewees, from fellow industry professionals to a clinical psychologist, “A Man Named Scott” is that rare musician-focused doc, one as sensitive, fully formed and noble in its intentions as Cudi himself.A Man Named ScottNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      How Meryl Streep Prepared to Play the President in ‘Don’t Look Up’

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      Meryl Streep explains how she prepared to play a fictional (and not especially competent) U.S. president in Adam McKay’s apocalyptic satire “Don’t Look Up.”Who would you turn to if you learned a comet was on a collision course with Earth and decisive action was required to prevent the extinction of all life on this planet? If your first thought was Meryl Streep, you have made both an excellent and terrible choice.In “Don’t Look Up,” from the writer-director Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Vice”), two scientists played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence find themselves facing this end-of-the-world scenario and must turn to a United States government led by the fictional President Orlean for assistance.The good news (for the movie, which will reach theaters on Dec. 10 and Netflix on Dec. 24) is that Orlean is played by Streep, the venerated film and TV star; the bad news (for humanity) is that Orlean is a self-centered scoundrel who cares a great deal about her public image but little to nothing about running the country.Orlean is one of several malefactors in “Don’t Look Up,” a social satire that McKay wrote about climate change but that he fully expects will be interpreted as a commentary on the pandemic. The president is also a character whose many faults and shortcomings Streep delighted in bringing to life, and she credits McKay for giving her and her co-stars the latitude to indulge in awfulness.As Streep explained in a recent phone interview, “He never lost heart or confidence in this vision that he had for this thing, which was to make an atmosphere as free as possible for everybody — just go nuts and do what you want. But with a deadly serious intent.”Here, Streep and McKay explained the steps they followed to put President Orlean in the Oval Office.Create a back story.Based on what she’d read in McKay’s screenplay, Streep said she was already envisioning how President Orlean could have won office. “You could imagine a group of various miscreants was pulled together, and she was the least bad of a lot of other candidates that they could have put out there,” Streep said, adding that she thought of Orlean “as someone whose elderly husband had a lot of money, and she got rid of him, and it was in California so she got half. She had no real agenda except to have and retain power, and when she got there, she just realized that the job was pretty easy.”McKay said that in naming the character, he was thinking of New Orleans — “It’s a fun city, but it’s kind of in jeopardy” — and not the fact that Streep played the author Susan Orlean in “Adaptation.” (The notion that he manifested Streep in the role by naming it for her, McKay said, is “definitely not the case.”)Draw on real-life inspiration.McKay said he thought of President Orlean as “a goulash” of recent chief executives. That meant “the self-serving con man aspects of the last president, the dangerous inexperience of George W. Bush, the slick polish of Bill Clinton, the celebrity of Barack Obama and the coziness with big money,” McKay said. Another inspiration was the finance expert Suze Orman, whom McKay described as “a brash populist with a strong fashion statement.”To that recipe, Streep said she added a dash of the “Real Housewives,” whose televised squabbles often play in her house when her daughters come to visit. Though Streep won an Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” she said that performance was instructive only up to a point. Thatcher, she said, “wielded a kind of femininity that was intimidating to men, and part of her power was how she could pull it together — it was very specific to the ladder she climbed there.” Orlean, she said, is “more of our time — algorithmically put together.”Streep on the set. Her look was modeled on that of news anchors.Niko Tavernise/NetflixLook the part.Streep had a hand in devising Orlean’s fashion sensibility, which she said communicated something essential about the character: “So what if she’s 70 years old and dresses like she’s 35?” she explained. “No one told her you can’t be 35 forever.” That meant attire modeled after TV news anchors who, Streep said, “tend to pick these broad swaths of bright, happy colors to put on themselves — no prints, no polka dots or plaids or, God forbid, florals. None of the things that other people wear. Just these power suits and pencil skirts.” It also called for a specific hair regimen: “When I was in high school, you’d set your hair in rollers, then take it out and brush it 100 times,” Streep said. “This is the kind of hair where you take it out of rollers and just leave it like that — the longer the better. And then those are sprayed and crisped and the ends curl out in weird ways. And that’s a thing. It has always escaped me why this was good. So I thought, well, I’m going to try to that — God knows I won’t do it in my real life.”Get ready to face the crowds.All that advance planning may still not fully prepare you for the demands of the presidency, as Streep discovered on her first day of shooting. She had spent several weeks in isolation, as screen actors have been required to do during the pandemic. Then, on the appointed day, she said, “I bundled up in my big down coat, put the dog in the back of my car, drove through a snowstorm to Worcester, Mass., and got out at a stadium and parked.” Once there, Streep said, “They tried to turn me away at several points to get into the set. I said no, I’m in it.” After getting into hair, makeup and costume, Streep took to the stage where she saw her face on a Jumbotron and heard the delayed echo of her voice as she spoke to a crowd of several hundred extras. “And I just lost it,” she said. “I thought, well, I clearly have to retire. I can’t do this. I actually can’t do this. It was really a crisis of confidence.” Needless to say, Streep did find her bearings, but, she said, “it took a while.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Review: ‘This Is Not a War Story,’ Nor Does Coming Home Mean Peace

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      This poignant drama directed by and starring Talia Lugacy follows a traumatized Marine as she tries to connect with a group of fellow veterans at home.“American Sniper,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Saving Private Ryan” — “I hate those movies,” says Isabelle (Talia Lugacy), a U.S. Marine recently returned home from combat. Painfully inhibited, neglected by her family and racked with guilt over her meaninglessly violent actions overseas, Isabelle is not at ease in this world. She struggles to find reasons to go on.
      At least she is not alone. Isabelle joins a multigenerational group of veterans who create antiwar artwork and poetry out of paper they fashion from discarded military uniforms. There she meets Will (Sam Adegoke), who has been blaming himself for the death of a vet he had been a mentor to, Timothy Reyes.“This Is Not a War Story,” which Lugacy also directed, is a naturalistic, chat-heavy narrative that captures the difficulties wrought by the unimaginable trauma individuals face as they attempt to forge connections and find peace after war. It opens with Timothy drifting around the New York City subway, taking pills and ultimately dying unnoticed in his seat, a warning about the perils of coming home. The cast is supplemented by real-life veterans in supporting roles who speak to their own experiences.In the film, Will uneasily takes Isabelle under his wing. “I hate the word ‘healing,’” he observes. “It’s not some point of arrival. It’s something you’re doing all the time.”Unfolding at a restlessly melancholy pace, the film is less a plot-driven story than an assemblage of conversations and encounters. Its power lies in the tentative friendship that takes root between Isabelle and Will. Though their discussions — which touch frankly on issues including the horrors of Abu Ghraib — can seem contrived and literal-minded, the edgy vulnerability and emotional stiltedness the actors bring to their characters’ rapport is palpable and authentic. When the two eventually achieve a more relaxed, harmonious relationship, it feels like a minor miracle.This Is Not a War StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      ‘Beans’ Review: Growing Up Fast in the ’90s

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      A middle school student comes of age during a standoff between the police and Mohawk residents during the 1990 Oka crisis in Canada.The drama “Beans” sets its coming-of-age story during the 1990 Oka crisis, when Mohawk residents of Oka, Quebec, began protesting the expansion of a golf course into Native burial ground. The characters in the story are fictional, but “Beans” takes place during a real period of turbulence in Eastern Canada, as Mohawk people were harassed by their neighbors and the police.The film’s heroine, Tekehentahkhwa (Kiawentiio), is a Mohawk middle schooler with a bright smile and braids. Her family calls her Beans. She’s still learning about the world when her hometown suddenly becomes the site of a major conflict. Gunshots ring out in the forest where she plays. People throw rocks at her mother’s car. Beans seeks out guidance from an older girl, April (Paulina Alexis), but no matter how much April pretends to be in control, she and Beans are still children. And this crisis has rattled even their elders, even Beans’s dauntless mother, Lily (Rainbow Dickerson).This is the first fictional film directed by the documentarian Tracey Deer, and she brings a good eye for which characters might make a compelling story. Deer emphasizes the styles of the period — the high ponytails and neon windbreakers opposite police uniforms. But her heroes aren’t fighters; they are the children and mothers who must navigate empty grocery shelves and taunting mobs.In choosing her protagonists as she has, Deer has made a canny portrait of Mohawk domestic life during a modern conflict. The difference between this and other homefront movies is that usually war is depicted as happening far away. Here, Beans has to make sense of a fight where her home is the battlefield, too.BeansNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘A Cop Movie’ Review: When a Uniform Is a Costume

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      This strange and ambitious Mexican film plays like a combination of “Cops,” “F for Fake” and “When Harry Met Sally.”Ambitious, heady and distinctive, if easier to admire in theory than engage with moment to moment, “A Cop Movie” has a conceptual strangeness that’s difficult to overstate. It’s as if someone combined “Cops,” “F for Fake” and “When Harry Met Sally.”Directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios (“Museo”), the film, from Mexico, initially appears to be a straight documentary. It opens with a sequence in which Teresa, one of the two main police officers, responds to a call about a woman in labor. After Teresa radios to check on an ambulance that isn’t coming soon enough, she grabs gloves to deliver the baby herself, even though, she says, the academy didn’t give her medical training.Exactly what training Teresa has becomes murkier. If the high-stakes situation doesn’t immediately indicate that “A Cop Movie” isn’t playing by ordinary documentary rules, the splashy wide-screen compositions, use of zooms as punctuation, careful camera setups and subjects’ habit of commenting toward the viewer all signal that something is up. By the time Teresa is breaking the fourth wall — yes, there’s a fourth wall — while cradling a colleague who has been shot, Ruizpalacios is clearly employing dramatization. Narrative expectations come into play when he reveals that Teresa and her partner, Montoya, are romantically involved.It would be easy to give too much away, but “A Cop Movie,” viewed one way, is a fake documentary that establishes its unreliability, then recasts itself as a documentary of a deception. It equates performing official duties with playing a character; the audience’s distrust may mirror a civilian’s distrust for authority. And as in the Stanford prison experiment, the uniform makes the officer.A Cop MovieRated R. Violence and a bit of sex. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More