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      ‘Bergman Island’ Review: Love Among the Cinephiles

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      In Mia Hansen-Love’s new film, Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth play filmmakers on the rocks in the Baltic Sea.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of forms, proportions, colors, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.” That is Ingmar Bergman, in his memoir “The Magic Lantern,” rhapsodizing on his “secret love,” the island of Faro in the Baltic Sea. Starting in 1960 with “Through a Glass Darkly,” he shot many of his films on Faro and died there in 2007.In “Bergman Island,” Mia Hansen-Love’s slippery and enchanting new movie, Faro, an austere and forbidding presence in much of Bergman’s work, is revealed as a pilgrimage spot for cinephiles and an appealing seaside destination for less obsessive travelers. Visitors can browse in the gift shop and the library, watch movies in Bergman’s personal screening room, or pile into a bus for the guided “Bergman Safari” (an actual annual event). They can also swim, drink, play Ludo and shop for sheepskins.Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) do some of those things, but they’ve come to Faro mostly to work. Filmmakers with screenplays at various stages of completion, they install themselves in the cottage where some of “Scenes From a Marriage” was filmed. The caretaker who shows them around cheerfully describes it as “the movie that caused millions of people to divorce.” (I wonder if the recent HBO remake will have the same impact.)An unmarried couple with a young daughter (she is staying with a grandmother while her parents are in Sweden), Chris and Tony have perhaps unwittingly arrived at a crisis in their relationship. They are affectionate and easy with each other, but the combination of Chris’s restlessness and Tony’s complacency suggests that things are not quite right between them.In Bergman’s films, love is a volatile element, as often as not a catalyst for emotional anguish and psychological disintegration. A man and a woman in a movie with his name on it are unlikely to find much peace. But Hansen-Love, though she is interested in the gloomy Swede and his legacy, is hardly in his thrall, and Chris and Tony don’t live in anything like the state of metaphysical extremity that so often afflicts Bergman characters.Chris is a passionate movie lover who is nonetheless skeptical of the power of the medium, and “Bergman Island” explores her ambivalence in a playful, critical spirit. She is bothered by the fact that Bergman, the father of nine children with six women, pursued his art at the expense of his family obligations. No woman would have been able to get away with that, she says, a complaint that is met with the usual shrugs, jokes and condescension from Tony and their dinner companions.She acknowledges the difference between art and life, but nonetheless wishes for a measure of “coherence” between them. The possibility of such a thing becomes more than just a theoretical question in the second half of “Bergman Island,” when the as-yet-unmade film that Chris is still struggling to write takes over the screen.That movie-within-the-movie, also set on Faro, involves a young woman — also a filmmaker — named Amy (Mia Wasikowska), who travels to the island for the wedding of a friend and encounters Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), the great love of her life. The two of them met as teenagers and all these years later, even though they are committed to other people, find that they just can’t quit each other.Their passionate, guilty romance — and Amy’s blondness — tilt the story closer to Bergman territory than Chris and Tony’s passive-aggressive courtesies, but the more obvious cinematic reference lies closer to home. Chris’s film is in effect a sequel to Hansen-Love’s “Goodbye First Love,” which followed adolescent lovers into young adulthood.The connection between the movie Chris dreams up and the one she’s in seems both elusive and obvious, as do the possible autobiographical implications of “Bergman Island.” Can it be entirely coincidental that Amy is a near-anagram of Mia, the name shared by Wasikowska and Hansen-Love? Is Tony a stand-in for Olivier Assayas, the French filmmaker with whom Hansen-Love has a child? Are we approaching Bergman’s landscape of doubling and collapsing identities from a different angle?But there are also intriguing hints that Chris and Tony’s story may itself be a kind of film-within-the-film, this one conjured out of Tony’s imagination. When Chris asks about his project, he answers that it’s about the unspoken meanings that circulate through the daily life of a couple, a description that fits the first half of “Bergman Island” almost too neatly. He also explains, during a Q.-and-A. session after a screening of one of his movies, that he tends to identify with his female characters. Does this make Chris his alter ego?To her credit, Hansen-Love doesn’t turn “Bergman Island” into a self-conscious philosophical puzzle. It unspools with an easy, fresh-air naturalism against a picturesque backdrop that doesn’t necessarily conform to anyone’s innermost imaginings. The mood, underscored by Robin Williamson’s sprightly music, is mainly comical, and the artists — Tony and Chris, at least — seem more playful than tormented, even at difficult moments.That may be because they both understand the paradox that “Bergman Island” so brilliantly enacts. It’s a movie that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be one, or which one it wants to be. Which makes it feel like more than just a movie.Bergman IslandRated R. Cries and whispers. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Introducing, Selma Blair’ Review: An Actress in Her Second Act

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      A window into the actress’s battle with multiple sclerosis.The documentary “Introducing, Selma Blair” presents a bracingly relatable version of an often all-too-artificial event: a performer navigating the process of reinvention. Change came to the actress Selma Blair involuntarily, when she was diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks the central nervous system, in August 2018. She went public with her illness with an Instagram post in October of that year.Blair’s initial announcement was candid, detailing the initial apathy she received from medical professionals, and she offered generous thanks to the friends — some famous and some not — who encouraged her to seek help. At the time, Blair, now 49, was best known for her supporting roles in several of the most approachable and entertaining Hollywood movies of the last 20 years. This familiarity lent to her remarkably frank post the quality of reading an update from an old friend.Her decisions following her public announcement remained consistent with this initial burst of sincerity. Blair continued to publicly document her illness on Instagram. She attended red carpets with a jeweled cane. She offered interviews, permitting journalists to show her disruptions of speech and movement. She was in turn glamorous and clumsy, funny and mournful.The documentary “Introducing, Selma Blair” expands the existing record of Blair’s life into a coherent, feature-length account. The film begins in 2019, after the initial cycle of media attention has passed. The director, Rachel Fleit, follows Blair at home for over a year, her camera watching in vérité style as the actress contemplates the aftermath of her diagnosis and plans ahead for life with a disability.At the start of filming in 2019, Blair was preparing for an experimental medical treatment that would combine chemotherapy and stem cell transplants to repair her immune system. When the procedures begin, the movie follows her into the hospital, incorporating video diaries from Blair in convalescence.The greatest asset of the film is its ability to simulate the intimacy of disclosure, and Blair’s comfort with the camera — her actress-y will to entertain — makes her a uniquely endearing subject. The forthrightness that has become the signature of her public persona is on full display; she treats the camera as if it were a trusted friend.In some of the film’s most touching sequences, Blair allows the filmmakers to watch as she plays with her son, her jolting movements at once a part of the fun, and evidence of her physical state. When he is out of the picture, she shares her worries about how her visible vulnerability might affect her child. She jokes, she weeps, she cries out in pain.The movie does not address all aspects of Blair’s life. There is little discussion of her career, and no mention of how she affords the extravagant home and the medical treatments that have provided her with relief through the worst days of her illness. What this human interest story offers instead is a simple and sympathetic portrait of a captivating character. Curiously, the career supporting actress Selma Blair has never before seemed like such a star.Introducing, Selma BlairNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. Also available on Discovery+ beginning Oct. 21. More

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      ‘Halloween Kills’ Review: There Will Be (Copious Amounts of) Blood

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      The newest installment of the “Halloween” franchise, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, is a murderous mess that substitutes corpses for characters.After a dozen movies — and a 13th on the horizon — the once-monstrous Michael Myers shuffles into theaters this weekend as exhausted as the 43-year-old franchise that indulges his blood lust. “Halloween Kills,” the middle film of a reboot trilogy started in 2018 by the director David Gordon Green, is an indolent, narratively impoverished mess that substitutes corpses for characters and slogans for dialogue.What Green appears to be killing here is time. While his previous installment cannily reimagined Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the plucky babysitter who bested Myers in John Carpenter’s original film, as a trauma-toughened grandmother, this latest exhumation turns her into a virtual bystander. We find her, mere minutes after the ending of the last chapter, bleeding profusely in the back of a truck, barreling away from her burning home and believing her nemesis vanquished once and for all.“Let it burn!” she screams at the firefighters, perhaps aware that the body count of emergency workers is about to soar. Thereafter, she will mostly languish in a hospital bed in the hapless burgh of Haddonfield, Ill., while her daughter and granddaughter (Judy Greer and Andi Matichak) are left to hold the bag — or, in this case, pitchfork — when Myers, inevitably, returns.Plagued by idiotic pronouncements (“He is an apex predator!”) and moronic behavior (doors are left unlocked, an unloaded gun is brandished), “Halloween Kills” plays at times like an exceptionally gory comedy routine. (I dare you not to laugh out loud when one character bemoans the rising number of slayings by declaring, “This was a safe place and now it’s not anymore!”) And if Haddonfield seems significantly more diverse this time out, it’s to no apparent purpose other than to vary the appearances and sexual orientations of its victims. That’s a shame, because the only characters I missed when the picture was over were the gay partners planning a pleasant evening with Mary Jane and “Minnie and Moskowitz” (1971). I hope they already knew the ending.Clumsy flashbacks to the original plot soothe the uninitiated, and characters we barely remember are reintroduced to take their chances among those being creatively killed off. Leading these is Anthony Michael Hall as a grown-up Tommy Doyle, the child Laurie was babysitting on Halloween, 1978, now running a support group for survivors of that night’s mayhem. In mere minutes, Tommy harangues his group into an angry posse, rounding up nondescript townspeople to hunt Myers down. As the mob congregates — mystifyingly — at the hospital, Laurie is prompted to stumble briefly out of bed, stab herself with a painkiller-filled syringe and yowl like a banshee. Contract fulfilled, Ms. Curtis!As for possibly our most resurrected cinematic psycho (played once again by James Jude Courtney), he seems a little sadder behind his rapidly decomposing mask. The success of any “Halloween” retread depends fundamentally on its ability to telegraph the mad magnetism between Myers and Laurie — a tether that’s trampled by this picture’s amorphous gang of vigilantes, repeatedly yelling “Evil dies tonight!” In light of the coming attractions, I can reliably predict that it does not.Halloween KillsRated R. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

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      ‘Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’ Review: What We Talk About

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      In three stories, men and women circle one another as they casually and cruelly share intimacies, express desires and voice doubts.The geometry of desire is elegantly plotted in “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” a wistful, moving, outwardly unassuming movie. In three segments, men and women circle one another, talking and talking some more. As they exchange glances, confessions and accusations, their cascading words become either bridges or walls. Throughout these effusive roundelays, they yearn — for meaning, former lovers, lost intimacy, an escape.“Fortune and Fantasy” is among the latest talkathons from the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, one of the more intriguing filmmakers to emerge in the last decade. If you haven’t heard of him, it isn’t surprising. The American market for foreign-language cinema has always been brutal, even before the pandemic, and his work has received scant theatrical distribution in the United States. But he’s a familiar name on the festival circuit, and both this movie and his superb “Drive My Car” were in the main slate at the recent New York Film Festival. (“Fortune” won a major prize at this year’s Berlin.)If Hamaguchi were another generic French filmmaker, or if he made gore-splattered genre movies or was just more obvious, he might attract greater distributor interest. Though maybe not: The length of some of his work likely presents a hurdle. While “Fortune and Fantasy” runs a crisp two hours, “Drive My Car” is three, and “Happy Hour,” an epic of minimalism, runs more than five. More challenging still, presumably, are his narrative choices and understated visuals, which don’t conform to the current template for American indie cinema with its dramatic problems, moral instruction and enough pictorial prettiness to make the emotional bloodletting go down smoothly.Hamaguchi’s realism is as constructed as that of any Sundance selection, but what distinguishes his work is his attention to ambiguity and to everyday moments, and his general avoidance of dramatic or melodramatic inflection. Things happen, terrible, heartbreaking things, though not necessarily onscreen. Instead, most of what you see has the flavor, rhythm and texture of quotidian life, which makes his artistic choices all the more intriguing and at times almost mysterious. You’re engrossed, but you may wonder why. (Hamaguchi cites John Cassavetes as a strong influence; the imprint of the French New Wave and the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo are also evident.)“Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over. The three stories are clearly separated with coy or cryptic or plainly descriptive titles. They have separate casts and each takes place in contemporary settings, though one has a modest, somewhat random splash of speculative fiction. Here, as in life, the most blandly familiar spaces — the back seat of a cab, a cluttered office, a living room — serve as unadorned stages for ordinary, existence-defining encounters.All the episodes feature a handful of men and women, but the secondary characters soon peel off — a photo crew disperses, an assistant hustles out of an office — leaving two people who serve as conversational and emotional foils. The middle and longest story (“Door Wide Open”) centers on a woman who’s persuaded, if not entirely convincingly, by her younger male lover to become a honey trap for his loathed former professor. She does, putting on makeup and visiting the professor at his office. Although he insists that the door remain open, danger seeps in anyway, through a probing, teasingly erotic and unexpectedly existential tête-à-tête that changes everyone’s life.Hamaguchi doesn’t move the camera all that much, which makes the moments when he draws attention to his visuals more noticeable, like the punctuating tilt up at a flowering tree that closes the first story. However subtly, he distinctly choreographs each episode, using the camera and staging to underscore eddies of harmony and dissonance, shifting moods and awareness. In some scenes, characters sit side by side in the same shot, which underscores their familiarity; in others, they are isolated in the frame to accentuate their detachment or antagonism. In several crucial instances, characters look directly at the camera, a jolt of intimacy — but now between you and them.Mostly, though, these men and women talk, revealing themselves as they also tease the story’s themes, fortune and fantasy included. They chat, confess, overshare, open up and lash out. In the first story, “Magic (or Something Less Assuring),” a young woman confronts a former boyfriend by sneeringly repeating some blandishments that he’d shared with another lover, wounding him and, in the process, exposing the miserable arc of their failed relationship. There’s more tenderness in the final story, “Once Again,” which beautifully brings the movie to a close through two women with faulty memories who, by opening their hearts to each other, quietly break yours.Wheel of Fortune and FantasyNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Velvet Underground’ Review: And Me, I’m in a Rock ’n’ Roll Band

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      Todd Haynes’s documentary paints a jagged, revelatory portrait of the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s.Sometime in the 1960s, John Cale, a classically trained Welsh violist with avant-garde leanings, met Lou Reed, a middle-class Jewish college dropout from Long Island who dreamed of being a rock star. Their creative partnership, encouraged by Andy Warhol and enhanced by the mercurial presence of the German model, actress and singer Nico, was the volatile bedrock of the Velvet Underground, a commercially marginal band that altered the course of popular music.The Velvet Underground story is hardly obscure, and in outline it might fit fairly neatly in the standard music-documentary template. Early struggle gives way to (relative) triumph, and then the whole thing blows up in a squall of battling egos, substance abuse and self-destructive behavior. In the aftermath life goes on, solo careers are pursued, and the survivors — fans as much as artists — look back with mellow affection on the wild and heady past, brought alive by excavated television footage.“The Velvet Underground” has some of those elements, but it’s directed by Todd Haynes, a protean filmmaker who never met a genre he couldn’t deconstruct. While not as radical as “I’m Not There,” his 2007 Bob Dylan anti-biopic, this movie is similarly committed to a skeptical, inventive reading of recent cultural history. It’s not content to tell the story in the usual way, and it finds revelation in what might have seemed familiar.Haynes doesn’t just want you to listen to the reminiscences of band members and their friends, lovers and collaborators, or to groove on vintage video of the band in action. He wants you to hear just how strange and new the Velvets sounded, to grasp, intuitively as well as analytically, where that sound came from. And also to see — to feel, to experience — the aesthetic ferment and sensory overload of mid-60s Manhattan.A lot of eloquent people are on hand to talk about what it was like. Cale and Maureen Tucker, the drummer, the two original Velvet Underground members who are still alive, share their memories, as do some of Reed’s old friends and surviving members of the Warhol circle.Their faces, shot in gentle, nostalgic, indirect light, share the screen with a rapid flow — a kinetic collage — of images. While those images sometimes document places, events and personalities — offering up Allen Ginsberg, Max’s Kansas City and a news clip about the downtown scene narrated by Barbara Walters — they serve more importantly to link the Velvets’ music to the experimental cinema of the time.From left, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Reed and Tucker in a split-screen frame from the film, which places the band in context of the aesthetic ferment of mid-60s Manhattan.Apple TV+Warhol was, along with everything else, a filmmaker, as was his associate Paul Morrissey. Haynes dedicates “The Velvet Underground” to the memory of Jonas Mekas, the great champion and gadfly of New York’s cinematic vanguard who died in 2019. In the film, Mekas marvels at the sheer abundance of artistic activity in the city in the early ’60s, and the constant blending and cross-pollination that was taking place. Traditional boundaries — between poetry and painting, high art and low, film and music, irony and earnestness — weren’t so much transgressed as shown to be irrelevant.It was a remarkable time, but not exactly a golden age. Haynes respects the art too much to idealize the artists, or to impose retrospective harmony on their dissonances. The overt cruelty and menace of the music — the droning and distortion behind lyrics about addiction, sadism and sexual exploitation — didn’t come from nowhere.The film critic Amy Taubin, who appeared in a Warhol film about “the most beautiful women in the world,” bluntly recalls that the Factory, Warhol’s headquarters, was a bad place for women, who were valued for their looks rather than their talents. An aspect of Warhol’s genius was a gift for using people, and often using them up. Reed, who died in 2013, is a posthumously beloved figure, but not many of his contemporaries would describe him as a nice person.And niceness was, in any case, antithetical to what the Velvet Underground was trying to do. “We hated that peace and love crap,” Tucker says. The artist Mary Woronov, who toured with the Velvets on the West Coast, elaborates on their hostility to the California counterculture: “We hated hippies.” Never a political band, it nonetheless articulated a powerful protest — against sentimentality, stupidity, false consciousness and positive thinking — that would sow the seeds of punk rock and later rebellions. Testimony to their influence is provided by the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who estimates he saw them live 60 or 70 times when he was a teenager in Boston, and whose enthusiasm is undimmed more than half a century later.Drop a needle on any Velvet Underground record — or queue up a playlist, if that’s how you roll — and what you hear will sound new, frightening and full of possibility, even on the thousandth listen. “The Velvet Underground” will show you where that perpetual novelty came from, and connect the sonic dots with other, contemporaneous artistic eruptions. As a documentary, it’s wonderfully informative. It’s also a jagged and powerful work of art in its own right, one that turns archaeology into prophecy.The Velvet UndergroundRated R. “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “Sister Ray” — you do the math. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+. More

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      The NY Cat and Dog Film Festivals Return After Pandemic Hiatus

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      After a pandemic-induced hiatus, these celebrations of human-animal bonds are screening in Manhattan and beyond.Two annual cinematic celebrations invariably attract impassioned ticket buyers, even though they lack car chases, explosions, alien invasions or Daniel Craig as a pouty James Bond.What they do have: whiskers, wildness and no small amount of wit.They’re the NY Cat Film Festival and the NY Dog Film Festival, which are returning to Manhattan after a pandemic-induced hiatus. The cat festival, screening at noon on Saturday — Global Cat Day — at the Village East by Angelika theater, comprises 21 short works that run for a total of around 90 minutes. The nearly two-hour dog festival, which arrives at the same theater on Oct. 24, features 20 short films. (Animal lovers outside New York can see the festivals, too: They will tour for several months, both nationwide and in Canada.)“I think it’s the highest-quality year, possibly, for both,” said Tracie Hotchner, an author and radio host in Vermont who founded the dog festival in 2015 and the cat edition two years later. In a telephone interview, she explained that in the early days of lockdown in 2020, “people couldn’t find toilet paper, but they were making beautiful movies.”Not surprisingly, the pandemic is featured in both festivals. In “Will You Be My Quarantine?,” a feline comedy, the actress and director Susku Ekim Kaya shows herself and her pet, Lady Leia, in split screen, engaged in typically obsessive lockdown activities like grooming, TV watching, cellphone scrolling and FaceTime calling. They lead harmonious parallel lives, whereas the feline protagonists of Jasmin Scuteri-Young’s “Quarantine Diary” and Asali Echols’s “House Cats” complain of their owners’ constant presence in human-supplied voice-overs.The dog festival’s subjects, on the other hand, never seem to long for social distancing. “You don’t believe in personal space,” Kyle Scoble says tenderly to Darla, his Labrador retriever-pointer mix, in “The Second Time I Got to Know My Dog,” a documentary that acts as a tribute to how Darla got him through 2020.But cats may have a reason for their apparently aloof attitudes. “If it’s an indoor cat, it’s enduring a perpetual state of lockdown,” Kim Best, a director from Durham, N.C., said in a phone conversation.That observation fuels Best’s “The Great Escape,” in which a cat named Monkey makes concerted attempts to exit the household, even consulting the digital assistant Alexa, which he bats around and meows at. In Best’s other festival entry, “Cat Capitalization,” her pet, Nube, turns to the internet to market his artistic talent, pretentiously thanking — in thought bubbles — mentors like the artists Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh. (Nube is missing a bit of one ear.)Best said she aimed for “a satire of not only capitalism but also of academia.”Such humor is very much a theme of the cat festival, in which films like Nevada Caldwell’s “Feline Noir” and Priscilla Dean’s “Catfight at the O’Kay Corral” parody old Hollywood clichés.But while the canine film slate is not without laughs — David Coole’s animated “Go Fetch” is a pointed two-minute revenge comedy — it has far more of the in-depth examinations of the human-animal bond that characterized both festivals previously.“Affection in the Streets,” for instance, a Brazilian documentary by Thiago Köche, captures the lives of Pôrto Alegre’s homeless, who often take better care of their dogs than themselves. The loyal pets also attract concern from passers-by, who frequently ignore the suffering of the animals’ owners.“People who love dogs just look right past the humans,” Hotchner said. “I would love more movies about that, because I think it’s the thing we don’t want to look at.”“The Comfort Dogs” also shows the power of pet ownership. Made by Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker, an Australian couple who live and work together in Brooklyn, the film is an excerpt from their feature documentary “We Don’t Deserve Dogs.” The segment focuses on the Comfort Dog Project, which provides pets to young people who were forced to become child soldiers in Uganda’s civil war.With the dogs at their side, the former soldiers can share “quite harrowing” experiences, Salleh said in a joint phone call. “The dogs almost become part of the storytelling method itself.”Another documentary, Zach Putnam’s “Nicola,” illustrates how its subject, a yellow Lab from Canine Companions, a service program for people with disabilities, transformed not only the life of the college student who received her. She also delivered a strong lesson in trust and sacrifice to the student who devotedly trained her but ultimately, tearfully, had to give her up.Both festivals, however, remind viewers that these animals need people as much as people need them. Hotchner, who organizes the programs as a labor of love — tickets to each are $20 — always contributes part of each screening’s sales to a related local charity. The cat festival in New York will help support Bideawee’s Feral Cat Initiative, while this year, all dog festival showings will benefit the nonprofits associated with Saving Senior Dogs Week (Oct. 25-31).“There is a growing awareness,” Covid aside, “that senior dogs are delightful to adopt and the most quick to be put to sleep in a shelter,” Hotchner said. In Gary Tellalian’s “Legends of Comedy Share Love for Old Dogs,” you’ll hear this message in a public service announcement from celebrities who are seniors themselves: Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart and Lily Tomlin, along with Carl Reiner, who died last June at 98.The plight of dogs that aren’t cuddly puppies also surfaces in documentaries like “Not Broken: Freedom Ride,” by Krista Dillane, Emma Lao and Dylan Abad, about a long journey to transport 53 rescued dogs from Louisiana to a pet adoption fair in Rhode Island. In “Chino,” another excerpt from “We Don’t Deserve Dogs,” its aging subject, a street mutt in Santiago, Chile, survives simply because concerned residents provide care.“The street dog culture there is completely different,” Tucker said, adding that the animals are a way to “just bring an entire community together” — a goal for these festivals, too.NY Cat Film FestivalOct. 16 at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; catfilmfestival.com.NY Dog Film FestivalOct. 24 at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; dogfilmfestival.com. More

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      ‘Hard Luck Love Song’ Review: A Glossy Take on a Gritty Tune

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      Drawn from the plotline of a Todd Snider song, the film follows a pool shark and an escort, taking twists that are both violent and silly.Movies based on popular songs often bring specifics to the table to better capitalize on the hooks. For Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe,” the 1976 movie adaptation took on a question the song doesn’t answer: Just what did Billy Joe and the narrator throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge? On the other hand, all the 1954 movie “White Christmas” required was its title Irving Berlin song, some more Irving Berlin songs and stars in Santa hats.“Hard Luck Love Song” is based on the Todd Snider tune “Just Like Old Times.” Snider’s no superstar, but he is a troubadour with a solid cult following and a good way with story songs. “Old Times” is a straightforward, ironically poignant narrative in which a pool hustler phones an escort service from his motel and is soon greeted by his onetime high school sweetheart.The movie, co-written and directed by Justin Corsbie and executive-produced by Snider, puts flesh — much of it movie-star-level attractive — on the song’s bones. Michael Dorman’s Jesse and Sophia Bush’s Carla are depicted partying with a vengeance, fueled by both alcohol and cocaine. Yet by the time they light out for a bar (mostly to put the plot into third gear), they both look as freshly scrubbed as a couple on the good side of a deodorant commercial.The song’s actual story line winds down about an hour and 10 minutes into the movie. After which “Hard Luck Love Song” falls further apart. The twists are violent and silly and have little relation to the gritty realities of Snider’s world. Corsbie has filmmaking energy to spare but also makes many undergrad errors, including a clunky needle drop of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion song “Bell Bottoms,” which was executed definitively in the opening scene of Edgar Wright’s 2017 “Baby Driver.”Hard Luck Love SongRated R for language and partying with a vengeance and cocaine. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Needle in a Timestack’ Review: Put a Pin in It

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      The director John Ridley, who wrote “12 Years a Slave,” tries to combine time travel and romance, and comes up short twice.Who among us has never dreamed of turning back time and changing a decision or event, just like Cher and the Terminator? That possibility is a reality in John Ridley’s sluggish, blandly slick time-travel romance, “Needle in a Timestack.”Nick (Leslie Odom Jr.) is a fancy architect and his wife, Janine (Cynthia Erivo), is a fancy photographer. We know they are soul mates because they constantly talk about their great love, maybe to make up for the fact that they have no real personalities.One day, Nick realizes there has been a so-called time shift — a slight realignment of reality after someone traveled back in time to change the past — thus modifying the present. Further, more consequential alterations in the timeline keep happening, until we end up in a reality where Janine is married to Tommy (Orlando Bloom), their old friend. Nick realizes that Tommy has been fiddling with the past to finally land the woman he wanted.The most fascinating idea in “Needle in a Timestack” is that “time jaunting” is a mundane activity, up to a point: It is so expensive that only wealthy people like Tommy can afford it on a regular basis. But Ridley (the writer of “12 Years a Slave”) decides to stick to the shiny surfaces of aspirational lives, and keeps layering on banalities like “Love is drawn in the form of a circle” and “Have we really thought through the cause and effect of our choices?” That needle was clearly used to stitch slogans on pillows.Needle in a TimestackRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More