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      ‘Illustrious Corpses’: A Mafia Thriller Heavy With Metaphors

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      Francesco Rosi’s film, released in 1974 when Italy feared a coup d’état, remains astute analysis of corruption. A new restoration is at Film Forum.An absorbing, resonant, at times near majestic whodunit, “Illustrious Corpses” is the Italian analog to Watergate-era conspiracy thrillers like “The Parallax View” and “The Conversation.” The movie, first seen here at the 1976 New York Film Festival, is at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration through Oct. 21.As directed by Francesco Rosi, one of the most political of Italian filmmakers, “Illustrious Corpses” aspires to the metaphysical. The opening sequence, partially set to Chopin’s Funeral March, has an elderly gentleman pay a visit to the sacred mummies in a dank church catacomb and, reaching for a flower, fall from an assassin’s bullet — the first of many judges to be shot. “The mafia killed him,” one orator later announces at the judge’s funeral. “He was the mafia,” shout the youthful demonstrators in the street, thus laying out the movie’s particular logic.“Illustrious Corpses” is based on the novel, “Equal Danger,” by Leonardo Sciascia, a Sicilian author who wrote often about the mafia, ultimately as metaphor. His afterword to “Equal Danger,” Sciascia calls it “a fable about power anywhere in the world.” Still, although Italy is never mentioned, the locations — recognizably Palermo, Naples and Rome — are scarcely allegorical.By contrast, Rosi’s protagonist is something of an abstraction or a useful cliché. Tough, honest Inspector Rogas (the veteran roughneck Lino Ventura) is tasked with solving the first murder and those that follow. As he theorizes a culprit, an existential policier plays out against a background of strikes and demonstrations, under constant state surveillance. There are strong hints of unseen forces. Playing a judge, Max Von Sydow materializes as a version of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor advancing a theology of judicial infallibility.In his 1976 review, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby called “Illustrious Corpses” “a dazzling example of fashionably radical Italian filmmaking — elegantly composed, breathlessly paced, photographed in the beautiful, drained colors of a landscape in mourning for the sun.” He also found the movie drained in another way, so broad in its “indictment of government” as to lack any real force.In fact, made during a time when Italy had ample reason to fear a coup d’état, “Illustrious Corpses” is not only topical but quite specific in addressing a bombing campaign waged by the right-wing extremists to destabilize the country as well as the “historic” compromise by which the Italian Communist Party joined the Christian Democratic government. More explicit than the novel, the movie ends with a communist official inverting a quote associated with the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “the truth isn’t always revolutionary.”Casting contributes to the film’s sardonic gravitas. Along with Von Sydow, the French war horses Charles Vanel and Alain Cuny appear as a pair of judges and Luis Buñuel’s frequent alter ego, the urbane Fernando Rey, plays a duplicitous minister of security. Despite the youthful radicals massed around the edges, “Illustrious Corpses” is, as the title suggests, an old man’s world. The corrupt gerontocracy is disrupted only when Tina Aumont (the daughter of camp icon Maria Montez) makes a scene-stealing appearance as a witness to murder.Illustrious CorpsesThrough Oct. 21 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      ‘Suzanna Andler’ Review: French Riviera Blues

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      This film takes place in a single afternoon, as Suzanna, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, contemplates her bourgeois marriage.The central figure in the French drama “Suzanna Andler” is a woman for whom passion, tragedy and indecision elicit the same response — a shrug. Her voice never raises; her face rarely betrays her emotions. She speaks to her friend, her husband and her lover in the same monotone. Even a raise of the eyebrows is too active for this inert film.Suzanna (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is the chic wife of a wealthy businessman. He neglects her, or they neglect each other, and in Suzanna’s leisure time, she has taken a younger lover, Michel (Niels Schneider). The film takes place in a single afternoon, as Suzanna contemplates renting a summer home with her husband’s money.Michel comes to visit, and his presence pushes Suzanna to consider pending decisions that haunt her. Should she rent the house? Should she leave her husband? Should she drink herself to death? Who cares?“Suzanna Andler” is an adaptation of a play by the writer Marguerite Duras, best known in cinema for her contributions to the screenplay of the 1959 film “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.” The director Benoît Jacquot’s interpretation of Duras’s disaffected characters leads him to keep his images detached. Pans and zooms show the same dispassion that his characters profess. Lovers kiss, and the camera moves away from the action.It’s a test of patience to watch these glass figurines discuss their romantic entanglements, the doll house on the Riviera that they will maybe rent, the bourgeois marriages they will maybe leave. Even the camera seems bored, as if it might wander off.Suzanna AndlerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘South of Heaven’ Review: Anything for Love

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      Jason Sudeikis plays a paroled felon who vows to give his dying lover the best year of her life.In “South of Heaven,” a Texas melodrama that’s as convincing as a taxidermied jackalope, Jason Sudeikis plays Jimmy Ray, a freshly paroled felon with a rootin’-tootin’ case of bad luck. His childhood sweetheart (Evangeline Lilly) is dying of a strain of cancer that’s beatified her into a smiling, glowing ever-patient saint. Yet, the couple’s 12-year engagement is further delayed by a series of creeps and coincidences that will force Sudeikis’s cornball bank robber to brandish an electric drill and, eventually, a gun. Can’t a good guy get a honeymoon?Aharon Keshales, who directed the film and wrote it alongside Kai Mark and Navot Papushado, aspires to say something about misunderstood antiheroes and the futility of escalating vengeance. (His and Papushado’s previous thriller, “Big Bad Wolves,” had real bite.) Here, however, the execution is at once laconic and nonsensical. There’s not just one car crash ex-Machina — there’s two.Perhaps the script could have been half-salvaged if it steered into the kind of steroidal masculine rampage that might star Liam Neeson. But in style and tone, “South of Heaven” asks to be taken earnestly, a flaw magnified by Sudeikis’s aw-shucks performance, all twitchy, tiny smiles that demand the audience’s love even as Jimmy makes one ludicrous choice after another. At one point, his character’s predicament is symbolized by a claw machine clenching a teddy bear.There are a few technical bright spots. While mostly tasked to shoot in tasteful monochrome, the cinematographer Matt Mitchell does pull off a nifty tracking shot of a home invasion, and the composer David Fleming puts down the acoustic guitar to score Jimmy’s job at a loading dock with a rattling of frisky percussion. That scene is meant to evoke monotony, but it has more zip than all of the whizzing bullets to come.South of HeavenNot rated. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Mass’ Review: Stages of Grief

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      Years after a school shooting, two couples meet to discuss their children — the one whose life was taken, and the one who took his life.The couples at the heart of the chamber drama “Mass” have much in common. Each pair has two children, one living and one dead. And they share the same tragedy. Linda and Richard’s son, Hayden, killed Gail and Jay’s son, Evan, in a school shooting, before turning his gun on himself.Years have passed, and now the couples have gathered in the back room of a church to discuss their children — the one who was taken, and the one who took. Gail (Martha Plimpton) and Jay (Jason Isaacs) initiated this meeting, and their goal is to uncover the facts that led to their child’s murder. Gail and Jay ask questions, and Linda (Ann Dowd) and Richard (Reed Birney) respond, recalling attempts to seek psychological help for their son, and the decisions that did not prevent his violence.The writer and director Fran Kranz stages this congregation like a play. The actors are seated across from each other in a single room, and the camera work is minimal, alternating between close-ups. The dialogue limits the amount of knowledge the audience is given about how or why the central horror took place. This measured approach allows the feelings that flicker across the faces of the movie’s veteran cast to register not only as markers of marvelous acting — though there is plenty of that to spare — but as events with the power to propel the introspective plot.The movie lacks the gut punch of live theater, the thrill or discomfort of watching people show their feelings in real time. But as cinema, it demonstrates the effectiveness of simplicity. A well-written script and an exemplary cast can still produce a movie worth watching.MassRated PG-13 for references to violence. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Prism’ Review: Taking a Clear View of Bias in Moviemaking

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      In this documentary, three filmmakers put together their own segments that ponder their profession’s culpability.In “Prism,” the directors Rosine Mbakam, An van. Dienderen and Eléonore Yameogo join forces to ask, “Is the very technology of cinema biased?”In 2015, van. Dienderen made “Lili,” a short film that interrogated cinema’s use of China Girls. That’s the name for the test images — typically of a white woman and a color bar — used since the 1920s for film processing calibrations. “Prism” is the result of van. Dienderen’s invitation to Mbakam and Yameogo to ponder their profession’s culpability with her, via Zoom and apart in their own segments. Their answers are personal, cultural, theoretical. Their pieces speak to each other, concurring but diverging too.Densely thoughtful, “Prism” has beautiful and poignant moments. In van. Dienderen’s section, a camera tracks through an art school campus to a television studio where it finds a Black woman, a white man and a color bar. In her layered piece, Mbakam questions two of her former film school professors, both white men. She also reconstructs Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait de négresse” as a living sculpture in which the model’s gaze meets the camera’s with a steady and gorgeous defiance. In Yameogo’s contribution, the actor Tella Kphomahou interviews Diarra Sourank, a cinematographer, and the French-Senegalese director Sylvestre Amoussou about the challenges faced as Black filmmakers.While a great deal here is sober, Yameogo’s piece teases a “60-Minutes”-style conceit that provokes and amuses. In it, Kphomahou interviews a camera. As the actor poses questions, smiling wryly, the camera appears to be paying Cyclopean attention to its hot-seat predicament.PrismNot rated. In French and English with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lamb’ Review: Oh No, Not My Baby!

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      A strange birth on an Icelandic farm bodes ill for a grieving couple in this eerie debut feature.If movies had smells, “Lamb” would reek of wet wool and dry hay, icy mist and animal breath. Bathed in the sort of unforgiving, glacial light that has actresses begging for a pink filter, this atmospheric debut feature from Valdimar Johannsson plays like a folk tale and thrums like a horror movie.Maria and Ingvar (Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snaer Gudnason) are a childless couple who run an isolated sheep farm in rural Iceland. It’s lambing season, and a mysterious, initially unexplained melancholy hangs over the couple’s calm labors. When a pregnant ewe delivers something that’s neither man nor beast — a tiny hybrid, revealed to us only gradually — Maria and Ingvar are alarmingly unfazed, swaddling the creature and installing it in a crib in their bedroom. They name it Ada.Slow-moving and inarguably nutty, “Lamb” nevertheless wields its atavistic power with the straightest of faces, helped in no small measure by an Oscar-worthy cast of farm animals. (The determination of Ada’s real mother to reunite with her offspring is downright chilling.) With deadpan skill, Johannsson and his fellow writer, the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjon, spin an ominous warning about the danger of seeking happiness through delusion — a peril that Ingvar’s black-sheep brother (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson), arriving for a visit, tries unsuccessfully to avert. And as the movie creeps toward its shockingly appropriate climax, the filmmakers’ grip on tone is almost uncanny.Relishing the wild beauty of the location, the fantastic cinematographer Eli Arenson eyes foggy fields and frightened horses with unruffled awe. When he turns his camera on Ada (an impressive blend of actors, animals, puppetry and CGI), the sight is at once ludicrous and strangely touching. After all, doesn’t every parent think their child is perfect?LambRated R for matricide, patricide and kidnapping. In Icelandic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Madres’ and ‘The Manor’ Review: Maligned Women Uncover the Truth

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      Two horror films about marginalized women uncovering conspiracies join Amazon’s “Welcome to the Blumhouse” anthology series.“Madres,” a new film directed by ​​Ryan Zaragoza, claims to be “inspired by true events,” like many paranormal thrillers before it. But unlike many of those films, this one isn’t borrowing from urban legends or famous ghost stories — it’s drawing on verifiable atrocities committed against Latina women. “The Manor,” which Amazon is releasing alongside “Madres” as part of their “Welcome to the Blumhouse” series of horror films, also tells a story of marginalized womanhood, albeit with a septuagenarian protagonist. Though vastly different in setting, both films offer refreshingly rare protagonists, yielding spirited — if occasionally middling — results.“Madres” takes place in the 1970s, as the mother-to-be Diana (Ariana Guerra) moves to a migrant community with her husband, Beto (Tenoch Huerta). A passionate investigative journalist, Diana is loath to leave her native Los Angeles, but she uncovers a wealth of new material when it appears a sinister force is harming the town’s pregnant Latina women. The ensuing investigation catalyzes social tensions between Diana, a light-skinned Mexican American, and her darker-skinned husband that are almost more fascinating than the mystery itself. A subdued score and some by-the-book camerawork can make this urgent story drag, but what it lacks in sting it makes up for with an original script (by Marcella Ochoa and Mario Miscione) and a ferociously pregnant protagonist who would make the “Fargo” character Marge Gunderson proud.Set at a present-day nursing home, “The Manor,” written and directed by Axelle Carolyn, focuses on the intersection between sexism and ageism. After the protagonist Judith (a fantastic Barbara Hershey) moves into assisted living following a stroke, she suspects the staff are up to something nefarious. Naturally nobody believes her, and her mental competency is soon up for debate. With the help of her goth grandson Josh (Nicholas Alexander), Judith must unravel a deranged conspiracy before it claims her life.Uncommon is the film that centers on grandmother-grandson relationships, let alone one that shows a relationship like Judith and Josh’s. Josh clearly worships his take-no-crap grandma, and the two bond over the macabre: He texts her “Psycho” references, she quizzes him on horror trivia in the parlor of the old folks’ home. At one point, Judith admonishes Josh for swearing and he counters that she cusses all the time. This is delightfully true — Judith drops expletives like she’s one of the kids in “Stranger Things.”Despite some flat cinematography and borderline goofy special effects, “The Manor” gives us a distinctive 70-year-old woman as its protagonist and a twisty ending sure to polarize. It and “Madres” are both a bit half-baked, but their foundations are inventive enough to distract from some sloppy construction.MadresNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Amazon.The ManorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      ‘Jacinta’ Review: A Neverending Cycle of Hurt

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      This haunting documentary by Jessica Earnshaw traces the journey of a young woman struggling with addiction after her release from prison.When we first meet Jacinta — the 26-year-old subject of this distressing documentary portrait that bears her name — she’s on the verge of being released from her eight-month stint at the Maine Correctional Center. Jacinta’s mother, Rosemary, is also serving a sentence there; both women are recovering from drug addiction, and both have gone to prison multiple times. Oddly, the pair — scrappy soul sisters more than mother and daughter — seem at peace with their incarceration. And when it’s time for Jacinta to leave, both women teeter from ambivalence to desperation.The remainder of the film grapples with an issue that might seem counterintuitive to the average viewer: Why might Jacinta dread her freedom? It’s not a simple answer, but the director, Jessica Earnshaw — a photographer turned documentarian who followed Jacinta over three years — responds generously by unfurling a long history of inherited trauma and regret.Earnshaw’s lo-fi, vérité approach gives the documentary the impression of a collection of home videos tracing Jacinta’s post-prison journey. Though she strives to stay sober for the sake of her doting daughter, Caylynn, who lives with her grandparents in the New Hampshire suburbs, home is with her father in a mill town bursting with familiar faces tempting her to relapse. As Jacinta gradually succumbs, Earnshaw weaves in interviews, often in voice-over, with Jacinta’s close ones that explain her early run-ins with the law, her experiences with sexual abuse, and her unwavering admiration for her mother, who taught her to fight, shoplift, and use drugs.Though Earnshaw relies on a cloyingly sentimental score to underscore the tragedy of Jacinta’s situation, this durational portrait is undeniably affecting, highlighting as it does Caylynn’s gradual disillusionment with her mother and the jarring ease with which Jacinta falls back into her old ways. This is not a happy story. The lucidity with which these subjects speak to their own mistakes and sorrows will leave you haunted.JacintaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More