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      ‘Before the Dying of the Light’ Review: Moroccan Cinema’s Attempted Revolution

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      This Ali Essafi documentary presents an inspiring view of the roiling visual-arts scene in 1970s Morocco.In 1968, the first substantive film festival was hosted in Tangier, Morocco, an event not mentioned in this impressionistic documentary directed by Ali Essafi. For the most part, “Before the Dying of the Light” is an immersive creation — its on-screen texts mostly philosophical rather than explanatory.The date of that festival is significant, though, because it can be seen as an indicator of emergent Moroccan cinema, which in the 1970s aligned itself with other visual arts and briefly, under the oppressive regime of King Hassan II, tried to forge an authentic politically pertinent body of work.
      Essafi assembles and presents staggering images. He juxtaposes on-the-street archival interviews; multiple covers of literary magazines, both in Arabic and French (France claimed the country as a “protectorate” from the 1910s until the mid-1950s); newsreel clips; scenes from European films shot in Morocco; and Morocco-produced mainstream films (including 1973’s “A Thousand and One Hands,” directed by Souheil Ben-Barka and starring the American actress Mimsy Farmer).These are interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the 1974 film “About Some Meaningless Events.” Its filmmakers, led by the director Mostafa Derkaoui, are very self-interrogating, as was the custom in leftist aesthetics around the world at the time. Contemplating how to best use working-class people in the picture, a team member says, “We could write a script”; another immediately counters, “No.” Their obsessing about how to best capture the spirit of their times resulted in a picture that was suppressed soon after it was completed.Even for viewers with little grounding in Moroccan history, Essafi’s film offers an inspiring view of a roiling period of artistic exploration.Before the Dying of the LightNot rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 8 minutes. Watch through MoMA’s Virtual Cinema. More

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      ‘Luz’ Review: Love In and Out of Lockup

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      In this romantic drama from Jon Garcia, two men find love in prison, then try to make it work on the outside.The lovers in the romantic drama “Luz” don’t meet under ideal circumstances. Ruben (Ernesto Reyes) is a new inmate at a minimum-security prison, and he is assigned to bunk with Carlos (Jesse Tayeh), who promptly threatens him over the use of their shared sink. When Ruben fights back, it’s the first sign that the duo might be evenly matched.Carlos begins to warm to Ruben, and he becomes a mentor as Ruben adjusts to prison life. As roommates, they eat together, and they spar together. They share stories from their pasts and dreams for their futures. They are intimate before they ever have sex.The film follows their relationship from its humble beginnings to their lives outside of prison, after the couple weathers a separation caused by differing sentence lengths. When Ruben finds Carlos after his release, Carlos invites his former lover back into his life.Together, the pair has to decide if the connection they made in confinement is worth carrying into their free lives — if each wants the other to meet and merge with family. The affair between Ruben and Carlos alternates between passionate sex and whispered intimacies.The film’s writer and director, Jon Garcia, treats the physicality of their romance in a frank way, staging realistic love scenes that show the attraction between the characters. But Garcia is less adept at finding passion in between scenes of sex. There is a seriousness to Ruben and Carlos’s relationship that becomes enervating. The first time strings resound in the film’s score, they produce is a plaintive, engrossing feeling. When the same theme plays for the 15th time, the romance feels monotonous.LUZNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters and on Laemmle’s Virtual Cinema. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Happily’ Review: Does Long-Lived Love Mean You Need Treatment?

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      In this keeps-you-guessing comedy, Joel McHale and Kelly Bishé play a couple married for 14 years whose mutual passion is undimmed, to the annoyance of their friends.After 14 years of marriage, what kind of couple has sex at least once a day? Probably, in the real world, a jobless one, but never mind that. In “Happily,” Tom (Joel McHale) writes at home and Janet (Kelly Bishé) works at an office, but yes, they (vigorously!) enjoy intimate relations with unusual frequency in this feature debut by the writer-director BenDavid Grabinski. When a bathroom is occupied for an unusual amount of time during a party, the hosts know exactly who’s hogging the private space and why. Consequently, Tom and Janet’s friends, and especially those party hosts (played by Paul Scheer and Natalie Zea), hate them.Two events rattle Tom and Janet’s bliss. First, a home visit from a mysterious stranger played by Stephen Root. Acting as a kind of cosmic overseer, he informs the couple that they’re biological/metaphysical anomalies and demands they submit to his cure. This visit ends badly for him. Then the pair bounces from being disinvited and reinvited to a weekend getaway hosted by another couple of hater friends, and attended by distinctly discontented duos.For a while it’s fun to be kept off-balance, wondering whether the movie is some kind of allegory or, as seems more likely, that the cosmic overseer visit was a prank engineered by one of those friends. Either way, since the visit, Tom and Janet are troubled — by guilt, by dreams, by temptations never experienced before.Grabinski has both wit and energy, and these qualities, along with a game cast, help keep “Happily” afloat for far longer than most made-in-L.A. dark domestic comedies. But the movie wants to do too many things, and grows diffuse. This is a not uncommon glitch with first features; one hopes and expects Grabinski will deliver something more focused next time.HappilyRated R for themes, language, excessive marital bliss. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Vudu, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Rose Plays Julie’ Review: An Eerie Thriller With Mirrored Traumas

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      Sexual violence and adoption bracket the life of a young woman seeking a family connection and finding a #MeToo legacy instead.As far as #MeToo thrillers go, “Rose Plays Julie” stands out for its unpredictability.A quiet veterinary student in Dublin, Rose (Ann Skelly), has recently discovered that she was adopted and that her original name was Julie. She goes to London to find her birth mother, Ellen (Orla Brady), a television actress who wants no reminders of the circumstances surrounding Julie’s birth and no connection with her daughter. Ellen’s baby was born of rape, and she had asked that there be no further contact with Julie after the adoption.“Rose Plays Julie,” written and directed by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, frames its sexual trauma as an intergenerational one. It contemplates the double lives of women through the ideas of outer success and inner anguish, as well as the trope of the naïve girl versus the seductive avenger.Just as Ellen plays a character for her day job, Rose “plays” Julie — costumed with a bobbed wig — when she eventually tracks down her biological father, Peter (Aidan Gillen), a famed archaeologist who repeats his pattern of sexual abuse with Rose. Her disguise is not necessary, since Peter does not know her name or that she even exists. The “Julie” identity provides both a shield against her mother’s trauma and a vessel to contain it. Her actions present a thought-provoking interplay of pain and self-preservation.But this device can sometimes work against the story, too. Amid the lush greenery of the setting, the atmosphere is perpetually bone-chilling — complete with an ominously high-pitched score — making the film seem distant and difficult to fully embrace. Even with its unusual approach to exacting delayed revenge, “Rose Plays Julie” remains just a little too cold and calculating.Rose Plays JulieNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. On virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Courier’ Review: Secrets and Spies

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      Benedict Cumberbatch plays a salesman-turned-secret agent in this stuffy Cold War drama.“The Courier,” a true life-based spy thriller set in the early 1960s — and staged to appeal to audiences old enough to have lived through them — stubbornly resists involving or affecting us until it’s almost over. By that time, though, you might have fallen asleep.Ideally, that shouldn’t happen while watching two stand-up guys — one British, one Russian — perhaps narrowly prevent a nuclear apocalypse. But the director, Dominic Cooke (whose 2018 feature debut, “On Chesil Beach,” touchingly conveyed the tragedy of broken intimacy), is either unable to generate tension or simply chooses not to. The Cuban Missile Crisis might loom in the background, but we barely sense its menace as Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), an unremarkable English salesman, is enlisted as an intermediary between MI6 (in the form of a suave Angus Wright) and a Soviet officer named Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze).With its wood-paneled rooms and pluming cigarette smoke, “The Courier” is espionage cinema at its most decorous. Disappointingly, no one is karate-chopping or transforming fountain pens into tiny daggers. (Instead, they have lunch and attend the ballet.) Wynne, we are told, must be given a crash course in tradecraft before accepting Soviet secrets, but Tom O’Connor’s stolid script is actively antithetical to such excitement. We need a montage!Though Jessie Buckley, as Wynne’s suspicious wife, and Rachel Brosnahan, as an amusingly pushy C.I.A. operative, add welcome jolts of female energy, “The Courier” is essentially the story of an extraordinary male friendship. The men’s mutual compassion peaks too late to save the picture, but is no less moving for that.The CourierRated PG-13 for a bit of violence and a blink-and-you-miss-it bedroom scene. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘The Fever’ Review: Tropical Maladies

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      Maya Da-Rin’s extraordinary film details the intimate life of an Indigenous family in the Brazilian city of Manaus.The urban world simmers with magic in “The Fever,” Maya Da-Rin’s meditative feature about an Indigenous family in Manaus, Brazil. The middle-aged Justino (Regis Myrupu), a native of the Desana tribe, works as a security guard at a cargo port, while his enterprising daughter, Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), is about to leave her job as a nurse to go to medical school on a scholarship.Da-Rin quietly observes their routines of work and home, intertwining two elliptical layers of reality. As Justino contends with the ennui of his job and his impending separation from Vanessa, he contracts a mysterious fever; at the same time, a strange animal roams through the nearby rainforest. The film never spells out its secrets, which nonetheless invest every shot with ethereal beauty: The cranes that move giant cuboid containers at Justino’s port inscribe geometric poetry into the sky, while a rich layer of ambient sound envelops the film, adding texture even to its silences.“The Fever” colors in the experiences of Brazil’s Indigenous community through the casual racism Justino and Vanessa face at work, including taunts about the shapes of their eyes and ignorance about the diversity of Native languages. The characters are stoic in public, but at home, Justino responds with his own judgments. “They don’t even know how to look into dreams,” he says of white doctors. “They have big eyes, but they can only see what’s in front of them.” By showing us the world through Justino’s searching gaze, Da-Rin gives us an elusive but powerful sense of the limits of our own vision.The FeverNot rated. In Tukano and Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In virtual cinemas, including Film at Lincoln Center. More

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      ‘City of Lies’ Review: Dirty Cops and a Dangerous Conspiracy

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      Johnny Depp and Forest Whitaker head up this artless procedural about the murders of two rap artists.Languishing since 2018, Brad Furman’s “City of Lies” is the latest attempt to monetize the unsolved 1990s murders of the rap artists Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G.) and Tupac Shakur. The killings, previously wrestled with on film and in print, have spawned a morass of theories that would give even the most experienced filmmaker pause.Not Furman, though, who (with the screenwriter Christian Contreras) sets about dramatizing Randall Sullivan’s 2002 nonfiction book, the aptly named “LAbyrinth,” with rather more appetite than artistry. His focus is Russell Poole (Johnny Depp, confusing somnolent with serious), a former Los Angeles police detective still tormented by his investigation into Wallace’s death decades earlier. We know this because his depressing apartment is liberally plastered in details of the case.Into this psychological swamp comes Jack Jackson (Forest Whitaker), a journalist who’s working on a 20-year retrospective of the crimes. Jackson needs information, while Poole — who believes that the L.A.P.D. was actively involved in Wallace’s killing and the ensuing cover-up — needs a confessor. So we’re off down memory lane to watch Poole battle police corruption, hostile suspects and his antagonistic superiors.At heart a movie about one man’s self-destructive obsession (Poole was forced to resign two weeks shy of his pension), “City of Lies” has an underlying, unexpected poignancy. The look is grimy and the atmosphere is grim; but what could have been a moody character study or a taut conspiracy thriller is instead a dreary procedural, a misbegotten mush of flashbacks, voice-overs and dead ends.City of LiesRated R for offensive language and deadly weapons. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      Ryan Reynolds Live Tweets Ticklish Commentary During His First Ever Viewing of 'Green Lantern'

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      Warner Bros.

      Getting into the St. Patrick’s Day spirit, the ‘Deadpool’ star additionally shares with his followers that he invented a new Lantern’s Light cocktail using his Aviation gin brand for the occasion.

      Mar 18, 2021

      AceShowbiz –
      Ryan Reynolds got into the St. Patrick’s Day spirit on Wednesday, March 17 by watching his 2011 superhero movie “Green Lantern” for the first time – and tweeting his commentary.

      The “Deadpool” star also invented a new Lantern’s Light cocktail – made with his Aviation gin brand – as he took in the movie.

      “It’s apparently the only f**king movie in existence that’s not streaming anywhere so you’re SOL [s**t out of luck] if you want to watch along,” Ryan shared with his fans ahead of his private screening. “But I’m going deep. #GinnerAndAMovie #AviationGin.”

      Ryan Reynolds live tweeted during ‘Green Lantern’ viewing party.

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      He added, “I only ever read my parts of the script so this is genuinely exciting for me to watch… [the] protagonist seems reckless but likable”.

      His tweets continued with, “I swear I’m drinking to Grammy winner and international ambassador of joy, @TaikaWaititi. Not to numb any pain I might be in,” before he noted his now-wife, Blake Lively, is in the film.

      Ryan’s nuggets included, “Oh boy. Tragic childhood flashback sequence killing a beloved parent. Designed to instill a level of depth and hard fought empathy for our hero. Disney perfected this move”, “Do you have any idea how weird it is to act while being attacked by invisible space energy?” and, “There’s a lot of heavy hitters in the movie. Not always used in the right way… but still… heavy hitters.”

      The ‘Deadpool’ actor posted ticklish commentary.

      He also dished out compliments to his co-stars, stating, “Love Stanley Tucci”, “Angela Bassett is stunning. Period,” and “Goddamn I miss Michael Clarke Duncan.” And he posted video of himself sipping his Lantern’s Light while wearing his character’s prop ring.

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