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      The Married Couple Behind the Dreamy Feminist Action Film ‘Mayday’

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      The writer and director Karen Cinorre and the cinematographer Sam Levy met in a college film class over 20 years ago. More recently, they collaborated on Cinorre’s first feature.When the cinematographer Sam Levy and the writer and director Karen Cinorre, who are now married forty-somethings, first met — in a film class as undergrads at Brown — he was struck by the fact that “she’d read all these interesting texts about magic, mediums and optical tricks you could play with the camera,” he says. “She was very studious and disciplined about it, and I loved that about her.”The couple’s living room is decorated with art made by friends, and with vintage wallpaper that Cinorre hand-painted.Blaine Davis“I was a really curious seeker,” confirms Cinorre, who primarily studied semiotics, physics and dance, but who ultimately landed in film. “I realized,” she says, “that the palette for filmmaking had so much of what I love — the science, the optics, the movement, the sound,” which together can enact an alchemy all their own. Not that she’s actively thinking about all of these elements as she goes. “For me, you just do it — I’m trying to express something almost in the subconscious,” she says. “It’s like having a divining rod, seeking a way to express the thing you’re feeling.”Levy prints his photos at home, laying them out on the floor to see patterns. Pictured here are 17-by-22-inch images on Fibre Rag paper, and the accordion of portrait images is from his favorite photo book, “Mesdames les Bodhisattva à Tokyo” (2013), by the photographer Papa-Chat Yokokawa.Blaine DavisLevy, she says, who took to the camera in high school, has a different and more deliberate approach — “he strips film to its most essential and powerful parts” — something that was apparent, and fascinating to her, from the start. The pair kept in touch after that first class together, which was taught by the avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton, and their romance bloomed shortly after they graduated and moved to New York. They married in 2000, just as they were beginning to build their respective careers. Cinorre edited and produced for Thornton; produced and curated multimedia installations; created films for opera productions; and worked as a set decorator and as a stylist, most notably for Isabella Rossellini’s experimental “Green Porno” short film series (2008), in which Cinorre also appears as an amorous snail. All the while, she was writing and directing her own shorts. One of them, “Plume” (2010), centers on a young boy lost in a sandstorm who is saved by an ostrich, which leaves him caught between the human and animal realms. “My artistic inclinations are to mysterious things — I’m interested in the territory of the sublime,” she says.Another view of the couple’s studio, where Cinorre wrote and edited “Mayday.”Blaine DavisAt the same time, Levy was making a name for himself. He shot music videos for Beck and Vampire Weekend and became a frequent collaborator of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, serving as the director of photography on Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” (2012), shot entirely in black and white, and “While We’re Young” (2015) and, later, for Gerwig’s Oscar-winning “Lady Bird” (2017). His lean, naturalistic approach belies a meticulous attention to detail that gives the films he works on a rich, lived-in aesthetic. Levy also shot nearly all of Cinorre’s shorts, and the couple would occasionally end up on the same set for other productions (as was the case with “Green Porno”). “We learned we really loved being on set together, spending 15 hours a day together making things,” says Levy. “When I would get a feature for someone else and leave home, it just reinforced the idea that we should be doing this together.”The shot list for “Mayday” — Cinorre and Levy worked together to break down every scripted scene into individual shots.Blaine DavisIn 2018, after an idea of Cinorre’s that had been percolating for over a decade took shape — “Sam, who’d seen the script in progress, was the one to point out that it should be a feature,” says Cinorre — they got their chance. The story — of what would become “Mayday,” which stars Grace Van Patten, Mia Goth, Havana Rose Liu and Juliette Lewis and hits theaters and all major video-on-demand platforms Friday — follows Ana (Van Patten), a put-upon young waitress who is transported to a lush and sparsely populated island in a dreamy other world. A war is on, but she finds refuge with a band of young women led by the seemingly unflappable Marsha (Goth). Soon, Ana learns, the women are bent on vengeance against all men, whom they lure to their deaths, often by impersonating damsels in distress via radio transmissions. In time, though, the feminist revenge fantasy gives way to something else, as Ana comes to see herself and her previous life in a different light.Levy and Cinorre on the set of “Mayday” in Croatia.Tjaša KalkanCinorre cites “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) and the ancient myth of the sirens as reference points for the story, which, she says, “felt like a bit of a fugue.” To figure out the film’s overall aesthetic, which has an appropriately gauzy, hypnotic quality, the couple searched for visual inspiration together. They went to live dance performances, including those done by the Belgian troupe Rosas and the Israeli company Batsheva, to help achieve a sense of grace and kineticism in the film (which has a darkly playful musical number in which Ana dances with a cadre of spry soldiers). The couple also browsed the shelves at Manhattan’s Dashwood Books, looking for images of women in action, which proved hard to find. Still, “a lot of Japanese photographers, like Rinko Kawauchi, spoke to us — something about the mystery and the color,” says Levy, who says his aim for “Mayday” was to “defy gravity.”A still from the film, which follows a band of women living on a strange island.Tjaša Kalkan/Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. “It’s a big movie for a first feature — it needed a lot of muscle to get off the ground, and it was reassuring to have someone so encouraging,” Cinorre says of working with Levy, which turned out to be as natural as they both expected. “The thing I’m always trying to develop with a director is this shorthand for communicating and a visual language,” says Levy. “You kind of have to become the same person — your brains have to meld and you finish each other’s sentences.” This was something he and Cinorre could already do, though the two are careful about maintaining at least some boundaries between work and life. “We take what we do so seriously that we have to not take ourselves too seriously,” says Levy. “We’re playful and silly and ridiculous with each other, so then we can bring that energy to set, which makes the process of filmmaking a real joy.”Hair by Corey Tuttle for Exclusive Artists. Makeup by Pearl Xu More

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      Review: In ‘Never Let Go,’ a Solo Performer’s Heart Goes On

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      Michael Kinnan’s sendup of “Titanic” explores the liminal space between tribute and affectionate satire.Michael Kinnan’s “Never Let Go” is a one-man stage version of “Titanic.” That would be enough to persuade a lot of people to head to the Brick Theater, the adventurous Williamsburg black box where the show opened this week. Just as many might shrug in reflexive disdain.Kinnan is aware of those potential responses. The program for his show, in which he plays all the parts, claims that his “theatrical realization” of the movie was “created for lovers, fans and even skeptics.” Improbably, all three groups may well come away happy: This heart does go on, and for only an hour instead of three and a half.“Never Let Go” is a feat of ingenuity that works regardless of whether you have seen the movie. It’s easy to follow the story and identify the characters, even though there is no ocean liner and only minimal costume alterations. Kinnan embodies a dashing androgyny: lipstick and fake eyelashes, a shaved head, tight black pants, a white shirt emerging from a laced corset.And he needs just a few sound effects and props, including a step ladder and that famous necklace, to drive along the plot. One of the movie’s best scenes is the first meeting between Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack and Kate Winslet’s Rose, when he talks her out of jumping into the sea from the ship’s stern. Recreating it, Kinnan seamlessly toggles between the two characters, and even nails the moment in which Jack catches Rose when she trips and almost falls into the ocean. As for the sex scene: This may be sacrilegious to say, but it’s better here.While he adeptly reproduces DiCaprio’s youthful cockiness, Kinnan raises his game to another level with Winslet’s role. He captures her coquettish coyness without caricaturing it. It’s hard not to laugh in delight at his resourcefulness and skill — the commotion following the collision with the iceberg is effectively rendered, complete with a hilariously tiny splash zone — which is quite a different reaction from snickering in superiority.Kinnan is not blind to the bombastic cheesiness of “Titanic,” yet appears to hold a genuine place in his heart for it, which gives the show winning élan, even heartfelt sincerity. By the time Rose told Jack “there’s a boat” then piteously pleaded “come back, come back,” I was so caught up in the drama that I’d forgotten the original scenes and was feeling for Kinnan’s version of the characters.In 2009, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper’s “Rambo Solo” turned the famous Sylvester Stallone into a one-person show that Charles Isherwood of The New York Times described as “a winking shard of low-concept theater for downtown hipsters.” This is not what Kinnan aims for, or even accidentally achieves.What he does is explore the liminal space between tribute and affectionate satire, which is well illustrated by the way he combines a can’t-help-it fondness for Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” with a playful awareness of its schmaltz. If there is one drawback to the show, it’s that it will send you back into the night with that earworm firmly lodged in your head, all over again.Never Let GoThrough Oct. 10 at the Brick Theater, Brooklyn; bricktheater.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      New Paramount chairman continues to clean house, showing another executive the door.

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      Regime change at Hollywood studios is almost always bloody. A new king or queen arrives and those loyal to the previous court lose their jobs.But the guillotine has been dropping at Paramount Pictures with surprising speed, creating something of a panic inside the 109-year-old film company.ViacomCBS, which owns Paramount, ousted Paramount’s chairman, James N. Gianopulos, on Sept. 13 and replaced him with Brian Robbins, a children’s television executive. By Sept. 17, Chris Petrikin, the studio’s respected executive vice president of global communications and corporate branding, had been shown the door. Emma Watts, president of the Paramount Motion Picture Group, was dismissed last week. And on Thursday, Paramount parted with its animation president, Mireille Soria.Paramount declined to comment on the departures.The speed with which Mr. Robbins is making changes reflects his personal style — forward charge! — and the vulnerable position in which Paramount and its corporate parent find themselves.Paramount was once the most powerful studio in Hollywood, delivering culture-defining films like “The Godfather,” “Grease,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Forrest Gump” and “Beverly Hills Cop.” But severe mismanagement in the 2010s left it on life support. Mr. Gianopulos pulled it back from the brink, but the studio remains an also-ran, with many analysts viewing it as unequipped to compete with franchise-rich competitors like Disney and Universal.Similarly, ViacomCBS ranks as a small player in the streaming business that has come to dominate the media industry. Mr. Robbins, who has online entertainment experience on his résumé and little attachment to calcified Hollywood business models, was installed at Paramount because ViacomCBS wants the studio to prioritize streaming distribution for films — in particular, feeding content to Paramount+, the conglomerate’s nascent streaming service. More

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      Ruth Sullivan, Advocate for People With Autism, Dies at 97

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      After her son was found to be autistic, she started organizations to help children and adults. She also consulted on the making of the movie “Rain Man.”Ruth Sullivan, a public health nurse who became an influential advocate for autistic children and adults after one of her sons was diagnosed with the disorder in the early 1960s, died on Sept. 16 at an assisted-living facility in Huntington, W.Va. She was 97.Her daughter Lydia Sullivan said the cause was atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm.For more than 40 years, Dr. Sullivan was a tireless champion for educational and other opportunities for people on the autism spectrum. She was a founder of the Autism Society, a national grass-roots organization, and secured state funding to open the West Virginia Autism Training Center at Marshall University.She started and ran the Autism Services Center, which provides residential, therapeutic and community services, and for several years offered information and referrals by telephone from her home in Huntington, where she and her husband, William, raised seven children.“Our dinners were often interrupted by hysterical parents calling,” Lydia Sullivan said in a phone interview, “and my mother would spend the evenings talking to desperate parents from around the world.”Dr. Sullivan was once that parent desperate for information about autism. When her son Joseph received his diagnosis in 1963, at the age of 3, autism was a mysterious disorder that most pediatricians knew little about. She took Joseph to a doctor in Lake Charles, La., where the family was living at the time, and he quickly recognized that Joseph was autistic.“I said, ‘What is that?’” she recalled when she was interviewed on a podcast in 2016 by Marc Ellison, the executive director of the Autism Training Center and one of her protégés. “He said he will always be odd. But he couldn’t offer anything else.”Nearly as disturbing to Dr. Sullivan was a prevailing psychological theory that cold and distant parents — most notably those who were referred to as “refrigerator mothers” — were responsible for causing their children’s autism.“I knew it wasn’t true,” she said on the podcast. “I didn’t love Joseph any less than the others. I treated him differently because he didn’t behave like the others.” She added: “I’m the oldest of seven. I have seven children. I was a nurse. I knew something about children.”Research led her to read the book “Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior” (1964), by Bernard Rimland, a psychologist with an autistic son. He rebutted the claim that neglectful parents caused autism in their children and argued that autism was a result of genetics and possibly environmental factors.Dr. Sullivan wrote to Dr. Rimland about starting a national network of parents that would receive the latest research about autism. In 1965, the two of them and a group of parents who had also written to Dr. Rimland met at a house in Teaneck, N.J., and founded the National Society for Autistic Children (now the Autism Society), a support group that would have numerous local chapters throughout the country. Dr. Sullivan was elected its president in 1969.Around that time she was also trying to overcome a local school board’s resistance to providing an education to autistic children like Joseph. She brought a prepared statement to a school board meeting, and local newspapers wrote about her campaign to educate Joseph.“For almost six weeks I was on the phone every day trying to persuade them to set up a special class,” Dr. Sullivan told The Sunday Gazette-Mail of Charleston, W.Va., in 1972. “The next week,” she added, “there was a class for Joseph and 12 other children. With the help of some dedicated teachers, they’ve been attending school ever since.”Dr. Sullivan lobbied for the passage in 1975 of what came to be called the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which required public schools that received federal money to provide equal access to children with disabilities. When the law was amended 15 years later, she helped write the language to include autistic children.She also became a technical adviser to “Rain Man,” Barry Levinson’s 1988 film about an autistic man (Dustin Hoffman) and his brother (Tom Cruise). To prepare for the role, Mr. Hoffman studied two documentary films featuring Joseph as well as outtakes from one of them, “Portrait of an Autistic Young Man” (1986), which was shown on PBS stations.“That’s where I met Joe, in a sense,” Mr. Hoffman told The Associated Press in 1988 at a showing of “Rain Man” in Huntington that, at Dr. Sullivan’s request, was a fund-raiser for the Autism Services Center. “I buried myself there for the first two months.”Joseph’s favorite scene in the film was when Mr. Hoffman’s character, Raymond Babbit, quickly counted spilled toothpicks.Mr. Hoffman thanked Dr. Sullivan and Joseph from the awards ceremony stage when he accepted the Oscar for best actor. She believed that the film helped broaden the public’s understanding of autism.Dr. Sullivan in 2018. For more than 40 years, she fought for educational and other opportunities for people on the autism spectrum.Rick Lee/Huntington QuarterlyRuth Marie Christ was born on April 20, 1924, in Port Arthur, Texas, 90 miles east of Houston. Her father, Lawrence, worked in oil refineries, then turned to farming after he and his family moved to Mowata, La., when Ruth was very young. Her mother, Ada (Matt) Christ, worked in a department store.After graduating from the nursing program at Charity Hospital in New Orleans in 1943, Dr. Sullivan served in the Army Nurse Corps, treating soldiers during World War II at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio (now Joint Base San Antonio).After the war ended, she moved to Lake Charles for four years, then attended Teachers College at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public health, she worked as a nurse in Manhattan. She married William Sullivan, an English professor, in 1952 and accompanied him to teaching posts in Columbia, Mo., Lake Charles and Albany, working part time as a nurse until her fourth child was born, in 1958.Joseph, her fifth child, was born in 1960. He started speaking early but began to withdraw at 18 months. By his second birthday, Dr. Sullivan wrote in her journal — which was quoted by The Gazette-Mail in 1972 — “he could say only eight words. He would indicate what he wanted by grunts, guiding our hands to what he wanted.”In 1984, at 60, she earned a Ph.D. in special education, speech pathology and psychology from Ohio University, which gave her greater standing with the people she lobbied.Her relentless but gentle style of advocacy continued until her retirement in 2007.“Providing guidance to families nationally was obviously spectacular,” said Stephen Edelson, executive director of the Autism Research Institute. “But she was also one of the first people to talk about medical comorbidities associated with autism, like seizures, sleep problems and gastrointestinal problems. And she was one of the first to point to the importance of providing services to adults with autism.”Jimmie Beirne, chief executive of the Autism Services Center (the position Dr. Sullivan held from 1979 to 2007), was hired 33 years ago to work part time with Joseph on developing his social skills.“The philosophy that she worked so hard to instill in us was to have a parent’s perspective, to think as if this is our child receiving these services,” Dr. Beirne said by phone. “She’d say that the difference between good and excellent services is in the details, and, like a good coach, she had an eye for details.”Today, Joseph lives in a group home run by the Autism Services Center and works at the Autism Training Center.In addition to Joseph and her daughter Lydia, Dr. Sullivan is survived by her other sons, Larry, Richard and Christopher; her other daughters, Eva Sullivan and Julie Sullivan, who is writing a book about her mother; her sisters, Geraldine Landry, Frances Buckingham and Julie Miller; her brother, Charles; 12 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.Dr. Sullivan’s influence was international. She received letters from parents around the world in search of solutions for their children, and she traveled widely to speak about autism.“She was invited to a conference on autism in Argentina in the 1990s,” her daughter Julie said by phone. “At the time, Argentina was in the grips of the ‘refrigerator mother’ thing, and she got together with parents and told them they needed to start their own group. So she’s the godmother of an autism parents’ group in Argentina.” More

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      ‘Karen Dalton: In My Own Time’ Review: An Elemental Musical Force

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      A documentary chronicles the turbulent life of a singer whose music made a substantial impression on New York’s 1960s folk scene and still resonates today.Musicians working in pop modes often navigate their careers using a combination of talent and calculation. Karen Dalton, a singer and instrumentalist who made a substantial impression on New York’s 1960s folk scene, and whose small body of recorded work moves and inspires listeners to this day, was someone for whom calculation was inconceivable.That’s one impression left by “Karen Dalton: In My Own Time,” an excellent documentary directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz. Dalton, who died of AIDS in 1993 at age 55, was of Irish and Cherokee extraction, born in Texas and raised in Oklahoma. As her friend and colleague Peter Stampfel observes, she was one of the few musicians in Greenwich Village’s earnest Americana scene who was authentically “folk.” (He tells some truly hair-raising stories of Dalton here.)As a player and singer, she was an elemental force. While her voice resembles that of Billie Holiday, there’s no sense of imitation or affectation to it, as Dalton’s unique reading of Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” demonstrates.Archival footage provides a disquieting window into Dalton’s bearing. Early in the picture there’s a home movie of Dalton singing, accompanying herself on guitar. Her mastery seems effortless; she’s framed by a seemingly unshakable confidence. Once she puts the guitar down, that confidence falls away, and she becomes awkward, almost uncomfortable in her own skin.A visibly missing tooth in some performance footage testifies to a life of privation and of abuse. Some abuse was self-generated. Like her friend Tim Hardin, another artist for whom compromise was inimical, Dalton was a hard-living addict. And alas, this cinematic tribute ends with an account of Dalton’s bad breaks continuing even after her death.Karen Dalton: In My Own TimeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Have You Run Out of Netflix Shows to Watch? Try These.

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      Fashion week may be back in-person, but not every designer wants to give up the digital approach. Marine Serre, Thebe Magugu, Burberry and Dries Van Noten explore the connection.PARIS — The last year and a half of being stuck to the small screen for work and pleasure, desperate for any new piece of escapism be it blockbuster or art house or glossy series, has to have changed forever our relationship to the moving picture, raising the stakes and the expectations. And if, when fashion first went online, the idea of transforming a show into a video seemed like a potential savior for the industry, it also exposed some of the limits in the fashion imagination.Watching model after model stroll by onscreen, even with some fancy camera angles, it soon became awfully easy to look away.This is especially true now that in-person shows — like big-screen movie experiences — are back; now that video has become a conscious choice, rather than a necessity. For some, such as Dries Van Noten, it’s a matter of pandemic health concerns; for others, such as Marine Serre, it’s a creative imperative.Look made from vintage linens, Marine Serre, spring 2022.via Marine SerreWhatever the motive, though, it has become increasingly clear that for a designer to opt for a mini-movie instead of a runway, there needs to be a specific reason for the video to be; something you can do onscreen that you can’t do in person.The medium has to be part of the message. (Apologies to Marshall McLuhan.)Ms. Serre, a designer who thinks deeply about the current state of things, has always understood this. (Well, she tends to be first with a lot of things: an inveterate bicyclist, she also made masks before masks became a part of daily life, and she’s already moved on from dependence on her widely-recognized crescent moon logo.)She made two of the most successful fashion films of the previous digital seasons, in part because each contained a narrative thread that — like her fashion, which was built on upcycling long before it became a runway trend — was rooted in the world. Not just the world of environmental politics, but of the literal materials of everyday life.To that end, she said, film “lets me go deeper than I can with a show, break the bounds of fashion in a way,” to show people not just how to wear her clothes but how to live and how to act within them.Dresses inspired by the print top in the family photo behind, Thebe Magugu, spring 2022.via Thebe MaguguShe did it again, this season, in a garden in the Marais, where her movie, “Ostel 24,” could premiere on a big screen. A day in the life of a single close-knit community, it showed them meditating, driving, kneading dough, eating, dancing alone in their rooms, crushing cherries for dye — above all, tending to one another. Taking care. Paying attention.That they happened to be wearing clothes that were also deeply imbued with a sense of the personal alchemy that can transform vintage Dutch linens (embroidered napkins and tablecloths) into delicate tea dresses, or checked terry-cloth dish towels into Chanel-like lunching suits, or ’90s popcorn tops no one likes anymore into extraordinary collages of print and color (sometimes 15 tops in one dress), was part of the story. A reminder that the choices you make matter, from what you put on in the morning to what you eat and whom you share it with.As, in a different way, was “Genealogy” from Thebe Magugu, like Ms. Serre a relatively young, independent designer who has found a more intimate voice through digital than in the echoing environs of the runway.Note the ears, Burberry, spring 2022.via BurberryA sort of family memory/therapy session, as well as a startlingly personal guide to his formative influences, the film featured Mr. Magugu conducting a kind of round table with his mother, Iris Magugu, and his maternal aunt, Esther Magugu, as they went through old family photos from their life in the South African mining town of Kimberley and discussed their favorite clothes — which Mr. Magugu had translated into his new collection.So his mom’s prized trench coat became a beige and sky blue off-the-shoulder trench dress. A nurse’s periwinkle blue uniform became a neat shirtdress with trumpet sleeves, hem dipping down in the back. Ditto the paisley print from a beloved frock, given a sophisticated rockabilly edge. As an expression of how the past informs the present (and future), and how memories are contained in what we wear, it was elegantly and potently done.And it made Riccardo Tisci’s Burberry video seem calculated and antiseptic by comparison: a sort of mix and match version of house codes (trench coats! leather!) with a world of nature overlay (gimmicky deer ear prosthetics; bat-ear hunting hats that might become viral successes; butterfly and cow prints and fluffy faux fox tail accessories) paraded through a landscape of rooms. It turned out many of the most classic looking trench coats were cut away entirely at the back to expose the rear. Shock! Transgression! Chilly? Also: Why?Dries Van Noten, spring 2022.Rafael PavarottiAt least Mr. Van Noten’s stop-and-start compilation of movement, color and music communicated the intensity of the collection, which viewed in accompanying still photographs looked like nothing so much as a flood of pure fashion: blown-up couture volumes and ruffles, waterfalls of rainbow fringe, blurry firework prints, denim covered in diamanté — idea after idea, each seeming more tactile and maximalist than the next.In a Zoom conversation, Mr. Van Noten said he had been thinking about festivals, both the desert happening Burning Man and India’s colorful Holi, and how people come together to express joy. His clothes were all that. But it made the disconnect between what they represented and the fact they were trapped, onscreen, especially frustrating. When what the viewer really should feel was enthralled.Emotional and technological connectivity isn’t enough; you need context, too. That’s the place where the stories we tell ourselves get woven into cloth. That’s when you hit rewind. And watch it again and again, until it’s ready-to-wear. More

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      ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ Review: No Picnic

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      A family outing attracts mysterious, menacing uninvited guests in this grinding New Zealand thriller.Not infrequently, films set and shot in the Antipodes make a convincing case that one ought to never leave one’s house. Think of the scenarios of “Wake In Fright” (kangaroos and lunatics running amok), “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (girls-school adventurers disappear), “A Cry in the Dark” (dingo, baby). Directed by James Ashcroft from a script he wrote with Eli Kent (based on a short story by Owen Marshall), “Coming Home in the Dark” doesn’t take long in demonstrating that sometimes a day trip to high New Zealand spaces is not worth the views.Beginning with an ominous shot of a Mercedes abandoned at roadside, “Coming Home” picks up with a family of four in a different vehicle. In the back seat, the sons of Jill (Miriama McDowell) and Hoaggie (Erik Thomson), bicker about music. Aside from that, all is friendly and well. Until the family lays out blankets at a picnic spot.Then along comes Mandrake (Daniel Gillies), a hirsute fellow whose long, earth-colored overcoat makes him look as if he’s stepped out of a spaghetti Western. Lagging a little behind him is a Maori man, Tubs (Matthias Luafutu). Tubs is exceptionally taciturn. Mandrake totes a rifle and has enough talk for the both of them.So begins an appalling feature-length ordeal connected to Haoggie’s past. Between excruciatingly suspenseful set pieces, the themes of sin, guilt and expiation get an oblique workout.While the whole thing is ruthlessly well done, it also sometimes seems to lean into a kind of moral relativism. Gillies’s performance as Mandrake, while remarkable in its way, radiates a kind of movie-killer cool that doesn’t quite square with the vengeful indignation that ostensibly motivates the character.Coming Home in the DarkNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. 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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      ‘Titane’ Review: Auto Erotic

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      Julia Ducournau’s new film, a prizewinner at Cannes, is a grisly, philosophical thriller that puts the pedal to the metal.Alexia is a strip-club dancer in the South of France whose hobby — her compulsion, her kink, her vocation — is murder. As the bodies pile up and the law seems to be closing in, she leaves the house where she lives with her parents and takes on the identity of Adrien Legrand, a boy who went missing many years before.Having seen a computer-generated image of the teenager Adrien might have grown up to be, Alexia fashions herself into a plausible likeness, cutting her hair short, binding her breasts and smashing her nose against a bathroom sink. The disguise works well enough to convince the boy’s dad, Vincent, the ultra-manly commander of a fire-and-rescue squad. But there is a complication: Alexia is pregnant. The father, as far as we can tell, is a Cadillac with hydraulic suspension and a custom paint job. As the pregnancy progresses, Alexia starts to lactate petroleum.Maybe we should back up for a moment. “Titane” is Julia Ducournau’s second feature. The first, “Raw,” which also included a character named Alexia (and one named Adrien), was a gruesome, witty, insistently thoughtful quasi-horror movie about sex, cannibalism and the varieties of hunger. Awarded the top prize in Cannes this year, “Titane” consolidates a filmmaking style based on visceral shock, grisly absurdism and high thematic ambition. Violence is often played for comedy. Cruelty collides with tenderness. Eroticism keeps company with disgust. Through the stroboscopic aggression of Ducournau’s images you can glimpse ideas about gender, lust and the intimacy that connects people and machines.Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) may be a little of both. As a child, she survived — and caused — a car crash that left her with a titanium plate in her skull. That explains the title of the movie, though not the character’s fascination with motors, which predated the accident, or the bloodthirstiness that drives her adult self. Titanically alluring, she seduces men and women before attacking them with a metal shank that doubles as a hairpin. After driving it through one guy’s ear, she wipes it clean as if she had just checked the oil in a car’s engine.There is slapstick as well as dread in the way Ducournau stages Alexia’s crimes. “How many of you are there?” she asks as a quiet evening of one-on-one homicide threatens to turn into a mass casualty event. “I’m exhausted,” she complains to one of her victims, who actually seems to feel sorry for her.Rousselle, a model making her film debut, has a sullen magnetism. Her iciness is edged with melancholy. Once Alexia becomes Adrien, moving in with Vincent (Vincent Lindon) and joining his crew, she seems less like a predator than a vulnerable, isolated misfit. Lindon, an avatar of weary, blue-collar masculinity, seems at first to be too obvious a foil for Rousselle. But Vincent turns out to have kinks and complications of his own. He fights aging with heavy doses of steroids, and seems willfully to overlook signs of his supposed son’s real identity.His firehouse is a cauldron of unchecked virility and barely suppressed homoeroticism. He insists that Adrien/Alexia will be one of the boys, with some special privileges. “To you, I’m God,” he tells the men, adding that his son is therefore Jesus — but also, the audience knows, a kind of Madonna figure, carrying a miraculously conceived child. This is what I mean by high thematic ambition: “Titane” is a movie concerned with gender politics, metaphysics, the nature of love and a great deal more.It’s no wonder that those concerns don’t entirely cohere, given Ducournau’s furious sensationalism. The hectic, brutal intensity that drives the first part of the movie, before Alexia becomes Adrien, dissipates in the middle, as the narrative engine sputters. The pregnancy supplies some suspense, of course, but the situation becomes curiously static, and the provocations increasingly mechanical. For all its reckless style and velocity, “Titane” doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.TitaneRated R for sex and violence, in and with cars. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More