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      ‘My Little Pony: A New Generation’ Review: The Ponies Get Political

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      The latest entry in the children’s franchise pits an eclectic team of progressive ponies against a fear mongering demagogue and the prejudices of their communities at largeOut with the hand drawn-animated ponies, in with their creepily-anthropomorphized, digitally-animated brethren: the “new generation,” if you will, which includes not only ponies but Pegasi and unicorns from all over Equestria. This “My Little Pony” movie takes a contemporary spin on the franchise’s tot-friendly tenets of love and friendship by staging a political awakening about tolerance, prejudice, even fascism — sweetened, of course, with musical numbers, cutesy gags, and pastel vistas.In “My Little Pony: The Next Generation,” directed by Robert Cullen and José L. Ucha, earth ponies are anti-magic (read: anti-science) and prone to fear mongering. Except for our enlightened heroine, Sunny Starscout (Vanessa Hudgens), who crashes a demonstration led by, essentially, a defensive weapons manufacturer who profits from a community comically afraid of being attacked by other ponylike creatures.The panic is obviously unwarranted when a ditsy unicorn, Izzy (Kimiko Glenn), comes on the scene. Sunny whisks her new pal away to safety, unfolding a learning tour that shows just how silly and retrograde the beliefs cultivated by their separate communities about the not-so-scary “other” actually are.In search of sacred objects that might restore magic in Equestria, Sunny and Izzy assemble an eclectic team of progressive youngsters — including a tomboyish Pegasus and her social-media obsessed sister — while back in earth pony-land, Sprout (Ken Jeong), a crimson demagogue with a bleach-blonde mane, ascends to power.However generic (just this year, “Raya and the Last Dragon” depicted a similar treasure hunt geared toward bringing together diverse groups), the film’s messaging about unity and the need for a new generation to band together against misinformation and rabble rousing isn’t the worst thing. At the same time, parents might get a kick out of the film’s surprisingly unsubtle references to American politics — something to numb the pain of watching yet another “My Little Pony” movie, which the kiddies will demand whether you (or I) like it or not.My Little Pony: A New GenerationRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘I’m Your Man’ Review: Living Doll

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      Dan Stevens plays a dreamy, pleasure-driven android in this delightful near-future romance.“Your eyes are like two mountain lakes I could sink into” is a compliment most women would be disinclined to take umbrage at. But Alma (Maren Eggert) is not most women: A prickly scientist and cuneiform expert, she’s interested neither in flattery nor the man who’s delivering it. His name is Tom (Dan Stevens), he’s gorgeous, and he’s available. He is also a robot.Inspired by a short story by Emma Braslavsky, “I’m Your Man” is a cool and clever sci-fi love story. Alighting on weighty questions with disarming playfulness, the script (by the director, Maria Schrader, and Jan Schomburg) never overreaches. Alma is lonely, but not desperate; brisk, but not unromantic. (She sees poetry in the ancient texts she’s studying). So when she’s asked to test-run a synthetic soul mate in exchange for a donation to the Berlin museum where she works, she reluctantly agrees.More gentle and droll than joke-a-minute, “I’m Your Man” — like the excellent TV series “Humans” — muses over the barriers to human-android partnerships. Tom, like much of the internet, is algorithmically designed to give Alma increasing amounts of what she likes; yet her exasperation over these attentions is as confusing to her as to him. Flirting, we learn, is the most difficult skill to program, but adjusting for human cussedness must run a very close second.Edging now and then into the surreal, this unusual and tender little movie gingerly interrogates the gulf between digital and biological wiring. Stevens, speaking fluent German, is fabulous, giving the character unexpected depth and delicacy. Tom can quote Rilke and dance the rumba, whip up brunch and a rose-petal bath, but so what? He had me at those mountain lakes.I’m Your ManRated R for cross-life-form canoodling. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’ Review: A Cautionary Tale

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      The 1971 film “Death in Venice” showcased the delicate androgyny of Bjorn Andresen’s face and form, but the changes it wrought on his life are indelible.Almost 30 years ago I interviewed the onetime child actor Bill Mumy, who was about 40 by then. He had played Will Robinson on “Lost in Space” when he was a kid and was now enjoying a creatively prosperous adulthood. Which has not often been the case for child actors. Citing himself and Jodie Foster, he insisted that what made a difference for them was preparation — professional training at an early age.Growing up, Bjorn Andresen wanted to be a musician and spent time singing and playing. But his actual fate was something for which he could not have prepared: The film director Luchino Visconti hand-picked him to play Tadzio, the ravishing albeit inadvertent angel of death to Dirk Bogarde’s Aschenbach in Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice.”We meet Visconti early in this often spellbinding documentary directed by Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri. In archival footage, Visconti visits Stockholm. He says he’s been all over Europe looking for a teen boy who embodies the perfection of Mann’s vision. This pursuit would be considered very odd and possibly actionable today.Once he picked Bjorn — the audition reel in which he asks the then-15-year-old strip to the waist is unsettling — he was protective of him on set. However, after the movie’s premiere, and the director’s proclamation that Bjorn was “the most beautiful boy in the world,” it seemed as if nobody could, let alone would, shield him.Certainly not his grandmother, who, according to Andresen, “wanted a celebrity for a grandchild.” Andresen is in his sixties now, with long hair and a beard that camouflages his face. He often wears shades to obscure the eyes Visconti once rhapsodized over. Following Bjorn over the course of a year or so, the movie shows him continuing to act. He appears, memorably, in the 2019 film “Midsommar,” although you’d never associate Tadzio with that horror movie without studying its credits. In low-key sequences, he unpeels his personal tragedies. He explores the disappearance of his beloved mother, recounts the death of one of his own children and has a melancholy return to Tokyo, where, post “Death,” he had pop music stardom foisted on him.It was there that his “bashonen” (a Japanese word for the quality of a young man of androgynous beauty) was a rampant cultural sensation. One sees Bjorn/Tadzio’s face and hair, or some slight variant of it, in manga and anime to this day.Andresen’s determination to rise above misfortune, and his hopes for himself, make this movie less than a total tragedy. But it’s an often shudder-inducing cautionary tale.The Most Beautiful Boy in the WorldNot rated. In English, Swedish and Japanese with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘El Planeta’ Review: A Comedy of Austerity

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      In this dry Spanish comedy, a mother and daughter commit to grifting as a full-time job.“El Planeta” is a Spanish comedy of financial errors that opens with a negotiation. Leo, played by the film’s director, Amalia Ulman, is a fashion student who meets with a middle-aged man to discuss her sexual rather than sartorial services. Leo’s coffee date lays out his preferences and kinks, and she names her price. Her date laughs in response. In their city of Gijón, Spain, he explains, oral sex might go for a cool 20 euros, not the 500 euros she proposed. In “El Planeta,” not even sex work can fetch a living wage.After her failed attempt to earn an honest wage, Leo returns to the apartment she shares with her mother (played by Amalia’s real mother, Ale Ulman). There is no food in the fridge, no bills have been paid, and neither mother nor daughter has work. Instead, they get by through grifting, donning fur coats to dine at restaurants where they’ve run up unpayable tabs. Leo is conflicted, but her mother is cheerfully committed to the scam regardless of the consequences. She reasons that at least in prison, the food is always free.This is a dry comedy that elicits amused recognition rather than belly laughs, and Ulman, as a first-time feature director, makes canny decisions to set a wry tone. The movie was shot in black and white, and music is used sparingly. Even when Leo and her mother present an appearance of opulence, with bespoke gowns and designer T-shirts, they remain visually trapped in a world of austerity. Like its grifter characters, “El Planeta” signals luxury but it does not luxuriate, creating an experience that is more intellectually than sensually satisfying.El PlanetaNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘East of the Mountains’ Review: Heart Doctor Is a Lonely Hunter

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      Tom Skerritt delivers an unfaltering portrayal of a cardiologist who is ailing and grieving.Had the widower Ben Givens executed his plan early in “East of the Mountains,” it would have made for a very short movie. Instead, Ben (Tom Skerritt) reconsiders killing himself in the home he and his wife shared and decides to stage a hunting accident. With his sweet spaniel and a shotgun, Ben drives east, away from Seattle and away from his daughter (Mira Sorvino), who doesn’t know he has cancer, toward the land of his youth. Washington’s Columbia River basin is a vast terrain rife with shrub and grassland, apple orchards and memories.His plan may have been revised, but he remains resolute. Then his car engine blows. Ben is picked up by two young lovers. Their solicitousness is buzzy and heralds interactions that will alter Ben’s journey. Some are kindly. One proves nearly lethal.There’s a bit of Hemingway-like overdetermined white masculinity to Ben, whose calling as a doctor came during the Korean War. Thane Swigart’s script engages that quality and provides a couple of demographic observations. “It wasn’t this brown when you were growing up,” Anita (Annie Gonzalez), a veterinarian and veteran, says about the town of Ben’s childhood.Based on David Guterson’s novel of the same name, this engaging if familiar drama (directed by SJ Chiro) joins a growing number of movies about aging protagonists. Often, these films are rewarding not so much for their story as for the telling performance of an actor who spent his or her career elevating the surrounding ensembles. In a star’s turn, Skerritt reveals the tiniest fissures of vulnerability in his unfaltering portrayal of a cardiologist who is ailing and grieving — and fed up with both.East of the MountainsNot 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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      ‘The Starling’ Review: For the Birds

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      Melissa McCarthy stars in this film on Netflix that takes shortcuts, at nearly every turn, in portraying the messiness of acceptance.A soppy, facile look at grief, “The Starling” finds its protagonist coping with the death of her infant daughter — and a marriage that has faltered in its aftermath — with the aid of a flapping metaphor.Lilly (Melissa McCarthy) is a supermarket employee who has channeled her anguish over losing a child into compulsive snack-food stacking. Lilly’s husband, Jack (Chris O’Dowd), has been living in a psychiatric institution. And a starling has taken up residence by Lilly’s garden. It keeps swooping down and striking her in the head.Starlings, explains a doctor named Larry Fine (Kevin Kline) — yes, like the Three Stooges, Lilly notes — are not easily scared away. Eventually, Lilly will learn that the bird is out of her control. She simply has to live with it.To be fair, “The Starling,” directed in bland, undistinguished terms by Theodore Melfi (“Hidden Figures”), never suggests that mourning is as easy or rapid a process as coexisting with a bothersome yard guest. But it does, at nearly every turn, take shortcuts in portraying the messiness of acceptance. Larry is both a veterinarian and a former psychiatrist, a combination that allows Lilly to economize on office visits and the screenwriter, Matt Harris, to dispense unrelated bromides from one character. (Larry also commits what seems like an ethical violation by visiting Jack without Lilly’s knowledge.)Blatant product placement, unconvincing bird effects and awful soundtrack selections all undermine a potentially wrenching, difficult premise with utter bogusness.The StarlingRated PG-13. Grief and animal cruelty. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Village Detective: A Song Cycle’ Review: Soviet Film Hero Emerges

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      Bill Morrison, the poet laureate of lost films, turns the story of footage found near Iceland into a history of a slice of Soviet cinema.The main title of this movie could be referring to two different people. The first would be Fyodor Ivanovich Aniskin, the avuncular hero of a banal 1969 Soviet film, played by the frequently avuncular actor Mikhail Zharov. Consulting on a case in which a musician, new to his hamlet, complains of a purloined accordion, Aniskin notes that the man does not yet understand the values of their small town.The other “village detective” might be Bill Morrison himself. For Morrison, who is the producer, director and editor of this strangely intoxicating film, is a cinematic investigator of the first stripe. The values of his own corner of film revival place as much emphasis on ruin as on restoration. His astonishing 2017 feature, “Dawson City: Frozen Time,” unearthed an uncanny swatch of buried film history from the end of the line of the Klondike Gold Rush. Other films, like “Decasia” (2002), are audiovisual tone poems reveling in the beautiful rot of old reels in varying states of disrepair.Like “Frozen Time,” “The Village Detective” tells the story of a find. After a preface in which two films featuring Zharov, one from the 1930s and another from the early 1970s, conduct a kind of dialogue with each other, Morrison tells, in onscreen titles, of a 2016 email from a friend, the Icelandic musician and composer Johann Johannsson.On a trip home, Johannsson heard of an Icelandic lobster trawler catching a forgotten film canister in its net. We learn that the canister was picked up on the border of the tectonic plates that hold North America and Europe — the West abutting the East, so to speak. Underneath these plates is molten lava; the hydrogen sulfide emanating from that lava is a very high-quality preservative. Film preservationists in Iceland were practically salivating over the possibilities.What was found, and what we see, in mesmeric images transferred from celluloid that was steeped in mud, was the Soviet movie from 1969, “Derevensky Detektiv,” savaged by critics but a huge popular hit — so much so that Zharov continued to play Aniskin in sequels for the last decade of his career. He died in 1981 at the age of 82.As Morrison demonstrates through exhaustively selected clips, the actor’s story is also a, if not the, story of Soviet cinema. His film debut, as an extra, was in 1915, in a pre-Soviet film about Ivan the Terrible. He appeared in movies by important Soviet directors such as Boris Barnet and V.I. Pudovkin — and by many less important filmmakers. As he grew a bit stout in his thirties, he began to resemble the players of friendly-but-hapless supporting roles in American studio films. He’s got a touch of Alan Hale Sr., you could say.He did some of his best work in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible, Part II,” which got its director in hot water with Stalin. And when Zharov’s in-laws were imprisoned as part of the so-called “doctors’ plot” to assassinate Stalin (no such plot existed; the whole affair was an antisemitic fraud), Zharov was ostracized for not denouncing them.Morrison weaves this history into a treatment of Zharov’s 1969 star turn that renders its stodgy corniness poetic. (The accordion-centered score, by David Lang, is essential to this near-alchemical process.) The movie ends on a droll semi-cosmic joke that one expects its dedicatee, Johannsson, who died in 2018, might have appreciated.The Village Detective: A Song CycleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In English, with some Russian and Icelandic, subtitled. In theaters. More

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      Balanchine, the Teacher: ‘I Pushed Everybody’

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      He used to say he would be remembered more for his teaching than his ballets. The film “In Balanchine’s Classroom” provides a glimpse of that.The setting is a ballet class, and the year is 1974. George Balanchine throws up his arms in exasperation at the sight of a dancer executing a step incorrectly at the barre. We may not be able to see her, and what she’s doing wrong, but we feel how hard Balanchine is taking it. It’s not just his words — “that’s bad” — but the punctuation of his body, emphatic, agile, alive.His hands slap his thighs. He raises an arm like a stiff branch to show how far a leg should be raised. It’s not high; it’s parallel to the floor.“Go enough,” he says, before lifting it a couple of inches. “To go up later. See? ’Cause if you go high, you fall down.”His arm crashes down, hitting his leg. Then his zinger: “Newton’s Law.”The new film “In Balanchine’s Classroom,” directed by Connie Hochman, focuses on the teaching of the groundbreaking choreographer — and how it instilled his dances at New York City Ballet with articulate, musical brilliance. It’s both enthralling and heartbreaking. To love Balanchine is to love this film; to love this film is to love ballet, specifically Balanchine’s kind and his kind of dancer: daring, fast, strong, free, at one with the music. Each is different from the next. That mattered to him.“What do you see?” he says in a voice-over. “You see a person doing it. This person, not the other one. This particular person. This particular leg is lifted or neck is bent. I care about these people, you see.”Balanchine, right, working on “Bayou” in 1952.Sam Falk/The New York TimesBalanchine is irreplaceable. His ballets are still performed, most regularly by City Ballet, the company he formed with Lincoln Kirstein, but are they performed in the same way? It’s that question that makes the film heartbreaking. Each year since Balanchine’s death in 1983, his legacy has become more vulnerable. The pandemic sped that up.In many ways, “In Balanchine’s Classroom” is a call to action, an opportunity to study what he left behind: his teaching, which was the basis for all that followed. He not only revolutionized ballet, but he also made it reflect the feeling of the time while giving it a sense of timelessness.“I feel the sadness too,” said Hochman, a dancer who studied at the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet as a child in the 1960s. “But I like to always remember that Balanchine was such an optimist.”“He sometimes was pulling his hair out trying to get his point across,” she added, “but he just stuck with it because he really believed in his dancers and he loved them so much.”Since Hochman began work on the documentary more than 10 years ago, several of the dancers she interviewed, including Jacques d’Amboise, have died. Esteemed teachers like Suki Schorer, a former principal who started teaching at Balanchine’s request in the early 1960s and continues to do so at the School of American Ballet, are getting older. That the film preserves their voices, and many more, is invaluable. (Hochman is also building an archive of the dozens of dancers that she interviewed for the film. A selection of snippets is available online.)Merrill Ashley, a former principal who appears in the film, said that Balanchine used to say that he would be more remembered for his teaching than for his ballets. “I don’t think that’s happened, but I think it should happen,” she said in an interview. “And I think this will be an important tool to show the world how he taught, and that it was important to him. He was a teacher.”“I like to always remember that Balanchine was such an optimist,” Hochman said.Ernst Hass, via Zeitgeist FilmsAnd he didn’t teach through counts and imagery alone. What this film shows so lucidly is how his philosophy of movement lived inside of his body. Rare archival footage of him teaching and rehearsing show not only his speed and accuracy but the generosity of his own dancing body as he demonstrates what he wants. Balanchine is clear, but he’s not polite. He devours space.One of Hochman’s greatest challenges was to unearth film of Balanchine. The classroom material comes from Jerome Robbins and Christine Redpath, then a dancer in the company and now a repertory director. In diving into the digital collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Hochman combed metadata. If she found something with words like “‘rehearsal’” and “‘Balanchine works with dancer,’” she made a note of it.One chunk of material she found is exceptional: footage from a shoot for a 1981 TV production of “The Spellbound Child,” or “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,” set to Ravel. The rehearsal was filmed, which meant “hours and hours of Balanchine working on that ballet,” Hochman said. “They were making a blueprint of the path of the dancers and the camera angles. It was wonderful.”It’s a fantasy ballet, full of creatures and objects that come to life; Balanchine, who created the first version of it for the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in 1925, revived it in 1975 for City Ballet’s Ravel Festival. In one rehearsal, he asks a dancer if she “could run starting forever.” She isn’t sure what he means — who would be? — so he shows her, lunging on the floor and moving forward and back slightly as if he is about to take off but some invisible force keeps him from doing so.“Something like that,” he says.“What do you see?” Balanchine says in Hochman’s film. “You see a person doing it. This person, not the other one.”Zeitgeist FilmsBalanchine, here and in footage of class, is an energetic force: The film may be blurry or grainy, but his intention is not. “Did you see moths in your life?” he asks a group before taking off in a serpentine swoop as if it were suddenly a moonlit night. Whoosh! He is so fast, so urgent. It’s all the more mesmerizing in the digitized films of him teaching class, as flickering lights render him ghostly, otherworldly.“It’s so magical,” Hochman said. “But when you watch it, I think on a subliminal level, you feel that this just barely captured what happened, because dance evaporates — everything goes, but we just have this little hint. The deterioration actually adds to the meaning of it.”Why would a dancer who never took a class from Balanchine want to make a film about his teaching? Hochman, who went on to become a member of the Pennsylvania Ballet, loved class. And when Pennsylvania Ballet would perform in New York, Schorer, her former teacher, would come to see her dance.“I did a solo in ‘Raymonda Variations’ and Suki came backstage,” Hochman said. “She’s very spirited and very blunt, and she said: ‘It was lovely, Connie, but you don’t get it. It’s about opposition.’ And she started right there in the dressing room trying to get across to me what the variation was about. The Balanchine dancers knew something that I didn’t know. It was like a fog.”Balanchine was a surprise guest at a 1972 School of American Ballet rehearsal, with Hochman and Fernando Bujones.Virginia BrooksShe wanted to get to the bottom of it for herself. And even more important, she wanted to preserve the dancers’ perspectives on Balanchine and his training, and to show how Balanchine cherished his dancers’ individuality.Even if you never had the luxury of seeing the company when he was in charge (I depressingly did not), “In Balanchine’s Classroom” shows that he would stop at nothing to make dancers more precise, stronger, more musical and also more themselves. “I wanted to have a certain way of dancing,” he says in another voice-over. “I want to have clean dancers. So I pushed everybody.”Balanchine studied at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, Russia, starting at age 9. (He left the Soviet Union in 1924.) That classical training, Ashley said, is what he passed onto them. “When people say he’s not teaching classical ballet, that is just ludicrous,” she said. “He is going back to the very essence of what ballet was.”What happens when there is no one left to correct the myths? Ashley is not alone in worrying about his legacy as a teacher and about misconceptions surrounding some of his ideas: He wanted the hand to be rounded with the fingers separated like petals, but sometimes it ends up looking like a claw. And there’s a the notion that he didn’t want his dancers to put down any weight in their heels when they danced. What Balanchine actually wanted was for dancers to feel as though there was nothing more than a piece of onion skin between the heel and the floor. “A piece of paper, that’s it,” Ashley said. “Your heel can touch the floor, but your weight can’t be in the heel.”While City Ballet can still feel like a glorious bouquet — Balanchine used to say his dancers were like flowers that bloomed at different times to create a garden — it’s not hard to imagine that he could transform today’s dancers into something transcendent. “This is how I see it: He chose people with strong personalities that he enjoyed,” Hochman said. “The rigors of ballet technique could not squelch them.”A moment from Balanchine’s “Serenade,” as seen in “In Balanchine’s Classroom.”Zeitgeist FilmsHochman draws out some of those personalities: How did they become so devoted? What was the spark? There’s something particularly affecting in Heather Watts’s story. A free spirit from California, Watts, in an interview, said he used to call her his little flower child. She was something of a problem — “discipline was not my middle name,” she admits in the film — but he wouldn’t give up on her.One day, when she was late for a costume fitting, Balanchine told her it was her last chance. Around that time, she got to perform a lead role in “Serenade,” and after the performance, Balanchine delivered the words that shifted her focus: “You were good.”“In that moment,” Watts says in the film, “he becomes the only voice in my head that can guide me to what I most want.”Hochman shows Watts (and others, too) coaching younger dancers: passing on her knowledge that in a Balanchine ballet there is no such thing as safe. Sometimes Watts finds that the dancers she works with improve but then settle into a place of safety. “You have to keep going,” she said. “And that’s what he did with us.”Dancers today like to use the expression that choreography is in their bodies. To Watts, that means trouble. “You’re not dancing on the edge of a volcano,” she said. “And you’re not hanging on that note like your life depended on it.”She thinks about the role of Dewdrop in “The Nutcracker.” In it, Balanchine challenged her to run as fast as she could, to bend as much as possible and to fly — to not touch the ground.“He dared me not to touch the ground,” Watts said. “That’s exhilarating. That’s an exhilarating dare.” More