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      ‘The Big Scary ‘S’ Word’ Review: Socialism for Beginners

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      This documentary serves up the merits of socialism with a stuffed compendium of formulations from experts, historical precedents and just-folks testimonials.The word “socialism” is often used as a boogeyman to scare voters, with little or no reference to actual substance. Enter Yael Bridge’s “Big Scary ‘S’ Word,” a stuffed compendium of formulations from experts, historical precedents and just-folks testimonials. Hope is not a policy, as the saying goes, so Bridge gamely tries to provide both, fleshing out ideals with examples.The (crowded) talking heads posit socialism as a democratic and equitable way of running our world. The touchstones include leaders such as Eugene V. Debs, the Milwaukee mayor Frank Zeidler, and yes, Bernie Sanders; as well as empowering endeavors like the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry in Cleveland, Ohio, and the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.The film’s humble sampling of socialism on the march might be a revelation to viewers accustomed to red-baiting or egghead stereotypes. In Oklahoma, a single-mom schoolteacher joins a strike, while a socialist legislator treads a lonely path in Virginia’s fusty State Assembly, where lobbyists close ranks with well-off politicians.But it’s just as hard to shake the struggling construction worker who opens the film: To him, it feels like there’s a war on. The man’s off-the-cuff eloquence suggests that Bridge’s dutiful approach could use the boost of companion viewing — perhaps Raoul Peck’s coruscating analysis of imperialism, “Exterminate All the Brutes.” (Cornel West does bring on some fire in declaring that capitalism’s industrial revolutions occurred alongside the labor of the enslaved and the vast displacement of Indigenous peoples.)With its alternate ideas for addressing urgent societal and economic needs, Bridge’s educational documentary helps envision other ways of getting things done, at a time when there’s ever more that needs doing.The Big Scary ‘S’ WordNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 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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      ‘Wild Indian’ Review: Reckoning With the Past to Save the Present

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      This drama from Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. captures the various wounds of individual, familial and generational trauma.“Some time ago, there was an Ojibwe man, who got a little sick and wandered West,” the intertitle at the start of “Wild Indian” states. The camera finds a man stooped and slowly making his way through the woods and follows him for a spell. “Little” is an understatement: His face is covered with pox blisters. This more-than-cautionary note sets the tone for the First Nations writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s symbolically rich and subtle thriller focused on two cousins who share a secret about a rending act of violence.As boys on a Wisconsin reservation, the cousins, Makwa and Teddo, have lives that are different by degrees. While Makwa’s home is far more brutal, both boys live in poverty, with empty beer bottles crowding tabletops. Teddo’s folks seem absent. Makwa’s are viciously present. The arbitrary violence endured by Makwa doesn’t make sense until a priest at the boys’ school delivers a homily. He tells his young audience that it was the story of Cain and Abel, with its lessons in suffering and worthiness, that “introduced resentment into the world.”After a defining incident in the woods, the cousins’ paths diverge. Teddo (a sympathetic Chaske Spencer) spends decades in and out of prison. “What happened to your face?” his sister (Lisa Cromarty) asks with touching sorrow when she sees the paw print tattoo across his cheek after he’s been released.The first time we see the adult Makwa, he’s setting up a shot on a golf course. Played by Michael Greyeyes, he has a chiseled beauty. He has done well in California. He has a corporate gig (with Jesse Eisenberg giving a fidgety performance as his boss), a loving wife (Kate Bosworth), a dark-haired toddler and an apartment with gallery-size walls, the better to display Native-themed artwork. He now goes by Michael. The transit from cherubic-faced Makwa to an emptied soul to a corporate striver who leverages his Indigenous identity appears complete — although a disturbing encounter at a strip club underscores that Michael is still writing his history of violence.As for Teddo, much took place while he was incarcerated: His mother died; his nephew was born; life and loss went on. It’s no surprise he’s coiled and angry. Still, he nearly lets his ache for vengeance recede. Nearly. Teddo asks after Makwa and tracks him down. It takes a nimble and deft compassion to capture the various wounds of individual, familial and generational trauma. What Corbine does with the cousins’ inevitable reuniting teases his film’s doleful prologue and the priest’s Sunday sermon. The ensuing violence and its aftermath are chilling, woeful and utterly consistent with the tragedy that began long before a fateful afternoon in the woods.Wild IndianNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 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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      ‘Worth’ Review: Appraising Lives

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      This drama starring Michael Keaton is a surprisingly effective movie about a tricky subject — the creation of the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund.The central question of “Worth” is whether it’s possible to reduce a life to a dollar value. The film, directed by Sara Colangelo (the American remake of “The Kindergarten Teacher”), dramatizes the creation of the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which the federal government established after the attacks to limit lawsuits against the airlines. The lawsuits’ downstream effects, the reasoning went, could sink the United States economy.“Worth” follows Kenneth R. Feinberg (an excellent, Boston-accented Michael Keaton), the lawyer appointed as the special master of the fund, through the two-year process of defining the project’s parameters and of getting potential plaintiffs to sign on.Notwithstanding skepticism from others, including Camille Biros (Amy Ryan), the business manager of Feinberg’s firm, it takes some time for the film’s Feinberg to understand he has underestimated the grief of the bereaved. Cold and imperious, he barely gets a word in at his first town hall with the victims. He discovers he won’t be able to farm out every interview or clerical assignment. A man who shuts out the world by listening to opera on headphones, he will have to leave his rarefied comfort zone.Even assessing “Worth” as entertainment feels fraught. Only survivors can judge whether its Hollywoodized simplifications are appropriate. The screenplay, by Max Borenstein, substantially funnels the breadth of criticism directed at Feinberg into the character of Charles Wolf (a superb Stanley Tucci), who, as he did in real life, runs a website demanding fixes to the fund. The other potential beneficiaries are composites. Laura Benanti plays a firefighter’s wife whose husband left more obligations than she knew. Andy Schneeflock appears as a man whose same-sex partner died in the Pentagon attack. The deceased’s parents and Virginia law don’t recognize the relationship.With most characters standing in for swaths of people who didn’t fit Feinberg’s formulations, “Worth” itself risks reducing individuals to types. Still, it’s probably impossible to make a mainstream movie without such streamlining, let alone to make a movie like “Worth,” on a subject that is not only challenging but superficially too technocratic for a two-hour movie. There are not many classic films about heroic legal settlements.For all the ways in which it might give short shrift to the politics or policy of the fund, “Worth” is uncommonly moving by the standards of biopics and certainly by the standards of movies that risk addressing 9/11 so overtly. Colangelo directs with what appears to be conscious restraint, in ways by turns calculated and powerful. She keeps the faces of figures who will die in the attacks just out of view as they leave their spouses for work the morning of Sept. 11. She doesn’t re-create images of the burning towers except in a reflection in Feinberg’s train window. A lengthy pan gradually reveals the size of a wall of missing-persons posters.The principal performances are uniformly strong, even with actors who do not resemble their real-life counterparts. Is it possible to reduce such complexities to an absorbing procedural? “Worth” argues yes.WorthRated PG-13. Trauma from the attacks. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Year of the Everlasting Storm’ Review: Home Movies

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      Seven directors present their views of the year of pandemic lockdown, but most fall into predictable territory.You can’t blame filmmakers for keeping busy during lockdown. The omnibus film “The Year of the Everlasting Storm” assembles pandemic-made shorts from around the globe. But with just two decent segments out of seven, this anthology uncannily replicates the sensation of feeling trapped.The highlights come first and last. Iran’s Jafar Panahi, who has dealt with the restrictions of filming at home before (he made his extraordinary “This Is Not a Film” in his apartment, defying a moviemaking ban), delivers a sweet, minor document of a cautious visit by his mother, who arrives wearing what looks like full hazmat gear. She video chats with her granddaughter (spritzing the phone with sanitizer first) and negotiates an accord with Panahi’s pet iguana, Iggy.From Thailand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”) closes out the feature with a nonnarrative short that intermingles the reverberations of tube lights and the buzzing of insects. Weerasethakul recorded the sound himself, and at a point the bugs’ fluttering seems to merge with scratchy spoken words.The other segments fall into more predictable territory. Anthony Chen (“Wet Season”), whose chapter is set in China, follows two parents and their young son as stir craziness sets in. In California, Malik Vitthal (“Body Cam”) mixes media, using camera phone footage and animation for a short documentary in which the coronavirus complicates an already complicated custody situation. The Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor (“Too Late to Die Young”) and the American David Lowery (“The Green Knight”) barely make impressions.And Laura Poitras (the Edward Snowden doc “Citizenfour”), working with the London-based research group Forensic Architecture, conjures a paranoia-suffused atmosphere as she shares highlights from an investigation into an Israeli cyberweapons manufacturer. But the brief running time does not allow for sufficient context.The Year of the Everlasting StormNot rated. In Persian, Mandarin, English, Spanish and Thai, with subtitles Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James’ Review: A Very Kinky Guy

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      A new documentary explores the serious artistry behind this “punk-funk” legend’s outlandish persona.The main title of this Sacha Jenkins-directed documentary derives from a sketch on Dave Chappelle’s still-mourned former show on Comedy Central. He regularly reenacted anecdotes told by the comic Charlie Murphy; in one of these, the funk renegade Rick James did some obscene blustering at a bar before announcing “I’m Rick James, bitch!” The sketch resulted in new visibility for James while also making him a cartoon.But then again, James’s outlandishness constituted the through-line of his visible career. This film strives to make the case for James as a serious artist, a social commentator and funk innovator who never got his due.To this end, the movie spends substantial time on James’s roots in Buffalo, N.Y. The contemporary rap artist Conway, also a Buffalo native, speaks of the miserable segregation of the city. James’s enlistment in the Navy in the early 1960s could be seen as a desperate bid to escape his origins. It was an unsatisfactory one. Going AWOL, he landed in Toronto and formed several musical alliances, among them an R&B inflected band with Neil Young that picked up many stylistic cues from the Rolling Stones. James was the lead singer and more than one interviewee from this time says he consciously imitated Mick Jagger.The period in which James’s woodshedding and partying achieved détente led to “punk funk” hits in the late ’70s. One interviewee insists on a distinction between the frat appeal of “Super Freak” and the deeply felt anger of “Ghetto Life.” But James’s vices soon overwhelmed his art and destroyed his character. MC Hammer’s sampling of “Super Freak” in the early 90s led to a windfall for James, which in turn was vacuumed up by his appetites. Despite a stint in prison and various stabs at sobriety, he died in 2004, an active user.The movie wants the viewer to believe that James didn’t have it easy — and he didn’t. But it can’t skate over the aberrant actions that led to his imprisonment. “Bitchin’” is fascinating and troubling viewing.Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick JamesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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      ‘Yakuza Princess’ Review: Crime, Amnesia and Ancient Swords

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      This mayhem-filled film from Brazil has no higher function beyond its beheadings.You know this movie isn’t kidding around from its opening scene. Set in Osaka “20 years ago,” the blue-tinted sequence depicts a solemn ceremony broken up by bloody gun assassinations, culminating with a young boy taking a bullet in the back of his neck. So when I say “isn’t kidding around,” what I mean is “wants to impress you with the crass opportunism of its violence.”Based on a graphic novel, “Yakuza Princess” is not a Japanese film; it’s a Brazilian one. The director is Vicente Amorim and the graphic novel, called “Samurai Shiro,” is by Danilo Beyruth. Much of the action takes place in São Paulo, which has one of the largest Japanese expatriate communities in the world. The Japanese pop musician Masumi (who never appears at all comfortable in her role) plays Akemi, who is newly 21 in that Brazilian city and living an ordinary life.At the same time, in Osaka, the Yakuza soldier Takeshi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) is on a hunt that involves him blowing people’s brains out. Back in São Paulo, a hospitalized amnesiac white man breaks out of his medical situation, taking a very shiny (and noisy) ancient sword with him. (The character is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, his face scarred up like Karloff’s version of Frankenstein’s monster.)It seems inevitable that this group must somehow form a family. OK, not that, but yes, their paths intersect because — of course — Akemi was the sole survivor of that opening massacre. And Takeshi was somehow related and … well, it’s all pretty complicated and not terribly relevant, because fraught chases, frantic fights and various beheadings are really what the movie is all about.The cynical pro forma luridness “Yakuza Princess” grinds out suggests that sensationalist cinema, or at least its most ostensibly mainstream iteration, is currently depleted of resources.Yakuza PrincessRated R for oodles and oodles of violence. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Faya Dayi’ Review: A Dream State

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      Jessica Beshir’s debut feature settles into a trance-like flow.Shot in a rural Ethiopian town, the tone poem “Faya Dayi” settles into a trance-like flow. We watch men and occasionally women musing to one another — about their dreams for the future or about distant lovers, mothers and fathers — but the feel is dreamlike, like a falling dusk, even when the concerns are concrete.Some of that comes from the local importance of khat — an addictive leaf that induces altered states when chewed (variously euphoric and melancholic). But while many are shown harvesting, warehousing, or otherwise touched by the crop, not everyone is under its influence. The documentary’s mystical sensation, after all, springs from choices by the director, Jessica Beshir, particularly the allusive style and monochrome black-and-white photography.Beshir left Ethiopia as a teenager and, returning as an adult to see family, she was struck by khat’s dominance. Also the cinematographer and producer, she flouts common vérité approaches in mapping out the changed community. Ritual objects and dramatic fragments — two kids bathing, a scuffle over emigrating, a madeleine-like musing on coffee — hold center stage more than bright narrative threads. The smoky texture of the images led me to think of her technique as a kind of sfumato: shading in and out of moods of presence, absence and longing.A voice-over recalls the Sufi tale about seeking eternal life (a nod to the spiritual role of khat). Unifying this elliptical canvas is the sense of a contemplative search, which can also mean an escape from an altered homeland, perhaps to dull what feels lost.Faya DayiNot rated. In Amharic, Harari, and Oromo with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Memory House’ Review: Seeking a Niche Between Present and Past

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      An Indigenous worker in Brazil finds a surreal portal of sorts to the culture of his forebears.While I don’t exactly agree that the worst of times generate the most compelling art, political turmoil can certainly inspire some of the angriest work. Case in point: the recent surge of class-conscious films by a number of Brazilian directors, such as Kleber Mendonça Filho (“Bacurau”), responding to the government’s austerity policies and its willful neglect of the country’s cultural heritage.“Memory House,” by the filmmaker João Paulo Miranda Maria, follows suit in somber and surreal fashion, pitting an aging Indigenous Black man from the rural North against the xenophobic inhabitants of an Austrian enclave in the South.Captured by the cinematographer Benjamin Echazarreta in menacing slow zooms and long, contemplative shots, the film follows Cristovam (the renowned actor Antônio Pitanga), an unfortunate outsider toiling away in a sterile-white milk factory where the employees are overtly likened to the livestock.Stoically withstanding an onslaught of racist encounters — the most devastating of which involves the killing of his three-legged pet dog by a group of white teenagers — Cristovam stumbles upon an abandoned house filled with folkloric relics of his cultural past, which prompt jarring hallucinations that occasionally have violent consequences.Better as a mood piece than a political statement, “Memory House” superficially nods to the bloviating politicians and coldblooded capitalists who dictate the lives of people like Cristovam. As he reconnects with his roots, eventually donning a full bull costume in an act of spiritual reclamation, his white neighbors take on an increasingly homogeneous appearance, suggesting an authoritarian hereafter.Trapped in a hopelessly alienating world, Cristovam would rather buck than surrender; a fatal end would seem inevitable, but wisely, Miranda Maria pulls back the reins with a glimpse of empathy that teases a potential way forward.Memory HouseNot rated. In Portuguese and German, with subtitles. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More