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      ‘Little Girl’ Review: Growing Up and Seeking Peace

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      This sensitive documentary by the French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz naturalistically explores the struggles of a 7-year-old transgender girl.“Little Girl,” the French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz’s disarmingly sensitive documentary about a 7-year-old transgender girl, understands the power of close-ups. The camera often lingers on the face of our fledgling protagonist, Sasha, not to gawk at her appearance, but to challenge whatever moralizing preconceptions one might have with emotion laid devastatingly bare.One could easily mistake “Little Girl” for a fictional drama that tends toward observation and realism. Lifshitz follows Sasha and her family over the course of roughly a year, homing in on her mannerisms and means of play with naturalistic camerawork that heightens the idyllic splendor of rural France, while framing her home life as a kind of safe haven away from the cruelties of the outside world. Beautiful as it may be, the French countryside remains a stronghold of rigidly traditional values.Sasha’s mother, Karine, often takes the spotlight: We see her struggle to convince dismissive school administrators to correctly identify Sasha as a girl and, in direct interviews, witness the emotional toll of such perpetually thwarted efforts as she verbalizes her frustrations and insecurities.There are no rubbernecking, pity-provoking scenes of Sasha being bullied or spurned; perhaps more affecting are the images we do see: Sasha miming the movements of a girl in her ballet class, delighting in what it feels like to move her hands with feminine softness and grace.In conversation with a psychiatrist, Sasha hesitates to respond to a question about her treatment at school. But the proof is in her face, which twists, flits and goes blank before capitulating to tears. It’s in simple moments like these that Lifshitz invites us to consider Sasha’s feelings: the stark reality of her despair, the depth of which only images can communicate, asking us to reconsider what exactly is fueling our ideological fights.Little GirlNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Max Harwood Steps Up in 'Everybody's Talking About Jamie'

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      Two years ago, Max Harwood made a video in his bedroom.A second-year student at a musical theater school in London, he introduced himself and said where he was from. He talked about how, as a child, he would don a bouffant wig and perform Rizzo’s songs from “Grease,” making his grandmother laugh so hard that she nearly wet herself.That minute-long video was Harwood’s first audition for the movie “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” an adaptation of the sparkly West End musical about a teenager in the north of England with dreams of being a drag queen. Seeking new talent, the producers held an open call, which yielded thousands of tapes. Jonathan Butterell, the film’s director, watched nearly all of them, and Harwood’s stood out immediately.“He had this kind of magic about him,” Butterell recalled. “He is fabulous without being arrogant.” He called Harwood back six more times, for dance calls, for recording sessions, for chemistry reads, for drag challenges. The magic didn’t fade.So now Harwood — who had no professional credits, couldn’t get into a first-class drama school and had been told that he should aim for ensemble parts — is filling some very high-heeled shoes. His ice-blonde crop and princeling looks occupy nearly every frame of “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” which premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday.“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood, 23, said on a recent evening while lolling on a sofa at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York. “This is who I am.”“I’ve had a process with this film where I’ve stepped into my queerness and my comfortability,” Harwood said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHarwood had arrived in the city the previous day, driving in from the Hamptons on a whistle-stop press tour for the film. The tour had taken him across America — which, mid-pandemic, mostly meant airports and hotels. He has louche, generous features, the outsize eyes of a startled deer and an unforced warmth. He wore a spotted T-shirt. And if his Converse sneakers lacked the pizazz of the glittery heels that Jamie covets, they did have platform soles. He carries himself like the dancer he trained to be, which makes him seem taller than 5 feet 10 inches.He grew up in Basingstoke, a town in south central England without a professional theater company. He knew he wanted to act, even if the drama schools that he applied to didn’t see it the same way. But his local theater society gave him a scholarship for a one-year course at the Guildford School of Acting. The teachers there weren’t entirely encouraging.“I was told that if I wanted to do musical theater, because of how I looked, I would be typically cast in the ensemble, and I needed to get my dancing up,” Harwood said. What exactly was wrong with his looks? “I’m not, like, the strapping leading man.”A scene from the film, an adaptation of the stage musical about an English teenager with dreams of being a drag performer.John Rogers/Amazon StudiosHe was directed to the Urdang Academy, a musical theater training program in London. Although he enjoyed the classes, he struggled there. He wanted to stand out, and the work of an ensemble member, who has to look and dance just like everybody else, never suited him. He wasn’t supposed to audition during the program, but he had seen “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” onstage, and had loved the sight of a story centered around a young gay man that didn’t depend on trauma.“He didn’t die at the end,” Harwood said. “He wasn’t comic relief. He didn’t come in for two scenes to be the gay best friend. And that was really nice.”So, when a friend told him about the open call for the movie, he put himself on tape. During the months of auditions that followed, he kept up with his schoolwork and his part-time job as a supervisor at a sneaker store. He never really thought that Butterell and the producers would cast him, but when he was called back for a day that involved a full drag makeup test, he let himself dream.Butterell had conceived the musical after watching the BBC documentary “Jamie: Drag Queen at 16,” which followed Jamie Campbell, an English teenager who wanted to wear a dress to prom. “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” opened in Sheffield, in the north of England, and quickly transferred to the West End in London. In The New York Times, the critic Ben Brantley called that production a “determinedly inspirational show.”In adapting the musical for the screen, Butterell and the other creators, the writer Tom MacRae and the composer Dan Gillespie Sells, didn’t want a strapping leading man to play Jamie. “Because what’s radical about Jamie is the fact that you’ve got an authentically effeminate male hero,” Gillespie Sells said in a phone interview. “That’s something you don’t see very often.”The creators saw it in Harwood. When Butterell told him that he had the part, Harwood screamed, swore and asked if he could call his mother.“Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” isn’t a coming out story; Jamie is out already. Instead it’s a tale of stepping confidently into your identity, in appropriately glamorous footwear. Jamie’s story isn’t really Harwood’s. Though Harwood liked playing dress-up, he never felt compelled to perform drag. But then again, maybe it’s everyone’s story: Doesn’t everyone want to be seen for who they really are?The dancing came easily to Harwood, and so did the songs, which are mostly pop- and R&B-inflected. Gillespie Sells praised his voice: “It was exactly that thing, that very pure, young male, perfect pop voice that was so good for Jamie because Jamie is pop personified. Everything about him is bright and hopeful.”Harwood didn’t always feel hopeful. Butterell, however, never doubted him. Neither did his colleagues, including Richard E. Grant, who gives a moving performance as Jamie’s drag mother. “He looks very young, sings and dances to the manner born, is emotionally open and giving, instantly likable, and of course, has talent by the bucket load,” Grant wrote of Harwood in an email.“I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” Harwood said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut there were moments — such as a scene between Jamie and his best friend, Pritti (Lauren Patel) — when Harwood worried whether he could deliver the right performance. He felt frightened. He felt vulnerable. Butterell took him aside and told him to breathe. Maybe in these moments Jamie felt vulnerable, too, Butterell suggested.The day they shot Jamie’s drag performance was even more anxiety-inducing, but Jamie Campbell, the musical’s inspiration, happened to be on set that day. “And I said to Jamie, ‘I’m so scared, I’m so scared,’” Harwood recalled. “And he was like: ‘You’re in exactly the right place. And if you weren’t in that place, you would not be human.’”So Harwood’s anxiety became Jamie’s anxiety, which layers the musical’s sequins and chiffon with a febrile authenticity. If the film is about Jamie coming into his own, it’s also about Harwood doing the same. “Max went on a similar journey to what Jamie’s going through,” Butterell said. “Max went looking for who he was in this. Where Max and Jamie meet is in this duality of sheer joy and the fear that you have to step through to maintain that joy.”Starring in a movie musical as your first professional gig is one more joy. But even a decade ago, young queer actors might have fretted about being birthed into the industry in a role like Jamie, because it could lead to a typecast future. That doesn’t bother Harwood. He believes in Jamie’s story, which he describes as “a little beacon of light and hope and joy.”Sprawled on that couch in New York, he said that story, however universal, is only one story — and queer youth deserve more. “I’m really happy to be a voice for my community,” he said. “But there are so many more stories to be told.” More

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      ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ Review: Fall From Grace

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      Tammy Faye Bakker gets the celebrity biopic treatment in a new movie starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield.If you were watching television in America in the 1970s and ’80s — the old three-network days that now seem as distant as the horse-and-buggy era — you could hardly miss Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Upbeat evangelists with the upper Midwest in their voices, they helped expand Christian broadcasting from a niche into an empire via their PTL satellite network.Even if you missed them in their prime, you couldn’t avoid the spectacle of their downfall — an end-of-the-80s tabloid scandal involving adultery, hypocrisy and financial shenanigans. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud and sentenced to federal prison. His wife (who had divorced him a few years later) was razzed by talk-show hosts and standup comedians across the land for her gaudy makeup, her big hair and her full-throated singing voice.“The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” directed by Michael Showalter from a script by Abe Sylvia, tells this story dutifully, following the familiar showbiz biopic sequence of rise, ruin and redemption. We start out in Eisenhower-era Minnesota, where Tammy Faye (Jessica Chastain) grows up in the shadow of a pious, unsmiling mother (Cherry Jones). When she meets Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) at Bible college, it seems like a providential match.Jim preaches a version of the prosperity gospel, insisting to his flock that God wants them to be rich. This optimism, and the worldly ambition that comes with it, appeal to Tammy. A natural performer onstage (and later, on camera), she brings maternal warmth, wholesome sex appeal and relentless good cheer to their itinerant ministry. And puppets, too.Showalter’s film shares its title and its plot with a 2000 documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, and also sympathy for its subject. Tammy Faye (who died in 2007) may have been an over-the-top spendthrift and an exhausting media personality, but she was also, these movies insist, sincere in her faith and generous in her view of humanity. Unlike the reverends Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds), powerful allies of her husband, she resisted mixing religion and politics, and defied their anti-feminist, anti-gay culture-war ideology.The documentary version, which includes voice-over narration by RuPaul, understands Tammy Faye as a camp figure, earning both sympathy and ridicule, and emerging with a measure of dignity intact. Showalter and his cast lack the style and the nerve to convey either the wildness of the character and her milieu or the pathos of her story.The narrative beats — Tammy Faye’s temptation (in the presence of a hunky record producer played by Mark Wystrach), Jim’s betrayal, Falwell’s treachery — seem almost generic. The performances, while hardly subtle, feel smaller than life. Garfield mugs and emotes with sketch-comedy abandon, and while Chastain tries for more depth and nuance, she is trapped by a literal-minded script and overwhelmed by hair, makeup and garish period costumes.The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.The Eyes of Tammy FayeRated PG-13. A handful of commandments violated. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Name Is Pauli Murray’ Review: Ahead of the Times

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      The pioneering legal thinker influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But this documentary by the filmmakers behind “RBG” misses the mark.“My Name Is Pauli Murray,” the plainly pedagogical documentary by the filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, hinges on the audience not knowing who Murray was: an activist, writer, attorney and priest. The easier to wow us with the onslaught of information, which rightfully situates Murray — a Black, gender nonconforming intellectual who died in 1985 — as a thinker ahead of the times.As the first African American student to receive a doctorate from Yale Law School, Murray was a civil rights trailblazer, and an early architect of the idea that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment should guarantee not just racial but gender equality. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the film’s many talking heads, explicitly cites Murray in one of her related Supreme Court opinions. Also touted is Murray’s refusal to sit at the back of the bus 15 years before Rosa Parks captured national attention by doing the same.Indeed, Murray’s story is a remarkable — and extensive — one that the filmmakers stuff into an hour and a half that feels like a dull and disorganized PowerPoint lecture.Murray was also a prolific writer who left behind troves of letters, diaries, poems and manuscripts detailing personal struggles with institutional rejection on the basis of gender or race (or often both) as well as romantic relationships with women. West and Cohen attempt to humanize their subject via these documents, but the effect feels cheesy and hollow, in no small part because of the overabundance of material. Along with audio recordings of Murray, the sound of a clacking typewriter is prominent and Murray’s cursive handwriting often floats across the screen.In “My Name is Pauli,” the filmmakers touch on more compelling themes than in their Ginsburg hagiography, “RBG,” by singling out a figure whose life and work reminds us that more complex and fluid understandings of race and gender are not strictly modern phenomena. But the result feels an awful lot like an illustrated textbook.My Name Is Pauli MurrayRated PG-13. 20th-century cruelty. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Mad Women’s Ball’ Review: A Shock Within the System

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      The French actor-director Mélanie Laurent delivers a feminist melodrama about the abuses of a Paris hospital in the 19th century.In its opening moments, “The Mad Women’s Ball” slowly focuses on the nape of a woman’s neck and the swirl of her hair pinned in a bun. It is an image that may recall Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Here it confirms that the director Mélanie Laurent’s drama — set in Paris in the late 1800s and based on a novel by Victoria Mas — will indeed touch on horrors.The daughter of a status-driven father, Eugénie (Lou de Laâge) appears haunted by spirits. Talking with her grandmother or readying for bed, she’ll begin rapidly breathing, trembling, staring at something that no one else sees. She also tends to speak her mind. To the heartbreak of her loving brother (Benjamin Voisin), Eugénie is committed by her father to the asylum where a diagnosis of hysteria has become all the rage. The soiree of the title was an actual event thrown at the Salpêtrière hospital during the tenure of the famed neurologist, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot.Depicted here, the gathering is as grotesque as one might fear. It is also a high point in the patients’ comradeship. Eugénie becomes a catalyst, nudging the head nurse, Geneviève (portrayed by Laurent), toward doubts about the ethics of her beloved institution.Laurent has made an elegant if overheated melodrama that amplifies the villainy of Charcot and his colleagues (one proves particularly appalling) to underscore how male-centered the medical establishment was — and is. A feminist work, “The Mad Women’s Ball” grapples, too, with the ways women can be complicit. Emmanuelle Bercot does chilly work as Jeanne, the nurse Charcot calls on to manage Eugénie’s solitary confinement. Move over, Nurse Ratched.The Mad Women’s BallNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      ‘The Nowhere Inn’ Review: Personalities, Disordered

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      This meta exercise, starring and written by St. Vincent and Carrie Brownstein, proves its point by not having a point.A hall of mirrors reflecting not terribly much, “The Nowhere Inn,” directed by Bill Benz, is an in-joke perpetrated by the singer Annie Clark, who performs as St. Vincent, and her friend and fellow musician Carrie Brownstein. The pair wrote it together and star as versions of themselves.After a prologue in which Clark’s limo driver obnoxiously professes ignorance of who Clark is (“Don’t worry, we’ll find out who you are,” he promises), the bulk of “The Nowhere Inn” unfolds as a drama about the making of a documentary, apparently never completed.Brownstein is directing a backstage portrait with the aim of depicting Clark as she really is. But Brownstein isn’t a seasoned documentarian (she does an internet search for “best documentaries”), and Clark’s offstage remarks (“I don’t even like to dress a salad, you know? I’m like, I want to taste the vegetables”) are completely uninteresting.Brownstein encourages Clark to “heighten” her camera presence, which causes Clark to bring on a girlfriend (Dakota Johnson, likewise playing herself or “herself”). When Clark becomes increasingly mean, and her efforts to control the documentary more assertive, Brownstein strives to make her relatable again.Formally lively, “The Nowhere Inn” is a true meta exercise in the sense that the more derivative and self-conscious its conceptual gambits seem (stick around: The reflexivity continues after the end credits), the more it proves its ostensible point: that Clark, or her constructed persona, is less intriguing than her music and how she performs it. Fittingly, the movie most comes to life when she’s shown singing.The Nowhere InnNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 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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      ‘Prisoners of the Ghostland’ Review: Going Nuclear

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      If the combination of Nicolas Cage and the director Sion Sono suggests a special kind of lunacy, this sunbaked samurai western more than delivers.With hindsight, we should have known that a collaboration between Nicolas Cage and the dashingly eccentric Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono was only a matter of time. Yet now that “Prisoners of the Ghostland” is here, it seems equally apparent that doubling the weirdness can, for the audience, produce ten times the head-scratching.The partnership should have been sublime. And maybe if Sono had written the script himself (as he often does, perhaps most movingly in his 2011 treatise on upskirt photography, “Love Exposure”), this sunbaked samurai western might have made a lick of sense. As it is, Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai’s story is so busily demented that Cage seems at times uncharacteristically muffled. To play Hero, a reprobate tasked by a white-suited warlord (Bill Moseley) to retrieve the warlord’s missing granddaughter (a persuasive Sofia Boutella), Cage spends most of the movie in a leather suit studded with strategically placed explosives. Should Hero harbor impure thoughts toward his quarry, his gonads will be goners.Crammed with mugging extras and chanting geishas, scrabbling mutants and ambulant mannequins, “Prisoners” can slide in an instant from haunting (a disfiguring mask slowly peeling from a woman’s face) to circuslike. Sono’s visuals, sizzlingly realized by the cinematographer Sohei Tanikawa, lack neither brio nor imagination. But the ludicrousness of the plot severs any emotional connection to a story whose apocalyptic stylings (the Ghostland of the title is a nuclear wasteland) gesture toward Japan and America’s painful history. In light of which, Hero’s eventual sacrifice of a single testicle seems an entirely negligible forfeit.Prisoners of the GhostlandNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Los Últimos Frikis’ Review: Keep On Rocking in Cuba

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      The hook of this documentary is the spectacle of a revolutionary government that can’t abide the rebellion of rock without bureaucratic oversight.In the 1990s Diony Arce, lead singer of the Cuban heavy metal group Zeus, was jailed for six years. That act of repression raises the stakes in Nicholas Brennan’s scrappy film “Los Últimos Frikis” and makes it more than your average documentary about middle-aged rockers attempting a comeback.Treated differently, the movie could be straight-faced satire. Zeus formed in the 1980s when rockers like Arce were persecuted as dissenters supporting a capitalist musical form, but today the Cuban Ministry of Culture has an Agency of Rock that keeps bands on the payroll and tours them around the island. Brennan joins Arce and his bandmates as they thrash to small moshing crowds across the nation (assuming the stage setup isn’t in shambles when they arrive) and rage against the hegemony of corporate reggaeton.Home sequences with the five band members’ families indulge my soft spot for seeing loved ones doting on their pet rockers. Most of these “frikis” (freaks) seem well-adjusted, taking on other work to pay the bills. But the film’s enduring hook is the spectacle of a self-proclaimed revolutionary government that can’t abide the rebellion of rock without bureaucratic oversight.Produced over several years, Brennan’s movie required some fancy footwork to complete as the relationship between the United States and Cuba continued to evolve. There’s definitely pathos to a heavy metal band that once spoke truth to power and now lacks a major influx of younger fans. But there’s also a punchline here: At the end we learn that Arce has been appointed director of the Agency of Rock.Los Últimos FrikisNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. Watch on Topic. More