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      ‘How to Have Sex,’ ‘Miller’s Girl’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Provocative debuts from two exciting new female filmmakers lead off this month’s roundup of recommendations from your subscription streaming services.‘How to Have Sex’ (2024)Stream it on Mubi.The title is provocative, but this is no how-to manual; instead, the writer and director Molly Manning Walker tells a contemporary coming-of-age story that will reverberate with viewers of all ages and sexes. Her focus is on Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), a 16-year-old British girl on a post-exams holiday in Crete with her friends. They plan to party, drink and hook up, and the latter is of particular import to Tara, who is keen to lose her virginity — less out of desire or romanticism than to simply get it over with. Manning is a cinematographer making her feature directing debut, and she deftly uses compositions, color and sound to convey Tara’s isolation, desperation and disappointment. She gets a big assist from McKenna-Bruce, a charismatic and empathetic lead who can whisper, in a throwaway line or discreet gesture, everything you need to know about this young woman’s past and present.‘Miller’s Girl’ (2024)Stream it on Netflix.The first-time writer and director Jade Halley Bartlett makes occasional rookie errors in this psychosexual drama. But she has a knack with actors, particularly Jenna Ortega, who plays the lead role of a brainy teen seductress with wit and verve. Bartlett photographs Ortega like a movie star, and she comes off like one; she has a particular way of chewing on a line of loaded dialogue, and she and Martin Freeman (as the creative writing professor whose professional interest becomes personal) create a specific, uneasy but undeniable chemistry that smooths over the script’s rougher stretches. The third-act turn into a 21st century “Oleanna” is effective, with Bartlett inventively intermingling her levels of fiction and cleanly visualizing the inevitable he said/she said conflicts. The moment when Ortega decisively takes the upper hand is screen acting of the highest order.‘Men’ (2022)Stream it on Max.The writer and director Alex Garland narrates a sequence from his film starring Jessie Buckley.Kevin Baker/A24We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Puzzles Retrace the Past

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      In addition to its gaming influences, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes contains traces of postmodern novels and the French New Wave.The puzzle game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes opens with the protagonist — a well-dressed woman with the solemnity of a catwalk model — inside a forest where boreal owls roam. Ahead looms a secluded hotel whose secrets include art exhibits, mathematical puzzles and a pettable Labrador.That mysterious estate, which has its roots in horror games like Resident Evil, is a place shaped as much by its own architecture as by character psychology and surrealism.In addition to reflections about the medium itself, Lorelei contains traces of postmodern novels and the cinema of the French New Wave. The video game is “like wandering in memories and dreams,” said Simon Flesser, one of the founders of the game’s developer, Simogo.Simogo has acknowledged an eclectic list of inspirations, including “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Twin Peaks: The Return,” The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and John Fowles’s 1965 novel, “The Magus.”Other references include the parallel realities in Paul Auster’s fiction and the enigmas of “Last Year at Marienbad,” an Alain Resnais film from the early 1960s in which characters explore palatial spaces and contemplate the past. (The name of the game’s hotel is Letztes Jahr, which is German for “Last Year.”)The minigames within Lorelei almost included Nim, an ancient combinatorial game that appears in “Last Year at Marienbad.” In the film, memories intrude and elude; interpersonal dynamics shift unpredictably, like Nim’s matchsticks. Yesterday’s pastime is tomorrow’s existential crisis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Power of the ‘Planet of the Apes’

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      Why is this long-running film series so gripping and effective? Because it doesn’t monkey around.When the very first “Planet of the Apes” movie opened in 1968, the movie critic at The Times, Renata Adler, found it unremarkable. “It is no good at all, but fun, at moments, to watch,” she wrote, deeming it an “anti-war film and a science-fiction liberal tract,” with the apes representing “militarism, fascism and police brutality.” It’s probably safe to say she wasn’t expecting it to become one of the longest-running science-fiction franchises in Hollywood history.I cannot quite blame her — and not just because endless sequels weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. Watching the 1968 film, you see how close it could have veered toward a quick extinction. At times the whole thing has the quality of a skit. Actors wear monkey suits and masks (“wonderful anthropoid masks,” as Adler put it), and the attempt to draw a parallel between the apes’ civilization and the viewers’ can feel a little clumsy. It’s 1968, so there are winking catchphrases like “you can’t trust the older generation” and “never trust anyone over 30,” slogans that had been adopted by the counterculture. Had I been the reviewer back then, I might have called it “sometimes hamfisted.”Yet with regrets to Adler, the movie does work on its own terms, and it has held up extraordinarily well over the past 56 years. Charlton Heston stars as the captain of a four-person space crew that crash-lands on a planet that feels unfamiliar, where talking apes rule and humans, such as they are, have been enslaved. (One member of the crew is female, which I suppose was meant to suggest something futuristic; the first American woman didn’t go into space until 25 years after “Planet of the Apes” premiered.)Charlton Heston, far left, starred in the first “Planet of the Apes” film, from 1968.APJAC ProductionsThe movie was based on a 1963 satirical novel by the French author Pierre Boulle, who also wrote the novel “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Rod Serling, the creator of the wildly popular science-fiction TV show “The Twilight Zone,” was brought on to adapt the book for the screen. Serling’s influence is obvious from the first moments, which involve Heston in monologue about philosophical matters. More time has passed on Earth than in the spacecraft, since they’re moving at the speed of light. “Seen from out here, everything seems different,” he says. “Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely.”“Tell me, though,” he continues. “Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who has sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother, keep his neighbor’s children starving?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cannes Film Festival: Red Carpet Roundup

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      Jane Birkin pairing her beaded dress with a basket. Madonna in a Jean-Paul Gaultier cone bra and a garter set. Kristen Stewart barefoot in Chanel chain mail. Spike Lee in a sunset-inspired suit.The Cannes Film Festival, with its sheer preponderance of red carpets and boardwalk photo ops, its blockbusters and art house flicks, has given the world more indelible fashion moments than any other festival. In 2002, Sharon Stone made so many dramatic red carpet entrances as a member of the Cannes jury that she managed to revive her flagging career through the power of clothes alone.Even before the start of this year’s festival, which officially takes place from May 14 through May 25 on the French Riviera, attendees began throwing down the fashion gauntlet.The actress Anya Taylor-Joy, who is in Cannes to promote “Furiosa,” the latest “Mad Max” movie, made waves by stepping out in a Jacquemus straw hat so large it doubled as a portable sunshade. The filmmaker Greta Gerwig, whose job as president of the festival’s competition jury means packing 10 days’ worth of outfits, stopped by a photo call wearing an hourglass-effect, blue-and-white-striped milkmaid dress straight from the latest Maison Margiela couture collection.Also hopping on the seaside stripes trend were the actor Chris Hemsworth, fresh off co-hosting the Met Gala, who stepped out in a blue-and-white-striped Etro suit, and Meryl Streep, who posed in a white Michael Kors pantsuit and a navy-and-white-striped shirt.Indeed, what makes the festival such irresistible eye candy is that it’s not only a parade of grand gowns and tuxedos, but also a panoply of accessible sunshine style.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cannes: Greta Gerwig, Lily Gladstone and the Weight of Politics at the Fest

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      The festival opened with questions for the jury about Indigenous representation, #MeToo rumors and other timely topics.Early on in the meta French comedy “The Second Act,” which was opening the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night, a father (Vincent Lindon) and daughter (Léa Seydoux) are sitting in his car and chatting about her boyfriend. But just a few lines into the scene, Lindon cracks and refuses to perform it.As he leaves the car to stalk across a field, Seydoux pursues him and tries to continue running their lines. But he is undeterred, claiming the current state of the world is too dire for light comedy.“You’ll carry on as if nothing was wrong, as if everything was fine and dandy?” Lindon says to her. “Mankind is nearly done, and you want to play my daughter in an indie movie?”Though the festival has only just begun, the question of how much the outside world should intrude on cinema has become a pertinent one. At a meeting with the news media on Monday, the Cannes artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, was peppered with so many queries about real-world issues — from the war in Gaza to the #MeToo controversies currently swirling in the French film industry — that he snapped, insisting that he would prefer Cannes to stand apart from such things.“We’re trying to have a festival without this polemical aspect,” Frémaux said. “We’re very careful to maintain that the reason people come here is because of the cinema.”That may be, but the real world can still be felt here: For two weeks, Cannes is a bubble, but a bubble can be popped.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Pressure’: The ‘Mean Streets’ of Brixton

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      Newly restored, Horace Ové’s film about a Trinidadian family in London makes a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The title “Pressure” suggests the force with which this first feature by the Trinidadian British director Horace Ové struck the conscience of a country. The movie, which premiered at the 1975 London Film Festival, was praised by critics and then shelved for three years. Apparently, its producer, the British Film Institute, deemed the public unready for Ové’s blunt depiction of the police violence and racial animus directed at London’s West Indian residents in Brixton.The film’s landmark status has since been recognized by the institute and its maker knighted. Newly restored, the movie is making a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where a 16-millimeter version was previously shown in 2016.With consummate irony, “Pressure” was originally titled “The Immigrant.” Anxiously watched by his Trinidadian family, Tony (Herbert Norville), born and educated in London, attempts to join, and is repeatedly rejected by, the white British world. His mother (Lucita Lijertwood), an overworked house cleaner, is perpetually, vociferously anxious. His father (Frank Singuineau), an accountant turned grocer, is resigned. His older brother, Colin (Oscar James), a Black Power militant who is unemployed, is contemptuous. (The casting mirrors the situation: All but Norville were born in Trinidad.)Written with the Trinidadian novelist Samuel Selvon, “Pressure” is a didactic film, opening with Tony’s mother frying up a traditional English breakfast, with greasy bacon shown in unappetizing close-up, triggering Colin’s disdain for the local cuisine. (He peels and devours an avocado swiped from his father’s store.)Venturing out, Tony, the first-generation Briton, is exposed to Brixton life — suffering a painful job interview, a landlady’s racist diatribe and a Black preacher who urges his congregation to “drive all black thoughts from your hearts.” Alongside these set pieces, neorealist footage captures white reactions to the Black people they pass on the street. Indeed, the streets provide Tony’s education in double consciousness. “Learn how to thieve constructively — for the struggle,” Colin scolds him when Tony is naïvely caught up in a bungled shoplifting caper.Colin likes to posture. His associate Sister Louise (the American actor Sheila Scott-Wilkinson) provides the speechifying. Her political line, racially aware and class-conscious — synthesizing the thinking of two Trinidadian activists Ové admired, the Black Power firebrand Stokely Carmichael and the internationalist historian C.L.R. James — brings down the power of the state in the form of riot police.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Iranian Film Director Mohammad Rasoulof Flees Country After Jail Sentence

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      Mohammad Rasoulof, known for the award-winning “There Is No Evil,” had been barred from leaving Iran after his work criticized the country’s clerical leadership.The celebrated Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof said he had fled the country, after a court sentenced him to eight years in prison for his movies.Mr. Rasoulof — known for his award-winning film “There Is No Evil” — had been barred from leaving Iran after his work criticized life under authoritarian rule in the country. His lawyer, Babak Paknia, wrote last week on social media that a court had sentenced Mr. Rasoulof to imprisonment, whipping and a fine for movies that it called “examples of collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security.”On Monday, Mr. Rasoulof announced his escape from Iran in an Instagram post that featured a video of snow-capped mountains and said he had reached a “safe place” after a “difficult and long journey.”Addressing Iran’s clerical rulers, Mr. Rasoulof said he had been forced to leave “because of your oppression and barbarity,” and that he had now joined Iranians in exile who were “impatiently waiting to bury you and your machine of oppression in the depths of history.”He did not provide details on his location or respond to a message from The New York Times.“There Is No Evil” — which focused on executioners in Iran — won the top prize in the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. Mr. Rasoulof, who had directed the film in secret, was not allowed to leave the country to attend that award ceremony.A scene from Mr. Rasoulof’s “There Is No Evil,” which won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020.Kino LorberIran’s film industry is acclaimed internationally and heavily policed at home, where the authorities can ban screening and filming.Mr. Rasoulof’s new movie, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France this month.Some of the film’s producers were interrogated by the authorities and some of its actors were barred from leaving the country, Mr. Paknia said in social media posts last month.Mr. Rasoulof told The New York Times in 2020 that early on in his career he had used allegorical stories to avoid confronting power directly, but eventually felt that was “a form of accepting the tyrannical regime.”He went on to offer sharp critiques of Iran’s clerical rulers with his films, including “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” and “A Man of Integrity” — which won an award at Cannes in 2017.Over the years, the Iranian authorities had charged him with propaganda against the state, confiscated his passport, arrested and prosecuted him.In a statement released on Monday, Mr. Rasoulof said “the scope and intensity of repression has reached a point of brutality where people expect news of another heinous government crime every day.”Leily Nikounazar More

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      Black Satire Is Having Its Hollywood Moment, but Something Is Missing

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      Recent releases like “American Fiction” and “The American Society of Magical Negroes” have used absurdist humor to examine race. But they have also depicted narrow views of Blackness.In 2017, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” was a critical and commercial smash that immediately became one of the defining movies of the Trump Era. The next year, Boots Riley’s masterful “Sorry to Bother You” seemed to herald a new golden age for Black satire films. But as those movies stood out for using surreal plot twists to humorously — and horrifically — unpack complex ideas like racial appropriation and consumer culture, the crop that has followed hasn’t kept pace. The current moment is defined by a central question: What does the “Black” look like in Black satire films today? Too often lately it’s “not Black enough.”By that I mean to say a recent influx of films, including “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” “American Fiction” and “The Blackening,” have failed to represent Blackness with all its due complexity — as sometimes messy, sometimes contradictory. Instead, they flatten and simplify Blackness to serve a more singular, and thus digestible, form of satirical storytelling.The foremost example is “American Fiction,” inspired by Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” which won this year’s Oscar for best screenplay. In the film, a Black author and professor named Monk (played by Jeffrey Wright) finds literary success through “My Pafology,” a novel satirizing books that feed negative Black stereotypes. But Monk’s audience receives his book with earnest praise, forcing him to reconcile his newfound prosperity with his racial ethics.The surface layer of satire is obvious: The white audiences and publishing professionals who celebrate “My Pafology” do so not because of its merits but because the book allows them to fetishize another tragic Black story. It’s a performance of racial acceptance; these fans are literally buying into their own white guilt.Monk’s foil in the film is another Black author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who publishes a popular book of sensationalist Black trauma about life in the ghetto. Profiting on her white audience’s racist assumptions about Blackness, Sintara is this satire’s race traitor — or so it initially seems. Because when, in one scene, Monk questions whether Sintara’s book is any different from “My Pafology,” which she dismisses as pandering, she counters that she is spotlighting an authentic Black experience. Sintara accuses Monk of snobbery, saying that his highfalutin notion of Blackness excludes other Black experiences because he is too ashamed to recognize them.But the fact that it is Sintara who voices the film’s criticism of Monk shows how loath “American Fiction” is to make a value statement on the characters’ actions within the context of their Blackness. Sintara, whom Monk catches reading “White Negroes,” a text about Black cultural appropriation, somehow isn’t winkingly framed as the hypocrite or the inauthentic one pointing out the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of the hero.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More