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      ‘Last Summer’ Review: A Shocking Affair to Remember

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      Few directors get as deeply under the skin as Catherine Breillat, a longtime provocateur who tests the limits of what the world thinks women should do and say and be.When Anne, the elegant, enigmatic protagonist in Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer,” walks in a room, she holds your gaze as formidably as she holds those of everyone in this startling, perverse French movie. A lawyer, wife, mother and sister, Anne likes sheath dresses and high heels, tasteful antiques and a sense of order. She’s serenely self-possessed, and everything in her life is just so, which suggests that she’s either invincible or waiting to break. Both are in play when she abandons herself in a shocking, recklessly consuming affair.Few directors get as deeply under the skin as Breillat, a longtime, reliably interesting provocateur who tests the limits of what the world thinks women should do and say and be. Breillat is interested in complexity, not orthodoxy (feminist or otherwise), in autonomy and subjugation, and in all the ways that pleasure and desire can take violent hold of minds and bodies. She was in her 20s when she directed her first feature, “A Real Young Girl” (1976), about a teenager’s sexual coming-of-age. It’s a messy, jolting movie; there aren’t many filmmakers who shock you like Breillat does and with such supremely natural ease.Anne, played by a superb Léa Drucker, seems wholly satisfied in her world. She and her loving, attentive husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), have two sweet girls, and live in a large, handsome suburban home. She’s close to her sister, Mina (Clotilde Courau), and Anne’s work seems satisfying and perhaps even important: She advocates for victims of sexual abuse and in cases involving parental custodianship. Outwardly, her life looks ideal, if maybe overly comfortable, and its frictionless surfaces — especially in a French movie about upper-class people — seem primed for disruption. Even so, nothing about her suggests that she will soon lose herself in an affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher).When “Last Summer” opens, Théo is living with his mother and has just been arrested. Pierre has decided to bring his son back home with him, a decision he explains to Anne while the couple are in their bedroom, an intimate setting that is as meaningful as it is banal. As Pierre hurriedly packs his bag, Breillat discreetly pushes the camera closer to him as he and an offscreen Anne talk. The scene is brief, and seemingly purely informational. Yet right after Pierre says that Théo punched a teacher, Breillat cuts to Anne who’s busily changing her clothes. Her dress is hiked over her face, exposing her trim body and pretty bra.Within minutes, Breillat has introduced both her characters and their world with brisk narrative economy and a sly, telegraphing conflation of sex and violence: the bedroom, the couple, the son, the punch, the lingerie. The movie has scarcely begun yet everything, including the complacency and first stirrings of trouble, is in place. These stirrings abruptly turn into klaxons when Théo arrives shortly thereafter, and Anne goes to speak to him. The moment that he appears onscreen — he’s on the bed in his room, his messy dark curls cascading over his face — it’s clear that he is this movie’s version of Chekhov’s gun.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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      ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Review: Lupita Nyong’o Commands the Screen

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      The chills are more effective than the thrills in this prequel to the “A Quiet Place” franchise.The cat. It’s all about the cat.No matter what else happens in “A Quiet Place: Day One,” no matter how sensational Lupita Nyong’o is — and she is — her character’s feline buddy is going to take over the story and, likely, the discourse around it.Mind you, there also was a cat, Jones, in “Alien,” a movie that’s a major influence on the “Quiet Place” universe — one in which aliens land on Earth and massacre everybody for no reason besides sheer killing instinct. John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place” (2018) and “A Quiet Place Part II” (2021) laid down the basic parameters, mainly that the creatures’ extremely developed hearing makes up for their blindness, and they hate bodies of water.But Jones was peripheral to “Alien,” the masterpiece that kicked off a franchise revolving around body invasion. Our fearless new hero is very much embedded in the theme running through all three “Quiet Place” movies: the importance of family, whether biological or chosen.In Michael Sarnoski’s prequel, Frodo (played by both Nico and Schnitzel) is the support cat of Samira (Nyong’o), a New York City poet living in crippling cancer-induced pain in a hospice. She takes Frodo everywhere, including an outing to a puppet show, where the audience members include a man (Djimon Hounsou) whom viewers of the second movie will instantly recognize. When the invasion begins, he is quick to impart the importance of making as little noise as possible to avoid alerting the attackers.Somehow borne on meteorites (don’t ask), the aliens immediately get down to their gruesome business. The movie allows us a few good looks at the toothy monsters, who made me think of hellish Giacometti sculptures. But otherwise Sarnoski (who made the endearing Nicolas Cage drama “Pig”) does not add all that much crucial new information to their basic character sheet — “Day One” is refreshingly free of origin story explaining.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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      ‘Confessions of a Good Samaritan’ Review: An Altruistic Story

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      In Penny Lane’s newest film, she turns the camera on herself to document her experience donating a kidney to a stranger.Would you donate a kidney to a stranger? Early in “Confessions of a Good Samaritan,” the filmmaker Penny Lane (“Hail Satan?”) flips the question around. With so many people in need of transplants, why wouldn’t you give one of yours?In the film, Lane puts this conviction to the test. Seated before a backdrop, she mulls over her drive to donate — she cringes at the idea that people will think she’s only doing it for a film — and explores the practice more broadly by interviewing doctors and other non-directed donors (a.k.a. altruistic donors). She pairs these testimonies with the history and ethics of organ transplants, including an impressive selection of archival clips. (I’d watch an entire documentary about the Dutch “Donor Show” that featured patients supposedly competing for a transplant.)But what begins as an optimistic piece of advocacy eventually veers into something more complex, ambivalent and even frantic. As Lane prepares for surgery, undergoing health screenings and drawing up a will, she grows increasingly aware of her solitude. A single woman without children, she struggles to name a health care proxy, cries while appointing a cat guardian and worries about being alone during recovery.Lane’s grappling with these feelings lends depth to what could have been a pat participatory exercise. The film never draws a line between its subject’s isolation and despair and that of the tens of thousands of Americans awaiting kidney transplants, but it doesn’t have to. Like the deed of a good Samaritan, the work speaks for itself.Confessions of a Good SamaritanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Vourdalak’ Review: Blood Relations

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      An endangered French aristocrat is stranded with a benighted rural family in this tragicomic fairy tale.Patriarchy first enslaves, then noisily devours in “The Vourdalak,” a gloomy Gothic folk tale with a robust literary and cinematic provenance.Adapting an 1839 novella by A.K. Tolstoy, the director, Adrien Beau, and Hadrien Bouvier have concocted a quaintly comic throwback to the vampire movies of yesteryear. Traversing a war-ravaged Eastern Europe, an effete French nobleman, the Marquis d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet-Klein), is set upon by bandits and forced to seek shelter in a forbidding manor house. The family inside is welcoming, if oddly secretive, anxiously awaiting the return of their father, Gorcha, who left to fight marauding Turks. There’s a domineering elder brother (Grégoire Colin), his cross-dressing sibling (Vassili Schneider), and their beautiful, lovelorn sister (Ariane Labed) who likes to eat worms and haunt the edge of a nearby cliff. The Marquis is instantly smitten.Viewed through the horrified eyes of our powdered and painted hero, the return of Gorcha — who is now clearly, terrifyingly nonhuman — is irresistibly funny. Far from the niceties of the French court, the Marquis is ill-equipped to process his hosts’ rough peculiarities and baffled by their meek subservience to Gorcha’s commands. They know what their father has become, but, trapped by love and filial duty, they seem incapable of fleeing their ghastly fates.Washed in a mood of misery and unease, this bizarre debut feature gains heft from David Chizallet’s often lovely photography and a sound design that prioritizes slurping and chomping. The actors are above reproach; but the movie’s star is inarguably the cadaverous marionette, voiced by Beau, that plays Gorcha. Its creepily insinuating presence — and hilarious involvement in a cringe-inducing sex scene — cements “The Vourdalak” as an endearing oddity. Surrender to its vintage vibe and its emotional kick may surprise you.The VourdalakNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Music’ Review: Oedipus Rocks

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      An ethereal, experimental new drama retells the story of the mythical Greek hero.“Music” is a contemporary retelling of the Oedipus legend, though the parallels between the director Angela Schanelec’s experimental drama and the original Greek myth are elusive by design.In the beginning of the film, a crew of young people pull up to a craggy Grecian coastline, among them Jon (Aliocha Schneider), whose feet, like Sophocles’ hero, are scraped and bloodied. While there, Jon accidentally knocks one of his companions into a rock. The friend, Lucian (Theodore Vrachas), hits his head, and Jon goes to prison for his crime. Upon his release, he reunites with a willowy woman, Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), with whom he starts a family.All of this unfolds with little to no dialogue. The biggest plot points are choreographed like somber dances, gestural fragments in a loosely bound narrative that employs booming, baroque music (and later, modern indie ballads) to sculpt its emotions.The Oedipus myth provides footholds with which to make sense of these ethereal proceedings, though it’s clear Schanelec is interested only in the contours of story: More powerful, for instance, are the supple ways the hands of two lovers touch for the first time; the way a father gazes beholding his child.“Music” follows “I Was at Home, But…” (2020), Schanelec’s similarly mysterious riff on “Hamlet,” but there’s a crucial difference separating this new film from not just the previous one, but possibly all of Schanelec’s earlier work.We eventually discover who Jon’s parents are, but the film’s most significant revision of the original story takes mercy on Jon. He is never told the truth, and this blissful, productive ignorance pervades the second, radiant half of the film, which is set in Berlin, where Jon’s musical gifts are foregrounded. Hope was never something that I associated with Schanelec’s typically dour films, yet here, from the darkness of a timeless tragedy emerges light.MusicNot rated. In Greek, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Review: In ‘June Zero,’ There Are Many Ways to See the Past

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      Jake Paltrow’s film braids three fictional stories around the 1962 execution of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official and war criminal.In 1960, Israeli agents smuggled the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann from Buenos Aires to Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the Holocaust. Rather than focus on the operation, or on Eichmann’s notorious defense, “June Zero” thoughtfully braids three stories that relate to the events around Eichmann’s execution by hanging in 1962.Jake Paltrow’s film, which premiered at festivals in 2022, might sound like an exercise in hagiography: Drawing on actual accounts, it’s framed by the tale of David, a plucky Israeli teenager who finds himself involved in Eichmann’s fate. But the shifting story, written by Paltrow and Tom Shoval, complicates the act of commemoration and dwells on the moral quandaries and uncomfortable resonances that result from the events.David (Noam Ovadia, a nervy newcomer) is pushed to work in a factory after trouble in school. His boss, Shlomi (Tzahi Grad), a brutal former soldier, is secretly custom-building an oven for the government to cremate Eichmann’s remains, and their plan is played in the movie for unease as much as for suspense.At the same time, Eichmann’s guard in jail, Haim (Yoav Levi), nearly goes mad from his assignment to protect the Nazi. The spotlight then leaps to Poland, where a tour guide (Tom Hagi), a Holocaust survivor, spars with the trip organizer (Joy Rieger), weighing the necessary rituals of remembrance against the risks of being trapped by the past.Concluding with David’s role in Eichmann’s disposal, “June Zero” sticks to its characters’ specific experiences of these events. But the resourceful narrative, with some surprising grace notes, tends to invite questioning and reflection.June ZeroNot rated. In Hebrew and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fancy Dance’ Review: The Search for a Sister

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      This debut feature about a missing woman on an Oklahoma reservation is an imperfect but palpably emotional portrait of desperation and hard-won hope.“Fancy Dance,” the debut feature film from Erica Tremblay, begins where most films of its ilk might find their story’s second act. Tawi, a mother of a teenage daughter, has been missing for weeks. Search parties have been combing the fields, and her sister, Jax (Lily Gladstone), has struggled to get the F.B.I. to assist.The ghost of Tawi, in other words, is a fixture from the start and hovers over the film. The empty space of her — we glimpse her only in photos and fliers — is intentional: This story about the search for a missing woman on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation of Oklahoma is not a mystery thriller, and the film is not meant to milk dramatic tension from her disappearance. Rather, Tawi’s case is all too common, and the entry point to what is ultimately a portrait of desperation, poverty and hard-won hope.Hope, or the illusion of it, is worth fighting for because of Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), Tawi’s daughter, whom Jax has been taking care of since Tawi went missing. The two are close, forcing Jax between two poles: the hardened exterior that reservation life necessitates (Gladstone is imperfect, but well suited to Jax’s steel-encased tenderness) and the desire to preserve Roki’s innocence. Even as they commit petty crimes to scrounge up cash and continue the search, Jax assures Roki that her mother will be at the upcoming annual powwow, where there is a mother-daughter dance.Tremblay’s film is not always graceful — the dialogue and acting can be stilted, and one hopes for a little more formal rigor — but it’s a strong debut undergirded by a palpably real emotional core and an un-showy sense of the reality of reservation life. Jax is often confronted by a push and pull in the same room: those ready to pounce and those offering to help. Each stance is born out of the same understanding — that the world is harsh, and not everyone can survive it.Fancy DanceRated R for language, some drug content and sexual material. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Daddio’ Review: Two for the Road

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      Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson outclass a humdrum script as two people who talk — and talk — in a New York City taxicab.Handicapped by more than a terrible title, Christy Hall’s “Daddio,” set almost entirely inside a New York City taxicab, tries too hard and lasts too long. A synthetic encounter between a gabby cabby and his self-possessed female passenger, the movie is a claustrophobic two-hander oxygenated in part by Phedon Papamichael’s sleekly gorgeous cinematography.The star power of its leads, Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson, doesn’t hurt either. Injecting nuance and emotional depth into Hall’s uninspired script, the two turn a threatened slog into a mildly enjoyable journey. Penn plays Clark, a tough, salt-of-the-earth type (he actually talks about salt at one point) whose roughened hands and veined forearms are catnip to the camera. Johnson is his last fare of the night, a sophisticated young woman traveling from Kennedy Airport to midtown Manhattan. He calls her Girlie.He is very nosy. When not railing against credit cards and rideshare apps, he peppers his passenger with increasingly personal questions. Initially guarded, Girlie slowly warms to this drive-by philosopher. Through the barriers of age, gender, class and education, their revelations grow more intimate — sometimes implausibly so, as when Clark shares a distasteful anecdote about his first wife, along with his thoughts on what married men want in a mistress. (Hint: It’s not love.) Not that Girlie is clutching her pearls; rather, she’s surreptitiously sexting her tongue-lolling lover.Somehow, Penn never allows Clark’s inappropriateness to become predatory, and Johnson’s marvelously expressive features reveal details the dialogue declines to provide. Yet if there’s a finer point to any of this — beyond yes, talking to strangers is sometimes beneficial — it eluded me. I did, though, appreciate Hall’s choice to flash some texts directly onto the movie screen: Squinting at characters’ smartphones is one of my least favorite activities. Along with listening to gossipy cabdrivers.DaddioRated R for bared breasts and barroom language. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More