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      ‘Malignant’ Review: Womb for Improvement

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      James Wan’s horror throwback follows a young woman with a mysterious connection to a brutal killer.The acting in “Malignant” might be on the hokey side, but who goes to a James Wan movie for the performances? What we want is gore and goose bumps, and in that regard, “Malignant” doesn’t entirely disappoint. Even if we have to wait until roughly 17 minutes before the finale to experience peak splatter.Until then, this gloomy psycho-horror follows poor, pregnant Madison (Annabelle Wallis), survivor of multiple miscarriages and spousal beatings. Madison has a complicated psychiatric past and a mysterious companion-stalker who may want to protect her, or possibly kill her. All we see initially is a scuttling lump with the posture of Quasimodo and the grooming of Cousin Itt; and after he invades Madison’s home — leaving her minus a baby, a partner and most of her wits — she’s horrified to discover she has a psychic connection to her attacker. When he kills, she can see every slice of his golden dagger, and so can we.Set in Seattle and filmed in and around Los Angeles, “Malignant” is replete with familiar genre tropes: the cavernous, shadowy homes with creaky doors and unreliable latches; the crumbly psychiatric hospital clinging to the edge of a cliff, where Madison’s childhood records lurk — you guessed it — in the spidery basement. Staticky, menacing voices croak from old radios and Michael Burgess’s camera beckons us into underground tunnels and clambers up walls on the heels of the villain and his victims.None of this is especially scary, but, if you’re patient, Wan delivers the kind of hilariously sick climax that only a sadist would spoil. Or envisage.MalignantRated R for gaping wounds and weaponized electricity. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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      ‘25th Hour’: The Best 9/11 Movie Was Always About New York

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      While other directors edited out the twin towers from movies at the time, Spike Lee worked the tragedy into a story originally about other things.When Spike Lee came under fire last month for including 9/11 conspiracy theorists in his HBO documentary series “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½,” historians and others expressed disappointment that Lee had seemed to give credibility to long-debunked claims. (He subsequently edited them out.) But for those of us who’ve followed Lee’s career, and its intersection with that seminal New York event of 20 years ago, the initial decision was especially baffling — as Lee also directed what many consider the quintessential film about post-9/11 New York City.“25th Hour” is not a “9/11 movie,” at least not in the way that “United 93” or “World Trade Center” are. In fact, the attacks were not part of the David Benioff screenplay that Lee signed on to direct, nor were they part of Benioff’s original novel (which was published in January 2001). But Lee is an intuitive filmmaker, open to improvisation and adjustments — and, as “NYC Epicenters” reminds us, he is a documentarian who saw his city in a moment of mourning, melancholy and transition, and wanted to capture it.Most of Hollywood did not feel the same. In the weeks following the attacks, feature films with terrorism plotlines, including the Barry Sonnenfeld comedy “Big Trouble” and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Collateral Damage,” were delayed and drastically re-edited. Films still in production, like “Men in Black II” and “Lilo & Stitch,” were rewritten to remove echoes of 9/11. Skyline shots with the World Trade Center were edited out of the not-yet-released “Kissing Jessica Stein,” “Igby Goes Down,” “People I Know” and “Spider-Man,” and a sequence of that superhero trapping a helicopter in a web between the twin towers — the centerpiece of a popular teaser trailer — was deleted as well.Most controversially, some filmmakers chose to leave their skyline shots intact, but to erase the Twin Towers with digital effects. And thus the World Trade Center was wiped from “Serendipity,” “Stuart Little 2,” “Mr. Deeds,” and Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander,” which hit screens less than three weeks after the attacks. The director’s publicist explained at the time that he made the last-minute decision to remove the towers because the film was an escapist comedy and seeing the buildings “would defeat that purpose.”Spike Lee disagreed. “You could not even show an image of the World Trade Center. “I said, we’re not doing that.” With filming on “25th Hour” planned for the following winter, Lee set about weaving 9/11 “into the fabric” of the existing story, as his star, Edward Norton, explained on the audio commentary: “It was like looking at it through the angle of another story, but the melancholy that the city was full of in that year afterward. I feel like the impact of 9/11 emotionally is all through this movie.”Spike Lee added a shot of the “Tribute in Light” installation after reading about it. Touchstone Pictures“25th Hour” is the story of Monty Brogan (Norton), a white-collar drug dealer whom we meet on the last day before he is to report for a seven-year incarceration. That night, he hits the town with his childhood pals (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and his live-in girlfriend (Rosario Dawson), ostensibly for one last blowout, but also in an attempt to come to terms with the choices — and thus, mistakes — he’s made in his life.So the explicit references to the tragedy are minimal. There is the opening credit sequence, featuring the “Tribute in Light” art installation, in which 88 searchlights combined to create two beams representing the fallen towers (Lee said he filmed it the very night he read about it in The Times); accompanied by Terence Blanchard’s moving musical score, these images say far more about the tragedy than any news footage or expositional dialogue could. Occasionally, ephemera of that autumn — American flags, makeshift memorials, wanted posters of Osama bin Laden — pop up in the background.One scene, lifted almost verbatim from the novel, finds Monty delivering a lengthy, angry, profanity-laden monologue into a mirror, meticulously insulting New Yorkers of every imaginable race, religion and class (before landing on his family, his friends and finally himself). Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were added to the list of his targets.Most poignantly, Lee relocated a scene between Hoffman and Pepper to an apartment overlooking ground zero, and placed the actors in front of a large window to view workers sifting for human remains. “New York Times says the air’s bad down here,” Hoffman notes; Pepper disparages the paper (“I read The Post”) and insists, “E.P.A. says it’s fine.” (The federal agency was later revealed to have misled the public.)In one scene, characters look out over workers at ground zero.Touchstone PicturesSome of the film’s initial critics found these additions to be an intrusion — A.O. Scott deemed them “obtrusive” and “a little jarring.” But as the years have passed, the value of what Lee was capturing has become clear. On the film’s fifth anniversary, the film critic Mick LaSalle called it “as much an urban historical document as Rossellini’s ‘Open City,’ filmed in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Rome.”But Lee didn’t just capture the way New York looked in those uncertain, shellshocked months after 9/11. His film captured how the city felt, the strange quiet that fell over the streets, the overwhelming melancholy that embedded itself in our collective DNA. “25th Hour” was not the story of those attacks, but it was a story about one way of life coming to an end, and another, far less certain one looming on the horizon.“We were very careful how we were going to portray Sept. 11 because we know it’s still very painful and that it will always be very painful for those who lost people,” Lee said upon its release in December 2002. “But at the same time, we couldn’t stick our heads in the sand and pretend like it never happened.” And that instinct, that insistence on documenting the city we lived in rather than the city we imagined, is what makes Spike Lee one of New York’s essential filmmakers.Jason Bailey is the author of the forthcoming book “Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies That Made It,” a history of the city and movies about it. He is also the host of the “Fun City Cinema” podcast. More

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      ‘Come From Away’ Review: Looking for Light in Somber Times

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      The filmed version of this Broadway musical lands on Apple TV+ to deliver hope and kindness.The capture of the Broadway musical “Come From Away” that is now streaming on Apple TV+ is almost impossible to hate. Unless, that is, you have an aversion to traditional Irish music and nice people.The first permeates the score, a tribute to the cultural heritage of Newfoundland where the show is set — and where the second find themselves. The ensemble, many from the original Broadway cast, deftly toggles between portraying passengers aboard planes diverted into the Gander airport on Sept. 11, 2001, and the kindly Canadians who welcomed them to their isolated province on the Atlantic coast.Hatched by the Canadian team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein and inspired by real people, “Come From Away” describes, in a series of vignettes, the surreal few days experienced by the stranded visitors and their hosts. Both were shellshocked by the situation and somewhat befuddled by each other, yet they made the most of the circumstances in a demonstration of tolerance and human decency.You would have to be green and hate Christmas to wish ill on this story. At the same time, the show does not elicit passionate feelings of any kind: It is … nice.Certainly, there is a double emotion involved in this Apple release: It coincides with the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and was filmed in front of an invited audience at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater back in May, when all the other Broadway theaters remained shuttered. Christopher Ashley, whose work on the stage version earned him the 2017 Tony Award for best direction of a musical, acquits himself well in the transition to video. But this amiable production’s temperature never rises above lukewarm: good sentiments are, unfortunately, difficult to dramatize, an issue compounded by a score that can feel like aural wallpaper.The best songs, which rely less on Celtic clichés, surface toward the end, including Jenn Colella’s belted ballad “Me and the Sky” and the rousing number “Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere.” It’s a fine send-off to folks we feel we got to know, at least a little.Come From AwayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘Azor’ Review: A World on Fire, Discreetly

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      In this low-key shocker set in Argentina in 1980, a Swiss banker travels through a world that he doesn’t seem to know is ablaze.Tendrils of menace creep through the unnerving drama “Azor,” snaking through every room and scene. It’s 1980 and a Swiss private banker and his wife are traveling through Argentina, taking in the sights while he tries to clean up a mess left by a missing colleague. Danger is everywhere — people have disappeared, are disappearing — though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the mansions they visit, where the Swiss interlopers exchange pleasantries with the Buenos Aires elite, some of whom voice vague warnings. Others just smile knowingly, betraying their loyalties.A harrowing vision of evil from the inside, the movie tracks the banker, Yvan (Fabrizio Rongione), as he journeys through Argentina several years after armed forces overthrew the government of President Isabel Martínez de Perón. For most of Yvan’s clients, life seems to go on as before, with little to disrupt their cosseted indolence. With the junta ruling the country, the wealthy, murmuring about nothing much, sip drinks by their pools, tended by fleets of servants. Again and again, Yvan apologizes for the behavior of his missing colleague, René Keys (seen briefly in the opening), a confounding figure intensely disliked by some yet beloved by others.Written and directed by Andreas Fontana, making a formally precise, tonally perfect feature debut, “Azor” is a low-key shocker. It has you in its cool grip from the opening shot of a shambolic-looking Keys standing in suit and tie before a flat, blurred backdrop of jungle greenery. As the camera holds on him, he seems more ill at ease and his laughing smiles give way to unexplained agitation. He suddenly looks like a man searching for an exit. As the story unfolds, this perturbation suffuses the movie. It shapes every gesture, sidelong glance and oblique comment, turning an outwardly routine business trip into a mystery unlocked only through Keys.With its swampy air of unease and the figure of the enigmatic missing man, the key to the story as it were, “Azor” vaguely evokes films like Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (written by Graham Greene), though without the narrative pulse and concerns or Hollywood glamour of that cloak-and-dagger thriller. (The name Keys recalls that of Edward G. Robinson’s claims adjuster, Keyes, in “Double Indemnity.”) Certainly “Azor” has a smattering of suspense-film essentials: hushed conversations, clouds of cigarette smoke, heavily armed soldiers. For his part, the colorless Yvan, with his stiff politesse and old-world firm, presents the very picture of a useful patsy.Fontana, who is Swiss but has lived in Argentina, takes a sideways, insistently oblique approach to intrigue. Rather than stuffing the movie with incidents, with clever turns and sexy characters, empty moralizing and political grandstanding, he has whittled it to the bone. There are no louche, swaggering spies in “Azor,” no dashing heroes, no swoony villains and very little of what could pass for Hollywood-style action. There is instead a lot of seemingly innocuous small talk, the kind often tucked in amid a movie’s narrative leaps forward. There’s chatter about Swiss schools, fine hotels, family castles, the good old days — all of which helps maintain the veneer of normalcy.Terrible things happen. Yet, for the most part, Yvan’s clients, with their money, landed estates and thoroughbreds seem largely indifferent to the evil informing their lives. The land, of course, was stolen long ago, though no one, Fontana included, puts it like that. Instead, when a sympathetic client (Juan Trench) takes Yvan and his wife, Ines (Stéphanie Cléau), on a ride, he speaks about a stand of trees planted by his great-grandfather. The client’s father called the area the grand boulevards, invoking Haussmann, the 19th-century French official who, in service of Louis Napoleon, remade Paris by razing slums and forcing out the poor. Fontana has landed his blow; the group rides on.Fontana doesn’t bludgeon you with explanations, declare his allegiances (they’re a given) or school you on Argentine history, which nevertheless comes into focus through the small talk and devious, sly looks, most notably in a terrifying scene with a Catholic monsignor (a fantastic Pablo Torre Nilsson). Fontana is asking you to look and to listen, and to really grasp what it means to behave as if the world isn’t on fire. Late in the movie, during a gala filled with laughing attendees, a zombie horde in gowns and black tie, Ines talks to an aristocratic doyenne (Carmen Irionda) about the peculiar dialect of Swiss private banking. One curious phrase means “to pretend you haven’t seen anything,” Ines explains, as she takes leisurely drags on her cigarette. “My husband does it very easily.”AzorNot rated. In French and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Small Engine Repair’ Review: Of Mechanics and Men

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      John Pollono directs and stars in an adaptation of his play that adds depth to the original text but also struggles in its translation from stage to screen.What happens in Manch-Vegas stays in Manch-Vegas. Just ask the men from “Small Engine Repair,” an adaptation of the play of the same name by the actor and playwright John Pollono. The film, which Pollono also directs, provides more depth than the original but still flounders in the translation from stage to screen.Frank (Pollono) calls together his longtime buds Swaino (Jon Bernthal) and Packie (Shea Whigham), middle-aged natives of Manchester, New Hampshire, who’ve fallen out because of a brawl. When a frat boy named Chad (Spencer House) joins what seems like a normal night of bro-ing, the darker intentions behind the gathering are revealed.Pollono’s film has the same grit as the play, which premiered Off Broadway in 2013. Pollono, Bernthal and Whigham deliver ace performances that humanize these puerile man-children without pardoning them. The dialogue is brutal: crass, racist, homophobic, misogynist. It’s The Testosterone Show. Though the play examined the men’s relationship to women, it lacked women characters; the film thankfully corrects that, introducing Frank’s ex Karen (Jordana Spiro) and daughter Crystal (Ciara Bravo).The film self-consciously cushions the trim content of the play, converting anecdotal moments in the dialogue into flashbacks. These additions more explicitly critique the characters for a 2021 audience with greater sensitivity to depictions of toxic men, but they’re largely distracting, highlighting how the film sits uneasily between the contained world of the play and the larger world the adaptation attempts to build. Ultimately, the story still feels unfinished, and Pollono’s direction falters in the film’s big twist, when it tries to balance horror and humor before its tidy resolution.Small Engine RepairRated R for gutter-mouth trash-talking. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fire Music’ Review: An Impassioned Case for Free Jazz

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      The beautiful souls that created free jazz — including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry and Carla Bley — light up this new documentary from Tom Surgal.One default reaction to the musical form called “free jazz” — Ornette Coleman’s phrase for this improvised, experimental style of jazz — has long been that it’s “not music.” This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.Gary Giddins, a critic who’s equally at home explicating Bing Crosby as Cecil Taylor, points out at the film’s beginning that someone playing the blues on a porch can make their phrases 12 bars or 14 bars or whatever at will. In group playing, certain agreements have to be met.One basis of free jazz is to approach ensemble playing without conventional agreements. Hence, Coleman’s practically leaderless double quartet approach on the 1961 “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation” album. Much consideration is also given here to Coleman’s break with bebop in insisting one could improvise without chords. His playing sounded out of tune to traditional jazz musicians not yet conversant with microtones.This sounds a little dry, but the movie is anything but. Among other highlights are incredibly well-curated archival footage and contemporary interviews that allow the viewer to briefly commune with some beautiful souls, including Coleman, Sam Rivers, John Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Don Cherry, Carla Bley. “Whatever he did was the right thing to do,” Bley, now 85, says of Cherry, who died in 1995.Most of these players are Black, and their innovations in the ’60s had trouble gaining traction in the United States. So they flocked to Paris, and the movie is scrupulous in chronicling how the European movement “free improvisation” grew into something allied with, but distinct from, what the U.S. founders created.As a fan of improvisational music myself, the 88 minutes of this movie constituted a too-short heaven on earth. I’d binge on an expanded series, honestly.Fire MusicNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Alpinist’ Review: Dizzying Heights

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      This documentary tries to shed light on the attitude of a Canadian rock climber it describes as “elusive.”In a podcast excerpted at the start of “The Alpinist,” the rock climber Alex Honnold, from the Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo,” is asked to name a climber who impresses him. He cites Marc-André Leclerc, a Canadian whom Honnold says takes on some of the sport’s most difficult challenges in “such a pure style.” Honnold’s remarks suggest Leclerc would happily ascend in obscurity, keeping his accomplishments between him and the mountains.“The Alpinist” — directed by Peter Mortimer (who narrates) and Nick Rosen, both specialists in climb documentaries — tries to pin Leclerc down. The difficulties go beyond filming him at great heights on rock faces covered with ice or snow. While the lanky, curly haired, almost goofy Leclerc proves an affable screen presence — after we’ve watched him ax his way up an icicle wall in the Canadian Rockies, he describes it nonchalantly as “a really good day out” — his commitment to the documentary is tenuous. At one point, he ditches the filmmakers. When they reconnect, he points out that the camera’s presence interferes with the notion of climbing alone: “It wouldn’t be a solo to me if somebody was there.”The movie could stand to demystify how some of its most terrifying early shots were filmed. (Later on, we’re told Leclerc agreed to carry a small camera himself to shoot part of a conquest in Patagonia.) But it does capture its subject’s philosophy. As with Honnold in “Free Solo,” the film raises the prospect that Leclerc was innately predisposed toward thrill-seeking. In Argentina, he says he eats every pre-climb dinner as if it might be his last.The AlpinistRated PG-13. Dangerous climbs. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Kate’ Review: Lost in Assassination

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      Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays a vengeful contract killer in this predictable thriller.The thriller “Kate” is an undistinguished action film that makes a hero of a hit woman. Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), guided by her wily handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), has been a professional since adolescence. Her only rule is to never kill in front of a child. Naturally — this being a relatively unimaginative plot — Kate betrays her principles within the first five minutes of the movie, murdering a yakuza gang member in front of his daughter.The fallout for Kate proves worse than a mere breach of assassin’s creed. She learns that her victim’s gang has targeted her, slipping her a fatal dose of polonium. She has 24 hours to live before radiation destroys her body, and in that time, she is determined to get her revenge. But the only person who knows where she can find the shadowy leader of the gang that wants her dead is Ani (Miku Martineau), the child who witnessed her father’s slaughter.The film takes place in Japan, and the director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan tries to use the setting to inject a shot of style into the largely routine story. There are neon cars, Kabuki theater performances and as many murders committed with samurai swords and katanas as there are with guns. The movie presents an eye-catching fantasy of a candy-colored Japanese underworld. But the exoticism feels as cheap as a whiff of a green tea and musk cologne called Tokyo wafting over a department store counter. Even Winstead, stoic in her fashionably boyish haircut, looks bored.KateRated R for graphic violence, brief gore, and brief sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More