Movies

For her first feature documentary, Mariam Ghani dug up five unfinished movies from the Communist era in Afghanistan.In “What We Left Unfinished,” five movies started and then abandoned during Afghanistan’s Communist era, between 1978 and 1992, form a dazzling time capsule of the nation’s political and cultural history. The director Mariam Ghani — the daughter of Afghanistan’s current president, Ashraf Ghani — digs into the archives of Afghan Film, a state-run company that endured the whims and demands of various regimes before the Taliban destroyed most of its holdings in the 1990s.Culled from the remnants of the company’s collections, the films Ghani remixes in “What We Left Unfinished” bear the traces of successive political upheavals. “The April Revolution” (1978), for instance, was commissioned by Hafizullah Amin, who became Afghanistan’s president in a 1979 coup. When the Soviets assassinated him months later in a takeover, the film had to be shut down.
In interviews, the filmmakers and actors involved in these movies recall their struggles with strict ideological dictates and censorship, but also the generous resources that propaganda-hungry governments lavished on them. The snippets we see are beautifully lit and produced — some feature big explosions and shootouts involving real soldiers wielding real Kalashnikovs.“What We Left Unfinished” doesn’t dwell too much on the nuts and bolts of the making of these films, which is a pity, because they offer tantalizing glimpses into a cinematic culture whose formal ambitions seem to have been unstinted — and perhaps even encouraged — by political pressures. But Ghani’s mode is less interrogative than associative. Her montage of film fragments illustrates and sometimes poetically belies the interviewees’ recollections, evoking the ambiguous and unresolved contours of collective memory.What We Left UnfinishedNot rated. In English and Dari, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 11 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard are star-crossed lovers in this hallucinatory musical, written by Sparks and directed by Leos Carax.“Annette” is a musical about the ill-starred romance between two artists, a description that suggests obvious kinship with “La La Land” and “A Star is Born.” Not to play algorithm or anything, but if you liked those movies, you will probably like this one too.Or maybe not. While it belongs, more or less, to the durable genre of backstage musical, “Annette” aims to be something darker and stranger than another angsty melodrama about the entanglements of ambition and love. It has some modern opera in its DNA — a lurid strand of violence, madness and demonic passion that evokes pre-World War II Vienna or Berlin as much as classic Hollywood. Rather than bursting into song or breaking into dance at opportune moments, the characters stream their tormented consciousnesses through lyrics that are never as simple as they sound.“We love each other so much.” That is the refrain that sticks in your head as you attend to the tragic tale of Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and Ann Desfranous (Marion Cotillard), a performance artist and an operatic soprano whose marriage is catnip for the tabloid media. Their love is the film’s premise and its central dramatic problem. It’s also, in a way, a red herring. The sexual bliss and emotional rapport that fill the first act give way to anger and alienation, but this isn’t just a love story with a sad ending. It’s more of a case study, a critique of the romantic mythology on which its appeal would seem to depend.A collaboration between Ron and Russell Mael — better known as the long-lived, pigeonhole-defying band Sparks — and the director Leos Carax, “Annette” opens with an overture in the key of anti-realism. The Mael brothers, who wrote the script as well as the songs, are in the recording studio. Carax and his daughter, Nastya, are behind the mixing board. The cast and crew walk out into the street, and Driver and Cotillard slowly move into character. He puts on a flowing dark wig and then a motorcycle helmet. She climbs into a black SUV. They are now Henry and Ann. The boundary between artifice and actuality has been clearly marked for us; for these two it will be blurry, permeable and treacherous.Carax, whose feverishly imaginative features include “Pola X” and “Holy Motors,” has never had much use for the naturalism that serves most filmmakers as a default setting. The world of “Annette” has some familiar place names (including Tokyo, London and Rio, though most of it takes place in Los Angeles), but it is a land beyond the literal, a figment of stage design, dream logic and hallucinatory expressionism. The fact that the characters sing more than they talk — even during sex — is in some ways the least strange thing about the movie, which casts a series of mechanical puppets in the title role.Annette is the name of Ann and Henry’s daughter, and to explain her centrality to the narrative may be to risk a spoiler or two. Not that the plot is terribly intricate or surprising; it unfolds with the relentless momentum of a nightmare. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Annette in the baby carriage. What follows is drunkenness and murder; shipwreck, ghosts and guilt.But let’s go back to the beginning, to Henry and Ann in their season of mutual enchantment. Though each has a flourishing career, it’s Henry who claims most of the attention. That’s partly charisma, partly narcissism, and entirely consistent with his identity as an artist. He is the star and author of “The Ape of God,” a one-man show (with backup singers) that traffics in the kind of belligerent self-display that popular culture sometimes mistakes for honesty.Bursting onto the stage in a hooded bathrobe that falls open to reveal tight boxer briefs and an impressively sculpted torso, Henry harangues the audience with intimate, often obnoxious confessions. Shame and bravado are the alternating currents of his act, yoked by hyper-articulate, cynical self-consciousness. The audience laughs, though Henry isn’t telling jokes so much as daring the public to take his aggression seriously.Ron Mael (in tie) and Russell Mael (in black) wrote the film’s script and songs. The brothers, better known as the band Sparks, also appear in this opening scene of the movie.Amazon StudiosIs he an internal critic of toxic masculinity or an exceptionally magnetic example of it? That may be a distinction without a difference. With Henry, as with some of his hypothetical real-life analogs, it’s hard to separate the art from the artist because the defiance of such a separation is the whole point of his art.Ann is a different kind of artist, and a less insistent presence in the film. She seems, at times, to recede in the shadow of her husband’s larger, louder personality. This can seem like a failure of imagination on the part of the filmmakers, who depict her more as the object of Henry’s desire, jealousy and resentment rather than as a creative force in her own right. She has more in common with the Cotillard characters in “Public Enemies” and “Inception” than the ones in “Rust and Bone” or “La Vie en Rose.”That imbalance turns out to be crucial to this film’s indictment of the cruelty that is excused in the name of genius, its unsparing dissection of male entitlement. This is less a love story than a monster movie, about a man incapable of grasping the full reality of other people, including his own wife and child. (The “not all men” objection is embodied by Simon Helberg, playing a conductor who is Henry’s sometime rival for Ann’s affection.) The consequences are lethal, and the final reckoning is as devastating as anything I’ve seen in a recent film, musical or not.Driver, some of whose best roles to date have been as troubled men of the theater (see also “Girls” and “Marriage Story”), doesn’t waste energy in trying to make Henry likable or in overselling his villainy. Instead, he’s entirely believable, not because you understand Henry’s psychological makeup, but precisely because you can’t. His megalomania distorts everything. He’s not larger than life, but he thinks he is, and Driver’s performance is perfectly scaled to that contradiction.“Annette” masters its own paradoxes. It’s a highly cerebral, formally complex film about unbridled emotion. A work of art propelled by a skepticism about where art comes from and why we value it the way we do. A fantastical film that attacks some of our culture’s most cherished fantasies. Utterly unreal and completely truthful.AnnetteRated R for Sturm und Drang. Running time: 2 hour 19 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

The composer and cornet player Bix Beiderbecke changed music forever in a very short life. A restored documentary from the ’80s goes into the details.Although this iteration of this 1981 documentary is a restoration, one ought not go to see “Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’” expecting a shiny cinematographic object. The movie looks like a 40-year-old mix of talking-head and archival footage. What makes it extraordinary is the story it tells of an uncanny musician and his beautiful playing and songs.Born in 1903, Bix Beiderbecke didn’t live to be 30, but he made an impression on jazz that is still felt today. He was raised in Davenport, Iowa, in a strait-laced German American household. A child prodigy, Beiderbecke first fell in love with jazz via the frenetically bouncy tune “Tiger Rag.” But he was also devoted to the work of Debussy and Ravel, and he brought their dreamy impressionism to his music. That influence persisted in jazz for decades. (It’s said that before recording “Kind of Blue” in 1959, Miles Davis and the pianist and composer Bill Evans did some serious listening to a rendition of Ravel’s Piano Concerto.)Among the luminaries contributing reminiscences are Hoagy Carmichael, Artie Shaw and Doc Cheatham. Louis Armstrong, in an audio recording, coins the phrase that gives the movie its subtitle. That the director, Brigitte Berman, doesn’t give more weight to the racial segregation that defined the jazz milieu of the 1920s speaks to a blind spot that was all too present when she made the picture. But the film does cite Beiderbecke’s devotion to Bessie Smith, as well as his playing in integrated jam sessions.The accounts of Beiderbecke’s tremendous ear — a protean soloist on the cornet, he composed on piano — and shyness are moving. The exhaustion and tedium of life on the road got Beiderbecke tripped up by alcoholism, which led to other health problems. Conventional wisdom in some circles considers the existence of a gigging musician to be somehow leisurely; this movie painstakingly lays out the way it can be practically deadly.Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

This documentary remembers the daring helicopter reporting of a couple in Los Angeles.According to “Whirlybird,” a documentary directed by Matt Yoka, the sprawling freeways of Los Angeles — and the difficulties they posed for reaching breaking-news events quickly — prompted Zoey Tur, along with Marika Gerard, her wife and partner in journalism at the time, to start reporting from a helicopter. They were stringers, Marika explains, and always needed new videos. Cars didn’t cut it, especially once they became parents. There is harrowing, if retrospectively charming, footage in which their young daughter, Katy Tur, now an MSNBC anchor, assists while she accompanies them on a pursuit.Once they took to the air, the pair gave a big boost to the news service they ran, and they could also report live. They flew over the intersection of Florence and Normandie filming the beating of the truck driver Reginald Denny, one of the earliest incidents in the 1992 riots. The documentary presents a lengthy account of how they found O.J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco. Marika says they were the first on the scene.Drawing on an amazing video stockpile from the 1980s and ’90s, “Whirlybird” is an editing feat. (The news clips and Marika consistently refer to Zoey by the name she was known by during the period recounted, before a gender transition.) The movie also has elements of a psychodrama: Building a family business around adrenaline turns out to be suboptimal for relationships and health. Zoey had a heart attack at 35. Despite the fires, floods and body count, “Whirlybird” plays like one big home movie.WhirlybirdNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

Set in a movie theater, this droll splatterfest is aimed straight at the jugular.On a rainy evening in Montevideo in 1993, a hulking figure enters a shabby movie theater where the day’s final showing of a horror feature is about to begin. The auditorium is almost empty — a young couple here, some boisterous teens there — and, in the projection booth, a distracted student (Luciana Grasso) is subbing for her ailing father. An encounter between the ominous figure and a young boy results in a dreamlike shot of multicolored candy balls bouncing down a staircase — an image that will later be repeated, only with far more disgusting spherical objects.“The Last Matinee” epitomizes a style I think of as slow horror — not in the sense of a foot-dragging narrative, but in the extreme patience and relish with which it attends to its abominations. The steady hand on this particular wheel belongs to the Uruguayan director Maxi Contenti, whose name hints at a placid temperament, yet whose tastes run to the gloriously gory. In one prime example, captured with amused precision by the cinematographer Benjamín Silva, the blood from a smoker’s sliced throat is upstaged by the milky haze of his final puff.Tipping his hat to the Italian thriller genre known as giallo, Contenti (who wrote the unfussy script with Manuel Facal) sets up a string of witty, highly specific slayings of audience members unaware they’re both voyeurs and prey. Underscoring this cheeky duality, the filmmakers cast Ricardo Islas — the real-life director of the 2011 feature playing in the theater — as the killer. He’s described in the press notes only as the Eye-Eater, which tells you everything you need to know; all I know is I may never look at a jar of pickles the same way again.The Last MatineeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In Spanish, with subtitles. In theaters. More

A young boy becomes obsessed with experiencing adult freedoms in this icy first feature.“When do you stop being a kid?,” John (Charlie Shotwell), 13, asks his bemused mother (Jennifer Ehle) midway through Pascual Sisto’s “John and the Hole.” The question offers a key to this modern-day fable, one that John is dangerously fixated on answering.Chilly, enigmatic and more than a little spooky, “John and the Hole” patrols the porous border between child and adult with more style than depth. Smart and unreadable, John takes unidentified medication and robotically slams tennis balls at an unseen coach. An air of bland obliviousness permeates his affluent, perfectly nice family, including a sweet-natured older sister (Taissa Farmiga) and a father (Michael C. Hall) who buys him expensive gifts. So when he enacts a perilous plan to achieve an ersatz independence, his behavior is all the more shocking.Tautly written by Nicolás Giacobone (adapting his own short story), “John and the Hole” reveals the fragility of prosperity as a shield against deep dysfunction. As Paul Ozgur’s camera, accompanied by Caterina Barbieri’s eerily minimalist score, floats lazily through John’s spacious home and over the treetops of a neighboring wood, the movie’s sleekness becomes a shell that’s difficult to breach. Distressing digressions to a conversation between a young girl and her mother emphasize the movie’s surreality and remind us that, for some, freedom can be more terrifying than seductive.Constructed with an artfulness that suggests ideological complexity, the movie is finally too withholding and ambiguous to fully engage. The entire cast is excellent, yet there’s something repellent about John’s inscrutability: His affect is too flat, his motives too mysterious. When he urges his mother’s friend to stay and have dinner with him, I found myself whispering to her, “Please don’t!”John and the HoleRated R for swear words and sociopathic behavior. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

The animated musical, about a kinkajou who goes on a journey to deliver a song, may have an uneven story, but the movie’s stellar songs, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, reflect the artist at his best.It’s all about the beat — in music and in “Vivo,” a new animated movie (streaming on Netflix) with an uneven story but dynamite songs from the “Hamilton” maestro himself, Lin-Manuel Miranda.In the film, from Sony Pictures Animation and directed by Kirk DeMicco, Vivo (Miranda), a musically talented kinkajou (a tropical mammal that looks like an adorable monkey-cat hybrid) busks the streets of Havana, Cuba, with his owner Andrés (Juan de Marcos). But after a tragedy, Vivo must journey to Florida to deliver a love song to his owner’s former musical partner and long-lost love, the famous Marta Sandoval (Gloria Estefan).A death, a journey, a multicultural cast of characters whose first language is music: “Vivo” feels like it’s in conversation with other recent animated movies with these themes, like “Coco” and “Soul.” The representation is essential, but there’s the risk of “brown characters finding grief and love through the beauty of music” becoming the new trope.Certainly “Vivo,” despite its exuberant beginning and heartfelt ending, struggles to offer more than odd turns and clichés in the rest of its story. The exacting Vivo is buddied up with the rambunctious purple-haired Gabi (Ynairaly Simo). Side characters — three off-brand Girl Scouts, two awkward spoonbills looking for love, a vicious python, Gabi’s exasperated mother — are meant to add humor and dramatic pitch but are too clumsily integrated to do much of either.So thank the Broadway gods for the film’s stellar music. Miranda’s songs incorporate his signature rapid-fire rapping, along with quick tempo changes and genre mash-ups. Gabi’s song, “My Own Drum,” with its grade-school Nicki Minaj-esque rap and auto-tune, is the jam I didn’t know I needed in my life.“Vivo” has cuteness to spare, even if the rest is hit or miss. But, we all know, the beat goes on.VivoRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

In this drama from Todd Stephens, Kier plays an Ohio hairdresser who takes a long walk to do one last job — on a corpse.The German-born actor Udo Kier has one of those faces that can turn from angelic to demonic in an instant. His eyes are in part heavenly lapis lazuli, in part impenetrable quartz. He’s an invariably uncanny presence. Directors who have hired him more than once include Paul Morrissey, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Dario Argento, Lars von Trier, and S. Craig Zahler.These days, more often than not, he’s cast in character roles, rarely asked to carry a movie. For “Swan Song” though, he’s in almost every frame. One could say he’s a revelation, but longtime Udo partisans always knew he had this kind of performance in him. And as the title of this movie, written and directed by Todd Stephens, indicates, the role is age-appropriate for the 76 year old.Kier plays Pat, a former hairdresser now in a Sandusky, Ohio, nursing home. Back in his heyday, his flamboyance was mostly accepted in this straight community as a byproduct of his profession. In assisted living, he sneaks More cigarettes and obsessively folds paper napkins. Soon a lawyer arrives, asking him to do, as they say in crime movies, one last job: to style a dead ex-friend for her funeral.There’s some bad blood here: “Bury her with bad hair,” Pat responds, despite the promise of a $25,000 honorarium. But he soon rouses himself and takes a long walk into town. Memories and hallucinations accompany his painful, sentimental journey.Kier is unfailingly captivating in the film, which makes it all the more bothersome that the film itself doesn’t match him. A few plot inconsistencies seem like arbitrary land mines designed to trip Pat up, and the device of having certain characters speak wisdom from beyond the grave doesn’t land.Swan SongNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More