Movies

This documentary on the strange case of Matt DeHart weaves uncertainty into its structure.Was Matt DeHart an Air National Guard veteran who, having spent time in hacktivist circles, stumbled on information so explosive that the F.B.I. had him physically tortured during an interrogation process? (That’s what he claimed when he fled to Canada after 2013.) Or was he a fugitive from justifiable charges of producing and transporting child pornography, a case he suggested had been concocted?Journalists who have covered the DeHart saga — and the summary above is only the tip of the iceberg — have tended to note when corroboration becomes impossible. The remarkable thing about “Enemies of the State,” a documentary directed by Sonia Kennebeck and executive produced by Errol Morris, no stranger to epistemological mysteries — is that it comes close to offering decisive yes and no answers, with evidence to back them up.It becomes a documentary about re-evaluating biases, a process that may well implicate the filmmakers. As Tor Ekeland, a lawyer who represented DeHart, says in the movie, “The only way to make the facts in this case make sense is to entertain some kind of wild conspiracy theory.” Kennebeck must have recognized the danger of doing just that. Matt’s parents, Paul and Leann, featured extensively, appear to have reached a point where no amount of paranoia would be unjustified, yet they seem utterly convinced of themselves. Even the third parties interviewed — the National Post journalist Adrian Humphreys, the McGill professor Gabriella Coleman — wind up confronting blind spots.Kennebeck weaves uncertainty into the formal design, staging re-enactments mingled with original audio, for instance. The movie is a spoiler deathtrap, but the questions it raises are fascinating.Enemies of the StateNot 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

Matt Damon plays a father determined to free his daughter from prison in the latest from Tom McCarthy, the director of “Spotlight.”A truism about American movies is that when they want to say something about the United States — something grand or profound or meaningful — they typically pull their punches. There are different reasons for this timidity, the most obvious being a fear of the audience’s tricky sensitivities. And so ostensibly political stories rarely take partisan stands, and movies like the ponderously earnest “Stillwater” sink under the weight of their good intentions.The latest from the director Tom McCarthy (“Spotlight”), “Stillwater” stars Matt Damon as Bill Baker. He’s a familiar narrative type with the usual late-capitalism woes, including the dead-end gigs, the family agonies, the wounded masculinity. He also has a touch of Hollywood-style exoticism: He’s from Oklahoma. A recovering addict, Bill now toggles between swinging a hammer and taking a knee for Jesus. Proud, hard, alone, with a cord of violence quaking below his impassivity, he lives in a small bleak house and lives a small bleak life. He doesn’t say much, but he’s got a real case of the white-man blues.He also has a burden in the form of a daughter, Allison (a miscast Abigail Breslin), who’s serving time in a Marseille prison, having been convicted of savagely killing her girlfriend. The story, which McCarthy conceived of (he shares script credit with several others), takes its inspiration from that of Amanda Knox, an American studying in Italy, who was convicted of a 2007 murder, a case that became an international scandal. Knox’s conviction was later overturned and she moved back to the United States, immortalized by lurid headlines, books, documentaries and a risible 2015 potboiler with Kate Beckinsale.Like that movie, which focuses on the sins of a vampiric, sensation-hungry media, “Stillwater” isn’t interested in the specifics of the Knox case but in its usefulness for moral instruction. Soon after it opens, and following a tour of Bill’s native habitat — with its industrial gothic backdrop and lonely junk-food dinners — he visits Allison, a trip he’s taken repeatedly. This time he stays. Allison thinks that she has a lead that will prove her innocence, which sends her father down an investigative rabbit hole and, for a time, quickens the movie’s pulse.McCarthy isn’t an intuitive or innovative filmmaker and, like a lot of actors turned directors, he’s more adept at working with performers than telling a story visually. Shot by Masanobu Takayanagi, “Stillwater” looks and moves just fine — it’s solid, professional — and Marseille, with its sunshine and noir, pulls its atmospheric weight as Bill maps the city, trying to chase clues and villains. Also earning his pay is the underutilized French Algerian actor Moussa Maaskri, playing one of those sly, world-weary private detectives who, like the viewer, figures things out long before Bill does.Much happens, including an abrupt, unpersuasive relationship with a French theater actress, Virginie (the electric Camille Cottin, from the Netflix show “Call My Agent!”). The character is a fantasy, a ministering angel with a hot bod and a cute tyke (Lilou Siauvaud); among her many implausible attributes, she isn’t ticked off by Bill’s inability to speak French. But Cottin, a charismatic performer whose febrile intensity is its own gravitational force, easily keeps you engaged and curious. She gives her character juice and her scenes a palpable charge, a relief given Bill’s leaden reserve.There’s little joy in Bill’s life; the problem is, there isn’t much personality, either. It’s clear that Damon and McCarthy have thought through this man in considered detail, from Bill’s plaid shirts to his tightly clenched walk. The character looks as if he hasn’t moved his bowels in weeks; if anything, he feels overworked, a product of too much conceptualizing and not enough feeling, identifiable humanity or sharp ideas. And because Bill doesn’t talk much, he has to emerge largely through his actions and tamped-down physicality, his lowered eyes and head partly obscured by a baseball hat that hangs over them like a visor.It is, as show people like to say, a committed performance, but it’s also a frustratingly flat one. Less character than conceit, Bill isn’t a specific father and uneasy American abroad; he’s a symbol. McCarthy tips his hand early in the first scene in Oklahoma with the image of Bill precisely framed in the center of a window of a house he’s helping demolish. A tornado has ripped through the region, leveling everything. When Bill pauses to look around, surveying the damage, the camera takes in the weeping survivors, the rubble and ruin. It’s a good setup, brimming with potential, but as the story develops, it becomes evident this isn’t simply a disaster, natural or otherwise. It’s an omen.Like “Nomadland” and any number of Sundance movies, “Stillwater” seizes on the classic figure of the American stoic, the rugged individualist whose self-reliance has become a trap, a dead end and — if all the narrative parts cohere — a tragedy. And like “Nomadland,” “Stillwater” tries to say something about the United States (“Ya Got Trouble,” as the Music Man sings) without turning the audience off by calling out specific names or advancing an ideological position. Times are tough, Americans are too (at least in movies). They keep quiet, soldier on, squint into the sun and the void. Bad things happen and it’s somebody’s fault, but it’s all so very vague.StillwaterRated R for violence and language. Running time: 2 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

There’s a stranger in town, and his touch is hypnotic, which is just what these icy, disaffected people needed.When Zenia (Alec Utgoff), a handsome masseur with an enigmatic smile, arrives at a wealthy gated community in Poland, he quickly gains a reputation among the depressed locals for his extraordinary — perhaps even magical — healing abilities. It doesn’t hurt that the majority of his clients are anguished women, and that Zenia’s warm, attentive touch purges them of their routine misery, if only for a little while.From Edward Scissorhands to Peter Sellers in “Being There,” the curious outsider figures as a spiritual balm to their bourgeois malaise. In many ways, “Never Gonna Snow Again,” which the Polish filmmaker Małgorzata Szumowska co-directed with the cinematographer Michał Englert, follows suit.Zenia, a Ukrainian migrant worker born exactly seven years before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, is no otherworldly idiot — though the condescension he faces suggests his employers believe otherwise.As Zenia becomes a community fixture, the lives of his alienated clients unfold in a series of vignettes, at turns bleakly somber, but also cheeky. We meet, among others, a housewife overwhelmed by her impudent children; an alcoholic woman obsessed with her three bulldogs; a bohemianesque widow whose creepy son manufactures synthetic drugs. Bored, they begin to lust after Zenia while dealing with their anxieties around class, climate change and Polish identity — issues that Szumowska and Englert subtly integrate, yet leave opaque.From the sterile symmetry of the neighborhood, composed of lifeless McMansions, the film cuts away to glimmering images of a shadowy forest, moments of uncanny enchantment meant to visualize the sublime experience produced by Zenia’s hypnosis sessions.Utgoff is irresistibly compelling, instilling in his character a silent yet singular presence worthy of the “superhero” status that he ultimately acquires. Yet Zenia, the flesh and bones human, emerges in fragments — a shimmying dance routine, a moonlit scooter ride with his security guard pal — indicating there’s much more here than meets the eye, if we could only truly see.Never Gonna Snow AgainNot rated. In Polish, Russian, French and Vietnamese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

Not even Emily Blunt, doing her best Katharine Hepburn impression, can keep this leaky boat ride afloat.Like Vogon poetry, the plot of Disney’s “Jungle Cruise” is mostly unintelligible and wants to beat you into submission. Manically directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, this latest derivation of a theme-park ride shoots for the fizzy fun of bygone romantic adventures like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981). That it misses has less to do with the heroic efforts of its female lead than with the glinting artifice of the entire enterprise.Emily Blunt plays Lily, a sassy British botanist weary of being disrespected by London’s chauvinistic scientific community. The Great War is in full swing, but Lily is obsessed with reaching the Amazon jungle to search for the Tree of Life, rumored to cure all ills. A roguish riverboat captain named Frank (Dwayne Johnson) is hired, and soon Lily and her fussy brother (Jack Whitehall) — whose discomfort with all things Amazonian is a running gag — are heading upriver into a host of digital dangers.As snakes, cannibals and maggoty supernatural beings rattle around the frame, “Jungle Cruise” exhibits a blatantly faux exoticism that feels as flat as the forced frisson between its two leads. The pace is hectic, the dialogue boilerplate (“The natives speak of this place with dread”), the general busyness a desperate dance for our attention. Jesse Plemons is briefly diverting as a nefarious German prince, and Edgar Ramírez pops up as a rotting Spanish conquistador named Aguirre. Werner Herzog must be thrilled.Buffeted by a relentless score and supported by a small town’s worth of digital artists, “Jungle Cruise” is less directed than whipped to a stiff peak before collapsing into a soggy mess.“Everything you see wants to kill you,” Frank tells his passengers. Actually, I think it just wants to take your money.Jungle CruiseRated PG-13 for chaste kissing and bloodless fighting. Running time 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters and on Disney+. More

In this drama featuring Winston Duke and Zazie Beetz, unborn souls are given a chance at life on Earth.“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov. We have been imagining and describing one of those ostensible eternities — the afterlife — for millenniums. “Nine Days,” the ambitious and often impressive debut feature from the writer-director Edson Oda, surprises by positing a prelife world, and a vetting process determining which souls are awarded a term on earth.In a small house in the middle of a desert, a stocky, quiet man named Will (Winston Duke) watches a bank of tube TVs, recording their feeds on VHS cassettes. These POVs show the lives of the people he’s “passed.”Just as he’s meeting, one by one, a new group of individuals to assess, one of his people in the world ends their life, which shakes Will to the core. He gets obsessed over why. Will this affect his ability to look at his new charges with fairness?“Nine Days” is more about questions than answers. It’s not an overtly political film, in any sense. Will’s screens don’t seem to depict any human beings who aren’t at least in the vicinity of the middle class. When Will is pitching his candidates on his process, he tells them of “the amazing opportunity of life,” and that if they pass they will be “born in a fruitful environment.” But later Will blurts out some thoughts to his friend and neighbor Kyo (Benedict Wong) suggesting Will believes himself something of a con man.The candidates are, arguably, stock characters with some sensitively added value. Alexander (Tony Hale) just wants to have beers and hang out. When he learns that Will himself once lived on earth — the film’s realm encompasses souls both “passed” and those never born — he can’t figure out why Will is reluctant. We know that Emma (Zazie Beetz) is going to be a special kind of free spirit by the insouciance she displays when showing up late for her first appointment.Oda is a very assured and sometimes inspired filmmaker, and he handles his actors beautifully. Duke and Beetz in particular deliver performances for the ages. And the movie’s inquiries, about ethics, morality, consciousness and the ability to hang on in this brief crack of light we’re sharing at the moment, are pertinent. But the narrative conceits of “Nine Days,” while exquisitely constructed, are intricate to the point of laborious. At times the movie almost sinks under their weight.Nine DaysRated R for language and themes. Running time 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

The study published Wednesday also showed that television is far behind film when it comes to representation of characters with disabilities.Let’s start with the good news: Significant depictions of disability on film and television shows have nearly tripled over the past decade compared with the previous 10 years. More

The actor and writer was hospitalized after he collapsed on the set of the show on Tuesday.Bob Odenkirk, the star of the AMC series “Better Call Saul,” was said to be in stable condition on Wednesday evening after suffering what his representatives said was “a heart-related incident.” More

The court decision that reversed the sexual assault conviction of Bill Cosby has prompted an unusual level of legal debate about the appropriate parameters of appellate review.The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Bill Cosby’s conviction has opened an unusually vigorous debate among the legal community in that state, and beyond, with critics suggesting the justices had overstepped their bounds in reversing findings of fact embraced by the trial court.Since being freed from prison last month, Cosby, 84, has tried to portray the decision as a full exoneration.But the court did not find Cosby to be innocent of charges he had drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand at his home outside Philadelphia in 2004.What it found was that prosecutors had violated Cosby’s due process rights by ignoring an oral promise a prior district attorney, Bruce L. Castor Jr., says he made to Cosby in 2005, assuring him that he would be immune from prosecution in the case.Castor said he had determined there was insufficient evidence to charge Cosby. Castor hoped, he said, that by promising immunity he would remove Cosby’s ability to cite his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and induce him to testify in any civil suit Constand might file.Constand did file suit, and Cosby testified, acknowledging giving quaaludes to women he wanted to have sex with. At his criminal trial more than a decade later, prosecutors entered that statement into evidence.The Supreme Court ruled that Cosby had relied on Castor’s assurances when he provided the potentially incriminating evidence and that Castor’s successors, bound by his promise, should never have charged Cosby years later.But critics of the decision say that, unlike two lower courts, the justices ignored compelling reasons to question whether such a promise of immunity ever existed.“I think the court was in error and read the case incorrectly,” said Lynne M. Abraham, a former Philadelphia district attorney and judge. “The court’s decision was a terrible blow to victims and a blow to prosecutors’ ability to prosecute someone where the evidence tended to show he was a predator and when all sorts of things suggested there wasn’t a promise.”The Supreme Court decided to reverse Cosby’s sexual assault conviction because it found that Cosby had relied on a 2005 promise of immunity from Bruce L. Castor Jr., the district attorney at the time.Matt Rourke/Associated PressWhat is more, these critics say the court overstepped its traditional bounds as an appeals tribunal in reversing the findings of fact by the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, the trial court that had decided no binding promise existed. Appellate courts typically do not overturn findings of fact by the trial court if they are backed by the record. They serve to examine whether lower courts correctly interpreted the law and followed the procedures to ensure a fair trial. The facts, many legal analysts argue, are best determined by the trial court, which has heard witnesses and overseen evidence in person.“The most fundamental thing that struck me,” said Dennis McAndrews, a Pennsylvania lawyer and former prosecutor, “was they said the trial judge’s findings were supported by the record and they were bound by them and then they went off and made their own factual findings. It’s exceptional to see an appellate court go to such lengths to find their own facts.”Several veteran Pennsylvania-based lawyers said they could not remember a Supreme Court decision that had spurred so much second-guessing. Some law experts have taken to Twitter to publish critiques of the decision.Reaction to the ruling has been strong outside legal circles too, especially among the more than 50 other women who have accused Cosby of sexual abuse and who, because the statutes of limitations had run out, viewed the Constand case as perhaps their last shot at justice.In the midst of it all, the chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Max Baer, decided to discuss the ruling on television — a rarity for judges. He defended it and called Cosby’s prosecution a “reprehensible bait and switch” by the government.To be sure, there are lawyers who agree with him and who applaud the court’s 6-1 ruling, a notable consensus on a difficult matter. They believe it delivered a strong message about prosecutorial overreach — about district attorneys’ sticking by the promises they make, even if those promises were ill-advised. “They got it right on the due process violation because what Castor did was basically a promise,” said David Rudovsky, a defense attorney and senior fellow at University of Pennsylvania Law School.But the “promise” remains a matter of much dispute.Castor said that, although he believed Constand’s account, she had hurt her credibility as a complainant by waiting a year to report Cosby and by continuing to have contact with him after the alleged assault. He said he decided he could not secure a conviction, so he made the promise, he said, as a tactic to get Constand a measure of justice in the civil case.But the promise was never written down. The prosecutor who handled the Cosby investigation with Castor, his chief deputy, Risa Vetri Ferman, said he never told her about it. Castor pointed to a news release he had issued announcing the end of the criminal investigation as evidence that an immunity agreement existed. But the news release does not mention anything about immunity. It does mention the anticipated civil case.Daniel Filler, dean of Drexel University’s Kline School of Law, said one has to question whether the average person would have gotten the benefit of the doubt that Cosby did. “Because there is no documentation that this promise was made, only this public statement that does not track exactly with what Castor said,” he said.Castor said he briefed one of Cosby’s lawyers at the time about his plan to offer Cosby immunity. But the lawyer, Walter Phillips, was dead by the time the promise became an issue and Cosby was criminally charged in 2015. Another of Cosby’s lawyers from the original case, John Schmitt, testified that Phillips had told him about it.Castor said he also discussed the immunity arrangement at the time with Constand’s lawyers. The two lawyers, Dolores M. Troiani and Bebe H. Kivitz, denied that.Andrea Constand, left, and her lawyer Dolores Troiani. The lawyer has denied that Castor told her about the promise of immunity he says he made to Cosby.Matt Slocum/Associated PressGiven that there was no written immunity agreement, several lawyers said they found it odd that Cosby never drew attention to the promise he had secured before taking questions at his deposition in the civil case. Constand’s civil case ended in 2006 in a settlement under which she received $3.38 million. During the negotiations, court papers show that Cosby’s lawyers sought to include a provision barring her from cooperating with any future law enforcement investigation, though by Castor’s account, the lawyers had already secured immunity for their client.Critics of the Supreme Court’s decision point to what they say are the inconsistent explanations Castor gave about what he had agreed to. When the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office reopened the investigation into Cosby, Castor alerted the office that its prosecution might be hampered by a promise he had made. Castor was at the time campaigning to regain his former post as district attorney against an opponent who later made Castor’s decision not to prosecute Cosby in 2005 an issue in the race. Castor told the office in an email that his agreement with Cosby meant that the deposition testimony could not be used against the entertainer. But he said he had not given Cosby full immunity.“Naturally, if a prosecution could be made out without using what Cosby said, or anything derived from what Cosby said, I believed then and continue to believe that a prosecution is not precluded,” Castor wrote in the email.A few months later in court, he testified that, actually, the promise had extended full immunity to Cosby.The trial judge ultimately ruled in 2016 that Castor’s explanations of the agreement, and Schmitt’s corroborating testimony, were not credible.In an interview, Castor denied he had been inconsistent and said his meaning had always been that Cosby could never be prosecuted on the Constand charges. “The only way to guarantee, to unlock the Fifth Amendment protection was to guarantee he would not be prosecuted,” he said. He said that when he had said he was still open to prosecuting Cosby, he meant that prosecutors might be able to find evidence in the testimony about Cosby’s encounters with other women, not Constand.In its recent ruling, the Supreme Court agreed that Castor’s descriptions of the promise were “inconsistent and equivocal,” but it held that he had been the district attorney, a powerful position, and that Cosby had a right to rely on his assurances. It emphasized the fact that, although there had been no formal agreement, Cosby had agreed to sit for four days of deposition in the Constand civil suit, a decision the justices viewed as evidence that a promise must have existed. By their reasoning, Castor’s successors were breaking that promise, however informal, and undermining his due process rights by using his deposition against Cosby.“The law is clear that, based upon their unique role in the criminal justice system, prosecutors generally are bound by their assurances, particularly when defendants rely to their detriment upon those guarantees,” the court’s majority opinion said.In particular, the Supreme Court parsed the language of the 2005 news release in which Castor announced his decision not to prosecute Cosby. It read, in part: “The District Attorney does not intend to expound publicly on the details of his decision for fear that his opinions and analysis might be given undue weight by jurors in any contemplated civil action. District Attorney Castor cautions all parties to this matter that he will reconsider this decision should the need arise.”The trial court had read Castor’s statement as an acknowledgment that, rather than agreeing to never prosecute Cosby, Castor had retained the option of revisiting the case. That interpretation was in line with what Castor told the Philadelphia Inquirer about the news release in 2015. “I put in there that if any evidence surfaced that was admissible then I would revisit the issue,” he said.The Supreme Court, however, held that Castor was only holding open the possibility that he might again publicly discuss the case.Some legal analysts had thought Cosby stood a chance of overturning his conviction on different grounds. The trial court had allowed prosecutors to bring in five other women, who were not part of the case, to testify that they too had been drugged and assaulted by Cosby. Cosby’s lawyers had argued that a jury would have a difficult time looking past the testimony of the women in deciding what had happened with Constand.To the surprise of many lawyers watching the case, the Supreme Court said it did not need to address that issue because it was moot once the jurists had decided the prosecution should not have happened because of the promise.“The very premise that somehow this promise was made, it’s not in writing and this very rich, well-lawyered person relied upon it and it’s therefore enforceable, is crazy,” said Nancy Erika Smith, a civil rights lawyer in New Jersey. “The trial court saw Bruce Castor testify and found Bruce Castor not credible, usually that’s the end of the story.”The Supreme Court majority argued in its decision that it had not, in fact, gone beyond its role, and had not revisited facts already decided by the trial court. It pointed out that it had joined the trial court in finding that there had been no formal agreement. Two of the justices said Castor’s explanations for his actions were “odd and ever-shifting.”John F.X. Reilly, a former deputy district attorney in Pennsylvania’s Delaware County, said he was not persuaded.“The majority acknowledged but overlooked a fundamental principle of appellate review,” he said, “deference to a trial court’s factual findings that are supported by the record.”In reversing Cosby’s conviction, the Supreme Court ruled additionally that he could not be tried again on the Constand charges. Judge Baer, on television, said, unpopular or not, the decision was meant to prevent government overreach.“Nobody is sympathetic to Bill Cosby,” he said. “That’s to protect 13 million Pennsylvanians against that kind of conduct.”Prosecutors said they were examining the possibility of appeal. More