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      ‘Her Man’: A Relic of a Bygone Hollywood, Now Restored

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      Now streaming, this mildly racy romance, from 1930, arrived before the censorious Production Code. What really sets the film apart is its incredible tracking shots.“Her Man,” a snappy bit of hokum inspired by the venerable crime-of-passion ballad “Frankie and Johnny,” was well received when it arrived in 1930. Decades later, the mildly racy romance, with lightly disguised hookers and pimps, would become a bone of contention between critics conversant with classic Hollywood.Periodically rediscovered, the movie is streaming in a crisp new digital restoration via the Museum of Modern Art’s Virtual Cinema. Although opinions vary on the American director Tay Garnett’s auteur status, his high-spirited lowlife drama is well worth a look.Garnett (1894-1977) broke into movies writing slapstick comedies for Mack Sennett and Hal Roach. “Her Man,” released four years before the censorious Production Code, is set in a roomy Havana “dance hall” named the Thalia, catering to (and robbing from) drunken American sailors. The tale is full of comic roughhouse. In his indispensable history “The American Cinema,” the critic Andrew Sarris characterized Garnett as a “rowdy vaudevillian” and “an artist with the kind of rough edges that cause the overcivilized French sensibility to swoon in sheer physical frustration.”Be that as it may, “Her Man” was a favorite of Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque Française. John Ashbery evidently saw the movie in Paris and cites it in his poem in praise of Helen Twelvetrees, the fragile Brooklyn-born actress who plays the teenage “bar-girl” Frankie.Twelvetrees, who committed suicide in 1958, was best known for starring in lachrymose melodramas. She’s spunkier here, caught between her shiv-wielding “protector” Johnnie (Ricardo Cortez, né Jacob Krantz) and a Sir Galahad figure, the sweet-singing American sailor Dan (Phillips Holmes, described in Ashbery’s poem as “awkwardly handsome”). “You’re just a dame and a pretty regular little dame at that,” Dan tells her on a date that winds up at a mission on St. Patrick’s Day.As befits an early talkie, “Her Man” is intermittently stagy, most often when the Broadway diva Marjorie Rambeau, emphatically playing an aging hooker with alcohol issues and a maternal interest in Frankie, is on set. But it’s also enlivened by a number of spirited secondary players. Thelma Todd, a comic beauty in several Marx Brothers movies, appears in a black wig with spit curls as the other woman, Nelly. Franklin Pangborn, a specialist in high-strung roles, is surprisingly bellicose, repeatedly mixing it up with Danny’s sailor pals (James Gleason and Harry Sweet). Their idiotic ongoing struggle for possession of a bowler hat evokes Garnett’s work with Laurel and Hardy.There’s an abundance of running gags, but what really sets “Her Man” apart is its fluidity. Garnett orchestrates several extended dolly shots through Havana’s red-light district — the camera navigating crowds, horse carts and fistfights. The accompanying sound mix is no less swoon-worthy. The movie, which often seems like one long barroom brawl, ends with the destruction of the Thalia set. (Evidently, Garnett hired a number of college football players and former boxers as extras.)“Her Man” is a period piece in more ways than one. The cavalcade of drunken antics is a reminder that while the Production Code didn’t fully exist in 1930, Prohibition was still in effect.Her ManStreaming through June 10; moma.org. More

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      Mike Faist Isn’t Sure About This Whole Acting Thing

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      “I can’t tell if I hate acting or if I love it too much,” he said ahead of the debut of the Amazon series “Panic.” Coming soon, a major role in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” For now, he’s going to Ohio.Tall and lanky, looking as if he were born wearing Wranglers, Mike Faist cuts quite a striking figure in the Amazon Prime series “Panic”: His character, Dodge Mason, is a Stetson-wearing rodeo dude who breaks untamed horses, then soulfully gazes into their eyes. More

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      ‘Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue’ Review: China Through Writers’ Eyes

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      Jia Zhangke’s documentary illuminates a vast and complicated history in a series of intimate conversations.The films of Jia Zhangke, documentary and fictional, zoom in on the granular details of individual lives. At the same time, they are chapters in the single, unimaginably complicated story of China’s transformation in the decades since the 1949 revolution. Jia, who was born in 1970, tends to dwell in the recent past, and to circle back to Shanxi, the part of northern China where he grew up, but he’s also attentive to the continuities of history and geography, the connections between generations and places.His latest documentary, “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue,” is intimate and specific, consisting mainly of interviews with three writers — Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua and Liang Hong — associated with Shanxi. They reminisce about their families and careers, and also about their sometimes wrenching, sometimes exhilarating experiences during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution in the ’60s and ’70s, and later periods of urbanization and capitalist expansion. Colleagues, neighbors and family members, listed as “witnesses” in the end credits, contribute their own anecdotes and insights. The movie is an affecting group portrait and also a complex and subtle piece of literary criticism.Watching it, I wished I was more familiar with the work of its subjects. Some of it has been translated into English, notably Jia Pingwa’s “Ruined City” and Yu’s “To Live,” which was the basis for Zhang Yimou’s acclaimed 1994 film. But Jia Zhangke’s patient listening and the elegant clarity of the movie’s structure — it advances in roughly chronological order, divided into short sections that explain where it’s going — make it accessible to the curious as well as illuminating to the already knowledgeable.More than that, “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue” demystifies historical episodes that are often presented, at least in the West, as abstractions, and personalizes large-scale events. Politics hovers over the writers’ lives, but their sense of national and regional history is filtered through work, family and landscape. Jia Pingwa recalls the hardship that his father, a teacher, suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Yu talks about his career transition from dentist to novelist. Liang delves into painful recollections of her mother’s illness and her sister’s marriage. Between the lines of their conversations with the unseen director you can intuit the elusive larger story — about the evolution of a poor, rural corner of an emerging global superpower — that is both his subject and theirs.Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns BlueNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Moby Doc’ Review: He Understands How He’s an Unlikely Pop Star

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      The movie is directed by Robert Gordon Bralver, but it’s a late-life self-realization project for the musician.In “Moby Doc,” animation, staged dream sequences, skits and archival footage form a portrait of the title artist, the musician Moby. While the credited director is Robert Gordon Bralver, the movie is clearly a late-life self-realization project for Moby himself.Small of frame and short of hair, Moby understands the ways in which he’s an unlikely pop star. Boy, does he ever. His presentation is a textbook example of the art of self-aggrandizement through affected self-effacement.He narrates the film, sometimes onscreen, speaking into a phone as if he’s having a conversation. The text (written by Moby with the director) could have used an editor. Here’s a passage: “My father worked in the chemistry department at Columbia University and he brought home some test rats. They were in their twenties, they were in New York and they hung out in the Village and they talked about poetry and politics.” Wait — the rats?What Moby leaves out of his account is as revealing as the tales of homelessness and addiction he puts in. Sampling is a hallmark of electronic dance music, and many songs on his blockbuster album “Play” were constructed around bits lifted from the work of African American musicians. You’d be hard pressed to learn much about that from this documentary.Indeed, other musicians come up only to convey Moby’s sense of cool, as in when he sports an Agnostic Front T-shirt, or spends a few minutes remembering his friendship with David Bowie. He also speaks of “dating” movie stars, but prudently does not say the name of the one movie star who publicly stated that no, she didn’t date him, after he mentioned her in his print memoir.“Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited,” Orson Welles once said of Woody Allen. Ditto with this guy.Moby DocNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘A Quiet Place Part II’ Review: Pump Up the Volume

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      This sequel to John Krasinski’s alien-invasion blockbuster is brasher, louder and less focused than its predecessor.Movies need endings, but franchises need cliffhangers, and “A Quiet Place Part II” is emblematic of this problem. The first “A Quiet Place” (2018) gave us a beautifully tragic finale, one that emphasized the story’s core themes of human resilience and familial devotion. It was almost perfect, and it could have been enough.The film’s unexpected success, however, gave Paramount Pictures other ideas. And while this new installment is, like its predecessor, wonderfully acted and intuitively directed (by John Krasinski, who is solely responsible for the story this time around), it has also largely replaced the hushed horror of the original with full-on action. Faster, coarser and far noisier, “Part II” sacrifices emotional depth for thriller setups that do less to advance the plot than grow the younger characters.A tensely orchestrated opening rewinds to Day 1 of the alien invasion as Lee and Evelyn Abbott (Krasinski and Emily Blunt) and their three children enjoy a small-town Little League game. Once again employing a combination of terrifying visual effects and unsettling sound design, Krasinski and his team build a sequence of kinetic chaos that serves as both prologue to the first movie and primer for those who unwisely skipped it.Catapulted to Day 474, mere minutes after the earlier film’s devastating conclusion, we find the remaining family members — including the newborn whose birth was a petrifying highlight of the previous installment — seeking shelter with a former neighbor, Emmett (Cillian Murphy), in an abandoned mill. Emmett, withdrawn and bereaved, is a less than congenial host. Nevertheless, when Evelyn’s daughter, Regan (still played to perfection by the deaf actor Millicent Simmonds), sneaks off to follow a radio signal she believes indicates other survivors, he agrees to follow and bring her home.Splitting the film into two separate story lines, Krasinski strains to replicate the bonding that gave “A Quiet Place” its heart — scenes of tender domesticity that paused the horror and allowed us to exhale. And while the remainder of “Part II” never quite rises to the vigor and excitement of its prologue, its action-movie commitments leave little room for the characters to mourn their losses. So as we follow Regan and Emmett’s sometimes harrowing adventures; watch her injured brother, Marcus (Noah Jupe), fight to protect the baby back at the steel mill; and worry about Evelyn as she scavenges for oxygen and medical supplies, “Part II” becomes primarily a story of children forced to grow up too fast and see too much.The aliens themselves, though, remain unfathomable, wanting nothing more than to eradicate us. (An idea that now, more than a year after the film’s original release date, feels uncomfortably metaphorical.) We know that they’re blind, navigate by sound, and that the feedback from Regan’s cochlear implant gives them the heebie-jeebies. But what do they eat? (If not humans, what are all those teeth for?) Are there baby beasties? Show me the nests!Though in many respects an exemplary piece of filmmaking, “Part II” remains hobbled by a script that resolves two separate crises while leaving the movie itself in limbo. At least until Part III.A Quiet Place Part IIRated PG-13 for toothy monsters and skeevy humans. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Plan B’ Review: A Joy Ride in Search of Emergency Contraception

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      Two teenagers embark on a madcap road trip to Planned Parenthood in this comedy from Natalie Morales.In the endearing comedy “Plan B,” Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) and Lupe (Victoria Moroles) are teenage best friends, bonded by hormonal longings and their will to sneak around their strict but loving parents.Together, the pair throw a party when Sunny’s mom is out of town, and impulsively, Sunny has sex for the first time. When she wakes up, she realizes that she slept with a condom inside her body, risking an unplanned pregnancy. Emergency contraception is needed, and Lupe is right alongside her friend as she runs to retrieve it.The only problem is that Sunny and Lupe live in South Dakota, a state that allows pharmacists to deny medication based on objections to reproductive rights. Sunny and Lupe are refused morning after pills at their local pharmacy, so they take to the road in search of the nearest Planned Parenthood, making room on their route for rendezvous with playground drug dealers and concerts headlined by crushes.This buddy comedy (streaming on Hulu) was directed by the actress Natalie Morales, and her filmmaking demonstrates the same easy confidence she has shown as a performer in movies like “Battle of the Sexes” and TV series like “Dead To Me.” The pace isn’t rushed, the punch lines are casually underplayed and the performances are relaxed and charismatic. The emphasis in “Plan B” stays on its characters and their relationships with each other, and this grounded sense of care lends a sense of assurance to more risqué sequences — including an extended scene of full frontal male nudity.The movie doesn’t make a joke of Sunny and Lupe’s concerns about pregnancy, dating and parental expectations, and in turn, it’s a delight to laugh through their goofier exploits.Plan BNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Blue Miracle’ Review: Fishing Lessons

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      Mexican orphans find hope through a fishing tournament in this cloying underdog Netflix drama.Gratingly sentimental and simplistic, Julio Quintana’s “Blue Miracle,” set in Cabo San Lucas in 2014, turns a potentially compelling underdog tale into a sermon. But if you’re in the mood to see Dennis Quaid learning and growing — and engaging in sappy conversations about fatherhood — then step right up.As the prizewinning fisherman Wade Malloy, Quaid evinces a manic desperation that, were it tended to, would be inconvenient to the script’s homily-strewn march toward uplift. Temperamentally grumpy and ethically malleable, Malloy learns he can only enter the latest fishing tournament if he has a local man on his team. Enter Papa Omar (Jimmy Gonzales), the saintly director of an imperiled orphanage. In debt to the bank for over $100,000, Omar needs the contest’s prize money to avoid eviction. That he doesn’t know one end of a fishing rod from the other is seemingly irrelevant.Based on a true story, “Blue Miracle” suffers mightily from slapdash plotting and superficial moralizing. (A scene where Omar is tempted by his criminal past needlessly emphasizes his reformed bona fides.) Realism is not a priority: When the orphanage is flooded by Hurricane Odile, the water appears to disappear of its own accord. Neither is it made clear why three orphans — broadly stamped as the smart one, the funny one and the tough kid with issues — are also included on the fishing crew, given their contribution to the task at hand can charitably be described as minimal.What is obvious, though, is that if the movie’s depiction of events is even close to accurate, its outcome is indeed a miracle.Blue MiracleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      'American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally' Review

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      Meadow Williams plays Mildred Gillars in this plodding and ultimately infuriatingly noncommittal movie.Mildred Gillars was an American woman who propagandized for the Nazis on German state radio for much of World War II. While not as well known as her Pacific counterpart “Tokyo Rose,” she acquired enough of a cachet to be nicknamed “Axis Sally” by contemporary troops who weren’t buying what she was selling.Directed by Michael Polish from a script by Polish, Vance Owen and Daryl Hicks, “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally,” a fictionalized version of her story, was executive produced by Meadow Williams, who plays Gillars. The movie begins with her arrest in Germany after the war. Gillars is extradited to Washington and indicted on many counts of treason and conspiracy. Her case is dumped in the lap of the gruff lawyer James Laughlin, played, well, gruffly by Al Pacino.As the case moves to trial, the movie intercuts flashbacks detailing Gillars’s distinctly nonbrilliant career in Germany, from meeting with a condescending Joseph Goebbels to bedroom strategizing with her lover, who’s also her radio producer. Williams plays Gillars as a not particularly clever or sympathetic tough cookie doing what she needs to do to “survive.” The argumentation conveyed through both the performance and the script is weak.This is a plodding and ultimately infuriatingly noncommittal movie. Its special pleadings are all over the map. And to make them, the filmmakers distort truth; for instance, mangling a famed Ernest Hemingway quote on the nature of war to make it specific to World War II. If Mildred Gillars has a story worth telling in a feature film, this isn’t it.American Traitor: The Trial of Axis SallyRated R for language, violence. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In select theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More