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      ‘Monday’ Review: A Year of Love and Its Hangovers

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      Fiery physical contact keeps an expat couple together in Greece, and the sex scenes are enough for a half-dozen movies.This movie’s first image is of a disco ball; the first song on its soundtrack is Donna Summer’s 1977 “I Feel Love.” But “Monday” isn’t a period piece.The director Argyris Papadimitropoulos, who co-wrote the movie with Rob Hayes, understands that for some partyers from the Balearic Islands to the Mediterranean — this movie’s English-speaking soon-to-be-lovers are introduced to each other while getting their freak on in the director’s native Greece — staying young involves nostalgia for a sybaritic era you didn’t actually live through.Mickey (Sebastian Stan), a D.J., and Chloe (Denise Gough), a lawyer, meet cute, and utterly smashed, on a Friday night, and wake up the next morning naked on a beach. They’re hauled off by cops to an embarrassed but not terribly traumatic reckoning with the law. These attractive characters are well past their 20s, which by some lights makes them a hair too old to be carrying on like this. Which is part of the film’s point, in fact.The movie chronicles more than one weekend — it follows the relationship over almost a year, but each sequence kicks off on a Friday and ends on a Monday. Movie enthusiasts who bemoan that contemporary film is bereft of both romance and sex take note: The glue that keeps these two together is fiery physical contact, and the sex scenes are enough for a half-dozen movies.Where their other affinities lie is something of a puzzle, but frequent intoxication can render such questions moot. The director’s semi-skewering of rom-com clichés, including the venerable race-to-the-airport bit, underscores their mutual unsuitability.While “Monday” is not quite as bracing as Papadimitropoulos’s prior feature, “Suntan,” it’s a sharply observed, well-acted picture with a lot of tart detail and a few real stings in its tail.MondayRated R for sexuality, and plenty of it. Language, too. In English and Greek, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts’ Review: He Made a ‘Pill for the Pain’

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      Blues, silhouettes, two-dimensional figures at play. This artist created mystical experiences from whatever scraps he could find.Many of the works by the Alabama artist Bill Traylor, stark silhouette drawings with striking, significant blocks of color, are drawn on scraps of paper, or someone else’s stationery — things like that. This wasn’t Traylor’s way of making a postmodern statement; he was just using the art supplies he had.Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 and died in 1949. His work is an enigmatic and vital part of the American art canon. This documentary, directed by Jeffrey Wolf, is a plain, sincere, nourishing account of the artist. Wolf makes excellent use of photo and film archives, laying out the territory that fed Traylor’s vision: dirt roads, railroad tracks, backwoods. These places, the critic and musician Greg Tate notes in the film, lay the ground for the “mystical realm” of Traylor’s work: The deliberately two-dimensional figures and the limited but bold colors have the transfixing power of a waking dream.In this realm the color blue is particularly significant. Tate waxes eloquent on embracing “the blues” in order to “keep the blues off.” The visual artist Radcliffe Bailey says of his own work, “That’s Traylor’s blue, not Yves Klein. I picked up that blue from him.”The evocations of Montgomery’s Monroe Street in the 1930s and ’40s — that era’s “city that never sleeps,” according to one interviewee — are vivid. Traylor set up shop there, outside a pool hall, drawing with his blunt instruments and available paper and sleeping in the coffin storage room of a nearby funeral home. His health problems eventually led to the amputation of one of his legs. In his drawings he often looked back — to moments of respite from the traumatic world he grew up in, such as afternoons at a local swimming hole.“I see his work as a pill for the pain,” Bailey says in the film. It remains powerful medicine today.Bill Traylor: Chasing GhostsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Downstream to Kinshasa’ Review: Sisyphean Persistence

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      Dieudo Hamadi’s documentary follows survivors of war as they demand long-overdue government compensation.The bow of a barge cuts through rippling water, carrying a boatload of people down the Congo River. Crammed in with barely any space to move, the passengers banter, dance, cook, eat, sleep and cling desperately to sheets of tarpaulin when the rain pours.The camera stays with a small group of disabled men and women within this jostling mass. These are the survivors of a bloody six-day conflict fought between Uganda and Rwanda in Kisangani, a city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 2000. They are on their way to Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, to demand their long-overdue government compensation, which the survivors say amounts to $1 billion.
      A documentary about Sisyphean persistence in the face of institutional indifference, “Downstream to Kinshasa” is riveting in these boat scenes. The director Dieudo Hamadi enters the fray with his subjects, his gaze neither voyeuristic nor ethnographic. As he threads through the boat with his hand-held phone camera, his lens is lashed by the wind and raindrops; later, when the survivors demonstrate at Congo’s parliament, the police repeatedly swat the director’s camera away.Hamadi intersperses these electric scenes of protest with quieter moments of the survivors fiddling with their cheap and uncomfortable prosthetic limbs, debating strategy and staging plays about their experiences. The film sometimes flags in energy as it cuts between these different strands, but its pace feels faithful to just how halting the fight for justice can be when democracy becomes impenetrable to those it serves. Watching the subjects of “Downstream to Kinshasa” — whose tenacity the movie honors but never romanticizes — it’s hard not to wonder: What good is the right to protest if it falls on deaf ears?Downstream to KinshasaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In Lingala and Swahili, with subtitles. On virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Why Did You Kill Me?’ Review: To Catfish a Killer

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      In this Netflix true crime documentary, murder meets Myspace.“Why Did You Kill Me?” tells the story of a terrible and arbitrary killing: the death of a young woman named Crystal Theobald in Riverside, California, who was shot when a member of a neighborhood gang opened fire on her car. Theobald had no connection whatsoever to her killer, and indeed the murder seemed so random that investigators didn’t initially know how to proceed with the case.Theobald’s death was tragic. But the circumstances were not exactly sensational, or even particularly unique — a pretty meager basis, in other words, for a feature length true crime documentary, where the compelling details of a case are its entire appeal. “Why Did You Kill Me?” (streaming on Netflix) seizes on the one intriguing wrinkle to be found: the efforts of Belinda Lane, Crystal’s mother, to solve the murder herself, by creating a fake profile on the social media site Myspace and befriending possible suspects.The director, Fredrick Munk, dramatizes Belinda’s true-crime catfishing by showing us Myspace from the desktop-POV style of films like the thriller “Searching” and the horror movie “Unfriended.” But these virtual recreations, as well as Munk’s use of handcrafted miniatures and a pulsing electronic score that takes cues from Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive,” feel like vain attempts to invigorate limp material.Munk avoids grappling with anything serious or difficult — for instance, the socio-economic factors that produce these kinds of killings in the first place. Instead, the movie fixates on the case’s one novelty, its tangential connection to an outdated social media site. Just because a crime is true doesn’t mean it’s interesting. And as “Why Did You Kill Me?” makes clear, without substance, a dash of style won’t do.Why Did You Kill Me?Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Beate’ Review: Bad Habits

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      Factory workers and nuns team up to make lingerie in this half-baked comedy from Italy.In “Beate,” (“Blessed”) lingerie factory workers and an order of nuns team up against a treacherous businesswoman threatening to outsource their jobs and remodel the convent into a hotel resort. It’s an intriguingly outlandish formula for a potentially empowering tale of female collaboration. Unfortunately, this half-baked comedy from Italy dozes off at the wheel.Spunky single mother Armida (Donatella Finocchiaro) rallies her crew of seamstresses into starting their own lingerie company when their employer abruptly gives them the boot via text message. Covertly using the factory’s equipment, they eventually hit the jackpot by designing luxury garments adorned with scraps of beaded embroidery procured from the nunnery.The director Samad Zarmadili cobbles together this underdog story like a slapdash sitcom episode. We’re supposed to be tickled at the notion of foul-mouthed working women laboring alongside brides of Christ (assembling racy intimates, no less!), but the film remains yawningly polite and prudish. The sole provocateur is Armida’s lover (Paolo Pierobon), a second-rate harlequin who winkingly delivers salacious sales pitches to potential buyers.Despite its attempts to deliver a message about collective power, the film hardly veers away from its leading lady, whose back story also feels random and perfunctory. Finocchiaro’s feisty performance is sabotaged by a script that scrambles her character’s motivations, while an out-of-left-field personal dilemma dulls the climactic fallout (and the entire point of the movie, really).At best “Beate” is a curious artifact that vaguely nods at the history of Italian fashion manufacturing, the country’s Catholic heritage, and the human consequences of rampant privatization. But maybe that’s giving it too much credit.BeateNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘In the Earth’ Review: Grassroots Horror

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      Ben Wheatley gets back to basics with this horror movie conceived during the pandemic.Movies evolve, and one day it will be possible to look at “In the Earth” and not see the contingencies of pandemic filmmaking. The director, Ben Wheatley, started writing it at the beginning of the lockdown in Britain, and elements of the finished product — the outdoor setting; references to quarantine, a third wave and a disease ravaging a city; the actors’ surgical masks at the beginning — bear unavoidable hallmarks of the past year.Viewed now, the film’s resourceful, even ingenious solutions to problems double as distractions; as those diminish, some of what is potent about the movie may also subside. What will be left is a back-to-basics effort from Wheatley, who has lately dabbled in splashy literary adaptations (J.G. Ballard in “High-Rise,” Daphne du Maurier in last year’s remake of “Rebecca”) but earned his cult reputation straddling horror and dark comedy in lower-budget fare like “Kill List” and “A Field in England.”Now the setting is a forest in England. “In the Earth” trails Alma (Ellora Torchia) and Martin (Joel Fry) on a mission to meet up with Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), who is about a two-day walk deep into the woods. Her communications have stopped, and we’ve been told that “people get a bit funny” out there. Dr. Wendle’s research — involving trees connected and controlled in a network that behaves like a brain — sounds more than a tad peculiar.But reaching her isn’t easy. Alma and Martin stumble on an abandoned tent whose occupants may have been murdered. They are jumped at night by someone who steals their shoes. They encounter Zach (Reece Shearsmith), a back-to-nature survivalist who keeps his social distance until — in two displays of debatable first-aid skill — he gets far closer to Martin than Martin would like. Zach’s insistence, as he wields an ax for surgery, that he’s acting in Martin’s best interest makes for one of the funnier gags, and the characters’ repeated claims that there is no time to get to a hospital become almost a gallows joke.Wheatley, who led hit men into a den of occult ritual in “Kill List,” isn’t one to let coherence get in the way of a good high concept. Expecting “In the Earth” to reconcile its influences (is this a plague movie, a folktale or science fiction?) is missing the point. As a glue, the movie employs a moody synth score from Clint Mansell, composing in a vein reminiscent of John Carpenter, whose presence hovers over several story developments. (Alma’s method of breaching a dangerous, encircling fog owes something to both versions of “Village of the Damned.”)The director operates with a faith that almost any plot element can be assimilated in a climactic freakout of editing. (Wheatley did his own.) And if the bigger picture of “In the Earth” doesn’t appear fully realized — this is a movie not just of the moment, but perhaps rushed to meet it — it would be difficult, this year, for at least some of its atmosphere of isolation-induced madness not to inspire a chill.In the EarthRated R. Blunt medical instruments. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Ride or Die’ Review: Killing for Love

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      After upending her life, a woman runs away with her longtime crush in this puzzling Japanese drama.The long take that opens “Ride or Die” might recall the Steadicam shot in “Goodfellas” were it not for the unsettling mood it evokes. On a clear evening in Tokyo, Rei (Kiko Mizuhara) enters an underground club and buys a stranger a tequila shot. Agitation builds as Rei and the man retire to his condo and start to have sex. Finally, the tension breaks — not in orgasm, but in grisly murder as Rei slits the man’s throat.Based on a Japanese manga series, “Ride or Die” (on Netflix) follows the complicated relationship between two women: Rei, a reserved doctor, and her longtime crush, Nanae (Honami Sato). We learn that the stranger at the bar was Nanae’s husband, a wealthy businessman who physically abused her. When Nanae asked Rei to kill him, Rei obliged out of love.The remainder of this long, often puzzling film unfolds as a fugitive road movie. After the murder, Rei and Nanae flee to the countryside. They visit Nanae’s childhood home and shelter from the rain at a railway depot. Despite the wild lengths Rei goes to for Nanae, the duo have not spoken for a decade before the murder. Their runaway doubles as a reunion trip.The director Ryuichi Hiroki paces out the pair’s blossoming alliance with care. Meals are times for laughter and bonding, while occasional flashbacks to the women’s prep school days offer a tender back story of their association. The movie gracefully captures the rhythms of intimacy, how it deepens quicker in stolen time.But even as they develop a kinship, the women themselves remain ciphers. We are asked to accept that Rei committed murder out of romantic ardor, but her sacrifice is too great to empathize with. Nanae’s feelings are also obscure — what she wants out of their time together seems to change on a whim. This blurriness of character never clears, making “Ride or Die” a frustrating experience as much as a sentimental one.Ride or DieNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 22 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Banishing’ Review: Choosing My Religion

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      A haunted English manor serves up incoherent shocks to a young cleric and his family in this Gothic melodrama streaming on Shudder.Silliness trumps scares in Christopher Smith’s “The Banishing,” a bewildering haunted-house tale larded with Nazis, mad monks, fallen women and a tango-dancing occultist. Why no one thought to include a zombie or two is anyone’s guess.The house in question is a sprawling rectory in rural England, the year is 1938 and a young reverend, Linus (John Heffernan), has arrived to replace the cleric who disappeared with his family some years earlier. Accompanying Linus is his new bride, Marianne (Jessica Brown Findlay), and her out-of-wedlock daughter, Adelaide (Anya McKenna-Bruce). Linus might have generously saved Marianne from societal scorn, but he has no intention of falling prey to her lustful wiles, frantically thumbing his Bible for passages that fortify his resolve.Unsurprisingly, Marianne is not down with this, but is distracted by Adelaide’s invisible friends and tiny, creepy tableaus featuring an eyeless china doll. When the strange noises and disturbing apparitions begin, Linus turns to his forbidding superior (John Lynch), while Marianne prefers the counsel of a wild-eyed occultist (Sean Harris). Both men are more concerning than anything going bump in the home’s tomblike basement.With a plot steeped in faith-based misogyny and performances ranging from mildly pickled (Harris) to remarkably touching (Brown Findlay), “The Banishing” never finds its groove. Casually inspired by a supposedly haunted rectory in Southeast England, the story struggles to link the couple’s domestic terrors with those of the outside world. War is on the horizon, but the rise of fascism feels unconnected to the film’s dance of desire and denial, pleasure and punishment. A kind of tango, if you like.The BanishingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More