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      ‘The Unholy’ Review: ‘There’s Something About Mary’

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      Miraculous acts or evil deeds? This tame, trite horror movie has a familiar answer.Satan is at it again in “The Unholy,” the first feature from Evan Spiliotopoulos and what feels like the millionth recurrence of a plot that turns an innocent young woman into the plaything of a soul-sucking demon.After a brief spasm of 1845 witchery, the movie jumps to present-day New England where the roguish reporter Gerry Fenn (who better than Jeffrey Dean Morgan?) is sniffing out supernatural mischief. Once famous and now disgraced for fabricating stories, Fenn enjoys the odd tipple: It helps alleviate the professional embarrassment of covering livestock mutilations. But when he encounters Alice (Cricket Brown) — a hearing-impaired woman who’s mysteriously cured after conversing with a petrified tree trunk — Fenn smells the kind of story that could resurrect his career.Unfortunately, that’s not what’s revived as Alice, believing she sees the Virgin Mary, begins to heal the sick and attract a horde of supplicants. Her uncle (William Sadler) is skeptical until she cures his emphysema, and the nearest bishop (an unrecognizable Cary Elwes) is flummoxed by Alice’s apparent miracles. Fenn, meantime, works on an exclusive (as a dissolute nonbeliever, he’s presumed objective) and gets friendly with a nice doctor (Katie Aselton). Even Fenn needs a break from the stress of the supernatural.Adapted from a 1983 novel by James Herbert, “The Unholy” (no relation to Camilo Vila’s 1988 dud) gives us the usual weeping statues and a soundtrack heaving with crackles and whispers. Playing the evil entity with convulsive movements and a killer manicure, the contortionist Marina Mazepa turns in the movie’s most entertaining performance. That’s if you don’t count Morgan looking genuinely baffled as to what he’s doing here at all.The UnholyRated PG-13 for a hanged man and half-baked scares. Running time: 1 hour 39 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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      ‘Every Breath You Take’ Review: The Therapist as Trauma Victim

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      Casey Affleck plays a vaunted psychiatrist whose life and career are derailed after he boasts about a miraculous new technique, which then fails tragically.With chillingly minimal interiors, ominously crescendoing music, and a bluish-gray palette, “Every Breath You Take” announces itself as a thriller in predictable ways. Directed by Vaughn Stein and written by David K. Murray, the movie coasts on so many tropes that you almost expect it to subvert them, but the plot remains equally foreseeable.At a conference, a renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Clark (Casey Affleck), boasts of his ethically ambiguous therapeutic method — which involves sharing his own deep secrets with patients — that has kept one of them, the suicidally inclined Daphne (Emily Alyn Lind), stable and off medications. Later that night, she commits suicide.At the scene, Dr. Clark meets Daphne’s distraught brother, (Sam Claflin). James later earns an invitation to dinner at the Clarks’ and eventually wins over Philip’s wife, Grace (Michelle Monaghan), and daughter, Lucy (India Eisley), with his charming English accent, dimpled smile and wounded puppy demeanor. James becomes a dangerous new presence in their lives. Claflin elevates the formulaic quality by playfully wavering between charismatic and psychotic as he burrows deeper into the Clark women’s lives, and thus Philip’s psyche.At the same time, Philip’s reputation is being razed by anonymous letters, though he claims he has no idea who is behind them. All the characters become shockingly dense pawns, with the women most notably getting caught in the cross hairs. Monaghan’s character, especially, is undermined. The film opens with her own tragedy — the death of her son in a car accident — a development that comes back briefly and insignificantly. With only a few fleeting moments of nail-biting thrills, “Every Breath You Take” remains mostly tepid and frustrating.Rated R for Sam Claflin’s wreaking havoc. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.Every Breath You TakeRated R. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In select theaters and on Google Play, FandangoNow 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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      ‘The Human Voice’ Review: Almodóvar Meets Cocteau Meets Swinton

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      The first English-language film from the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar stars Tilda Swinton and adapts Jean Cocteau to sublime results.A woman is brought to the end of her rope by a recalcitrant former lover. In what could be their last exchange, she speaks to the man over the phone. She cajoles, she feigns composure, she sneers, she renounces — things get kind of crazy.Sounds like a Pedro Almodóvar movie. It was, and it is again. It’s a little complicated.This movie, a mere 30 minutes in length but as fully fleshed out as almost any feature by the dazzling Spanish filmmaker, is an adaptation of the venerable 1930 monodrama “La Voix Humaine,” a magnificent actress’s aria by Jean Cocteau. Back in 1988, Almodóvar borrowed its narrative elements for his film “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” which helped the director advance into the mainstream. Previously, he’d been a near-underground cult figure.Almodóvar had been planning to make an English-language film for some time, and now he’s done it, working with the British actress Tilda Swinton. Does this sound like a match made in heaven? Yeah, it pretty much is. Almodóvar’s sense of cinema design — the décor simulates a luxe apartment and lays it bare as a soundstage illusion — is acutely keyed to Swinton’s performance here, which projects mercurial emotion with Swiss watch precision.The credits specify that this is a “free” adaptation of the Cocteau work. One factor of that freedom is that the monologue doesn’t begin until about 10 minutes in — unlike Cocteau’s work. But Almodóvar’s own poetic spirit meshes nicely with that of the old master’s throughout. Hardly surprising.The Human VoiceRated R for language. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 30 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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      ‘WeWork’ Review: The Sharing Economy or a Shared Delusion?

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      This documentary on the workspace start-up is a fast-paced, entertaining saga of relentless self-selling and a curious corporate culture.Getting freelancers to split a workspace and convincing them that they’re part of an exclusive club is a neat trick, but it’s only the first flicker of gaslighting visible in “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn,” a documentary that suggests that WeWork — the tech start-up, or is it a real-estate start-up? — owed its growth less to the sharing economy than to shared delusion.On why what now looks like a tenuous, bluster-based business model would appeal to Wall Street, the director, Jed Rothstein, spends less time than he should. Instead, the movie relays a fast-paced, entertaining saga of WeWork’s relentless self-selling and what it portrays as a cultlike corporate atmosphere. (One interviewee, August Urbish, who worked at WeWork and lived in WeLive — a similar venture for short-term, semi-communal apartment rentals — says his “entire life was being propped up by the We community.”)Rothstein’s documentary never captures the appeal of the obnoxious guru at its center, Adam Neumann, a co-founder of WeWork who stepped down as chief executive in 2019. A title card says he declined to participate, but from what’s onscreen, he speaks (and maybe thinks) exclusively in motivational sound bites. Person after person testifies to his charisma, but it’s hard to understand how he persuaded people to join the company, rather than hit him in the head with a designer chair.The film is sharper when its subjects describe the financial maneuvering that enabled WeWork’s rise, which, as explained here, involved redefining measures of profitability into meaninglessness. The movie overextends itself, too, by implying, in its final beat, that, folly or not, WeWork’s vision of human interaction holds promise for a post-lockdown world.WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion UnicornNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Malni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore’ Review: Embracing Our Ghosts

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      This ethereal experimental documentary by Sky Hopinka is an essential portrait of contemporary Indigenous life.An essential portrait of contemporary Indigenous life that resists the touristic gaze, “Małni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore,” the debut feature from the Ho-Chunk artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka, isn’t too concerned with whether we fully understand the traditions and rituals it entrancingly commits to screen. It refreshingly centers the Native perspective, and beckons audiences onto its wavelength by tapping into something more intuitive, the stuff of dreams.“You don’t have to say much,” says one of the film’s two subjects, Sweetwater Sahme, as she leads the filmmaker on a hike through the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, gesturing at the quivering foliage. “It’s a feeling, an energy. And there’s so much to look at.”The documentary, anchored in the Chinookan origin-of-death myth (a dialogue between a wolf and a coyote about the afterlife), separately follows two young parents — pregnant Sahme and Jordan Mercier, both friends of Hopinka’s — as they grapple with questions of legacy and identity.Subtitles switch between English and Chinook jargon, yet the oral component (including Hopinka’s narration) occasionally fades into the backdrop with sound design that amplifies the crackling of a fire, the bubbling and thrashing of the ocean and waterfalls.The natural world, with its never-ending tides and its cycles of life and death, provides a framework for the preservation of Indigenous culture, resilient despite its new forms and manifestations. An extended interlude sees a Native song and dance performed inside a school gymnasium. In voice-over, Sahme considers the link between her unborn child and her grandmother while a long canoe makes its way down a river lined with cranes and factories.An undeniable melancholy — a sense of loss — pervades the film. Yet it is never resigned. The ghosts of history live among us. To ignore their presence, “Małni” seems to say, is to forget who we really are.Malni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the ShoreNot rated. In English and Chinook jargon, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. On Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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      ‘Concrete Cowboy’ Review: Acquiring Horse Sense on the Philly Streets

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      Idris Elba leads us through the long-buried heritage of America’s Black cowboys, manifested in their modern-day urban descendants.There’s a quote that’s been circulating for years and years, apocryphally attributed to Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill and a few other white men: “There is nothing so good for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.” In “Concrete Cowboy,” the improving aspects of horseback riding — and, yes, stable maintenance — are demonstrated in the tale of a troubled Black teenager, Cole (Caleb McLaughlin).One afternoon Cole’s mom picks him up from school after a fight gets him expelled. She’s so fed up with her son that she drives him all the way from their home in Detroit to Philadelphia, where his estranged, taciturn father, Harp (Idris Elba), lives. With a horse.Harp is part of a group of urban riders. There’s not a lot of room in Philly for expansive stables, so it’s catch as catch can. Nevertheless, Harp and his buddies keep their operations sufficiently copacetic that they are not just tolerated but embraced by much of their community, although the local cop Leroy (Method Man) warns that the authorities might soon break up their party. Cole gets schooled in horse sense; his training features an in-your-face close-up of a wheelbarrow full of manure.Directed by Ricky Staub and adapted from G. Neri’s young adult novel “Ghetto Cowboy,” this picture offers a standard shot-at-redemption story, complete with temptation in the form of Cole’s renewed connection with an old friend who’s involved in drug dealing. But the movie’s convincing accretion of detail and its affectionate fictionalization of an actual subculture are disarming. (Some of the supporting players are members of the Fletcher Street Riders; the characters they play talk of the actual history of the Black cowboy in a scene around a vacant-lot campfire.) The quirks of Elba’s character suit his confident manliness well, and McLaughlin handles Cole’s defiance and sometimes practically equine skittishness with considerable depth.Concrete CowboyRated R for themes, language, drug use. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Man Who Sold His Skin’ Review: The Artwork Has Legs

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      In this Oscar-nominated film, a Syrian refugee agrees to become a piece of art in exchange for passage to Europe.Art satire meets immigration drama in the Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s “The Man Who Sold His Skin.” Ben Hania repurposes a real-life chapter from the annals of the art world, when the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye tattooed the back of a man, and then sold it as art. What sounds like a recipe for trouble — what about the human who’s the canvas? — is exactly where the movie lives, spinning a prickly cautionary tale of exploitation and commodification.Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) is jailed after declaring his love for Abeer (Dea Liane) on a train in Syria. Escaping to Lebanon, he crosses paths with a high-flying artiste, Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), who offers legal passage to Europe in exchange for conscripting Sam in an audacious project. That entails tattooing Sam’s back with a Schengen visa and showcasing him in museums. (Lending a plot assist as Jeffrey’s modish associate is Monica Bellucci.)Sam keeps Skyping with Abeer, who’s now stuck in a parent-approved marriage to a diplomat, and their slender romantic thread pulls the story along through Sam’s sometimes clunky trials as a museum piece and luxury-hotel inmate. His feelings of being a perpetual outsider, valued for everything but his personhood, body forth the dehumanizing elements of some immigrant experience.The lustrously shot movie breaks Sam out of the gallery grind through Hollywood-grade somersaults in storytelling (one of them so breezily violent as to feel a little tasteless). But the story evidently struck a chord, garnering an Academy Award nomination (like “The Square” before it) in the international feature category.The Man Who Sold His SkinNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 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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      ‘This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection’ Review: Bringing Out the Dead

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      In this drama, a widow rises out of grief to protest a threat to her village.The South African actress Mary Twala Mhlongo (who died last summer at 80) becomes an avatar of grief in “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.” With a gorgeously wizened face that feels weighted down by all that she has seen, Mhlongo plays a widow, Mantoa, whose miner son has just died. At first she sits at night by the radio, listening to obituaries and seemingly waiting for her own maker. But she surges into indignant action when a (true-to-life) dam project threatens her village with erasure, and desecration.Lesotho-born director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese shoots his film as a kind of living legend, with a mix of warm-hued tableaus and hillside portraits in defiance. Mosese reaches for a knockout from the very first sequence, a narcotic pan across a hauntingly lit party scene that rests on the film’s narrator figure, playing a lesiba (a mouth-blown string instrument). Though the film cuts back to this mystery storyteller periodically, Mhlongo (who also appears in Beyoncé’s “Black Is King”) carries the movie on her shoulders with an authoritative presence.
      Mantoa rallies the residents of her farming village, while weathering periods of hopelessness and bafflement. Haunted by the score’s buzzing soundscapes, the movie feels a bit blockily assembled. Its impact radiates out of Mhlongo’s discontent, whether with a priest’s pieties, or with the politician who says displaced villagers can simply exhume and bring their ancestors’ remains.The film’s press announcement drops the word “cryptic” but, after a year of global loss from Covid-19, the need to mourn the dead properly couldn’t feel more immediate and recognizable.This Is Not a Burial, It’s a ResurrectionNot rated. In Sesotho, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours. In virtual cinemas. More