Movies

Having settled into his horror-comedy groove with the “Happy Death Day” movies, the director Christopher Landon repeats his blood-and-badinage formula with the body-swap farce, “Freaky.”This time, though — despite a bright palette and intrepid performances — the blueprint feels a little tired. The smutty humor and high-school setting (complete with mean-girl posse and snarky-smart gay friend) are as familiar as Millie (Kathryn Newton), the lonely heroine in love with the handsome athlete (Uriah Shelton). They’re seniors at Blissfield Valley High, and if Millie’s mascot costume (the football team is the Beavers) doesn’t make her pitiable, then her dead father and sauced mother will.[embedded content]And that’s before she encounters the infamous Butcher (Vince Vaughn), an impressively productive killer with apparently decades of slicing under his belt. Stabbing Millie with a recently acquired Aztec dagger, the Butcher inadvertently causes himself and his intended victim to exchange bodies. They have 24 hours before the switch becomes permanent.Written by Landon and Michael Kennedy, this genre-straddler gives throwaway characters inventively messy ends and its two leads the freedom to experiment. As the swappers settle into their new forms, Vaughn and Newton prove remarkably effective at selling the benefits of their alternate packaging. Their efforts, however, are too often diluted by the film’s lazy plotting and Millie’s hackneyed emotional baggage.But what do I know? Maybe sometimes it really does take a serial killer to heal a damaged family.FreakyRated R for termination by tennis racket, toilet seat and two varieties of saw. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

“Ammonite” is only the director Francis Lee’s second feature, yet already he’s developing a strong visual signature, at once eloquent and elemental. His smashing 2017 debut, “God’s Own Country,” which followed the searing connection between a gay sheep farmer and a migrant worker, has clear parallels with the new film. Both focus on dampened souls set ablaze by unlikely passion; both unfold in harsh, punishing landscapes; both fiercely acknowledge gender and class; and both feature sudden blooms of panting, explicit eroticism.Dipping into another tale of forbidden love in a forbidding place, “Ammonite,” set in 1840s England, finds the real-life pioneering paleontologist, Mary Anning (Kate Winslet), tirelessly searching for fossils along the blustery Dorset coastline. Renowned among male peers who regularly steal credit for her finds, an impoverished Mary now sells them to tourists to support her sickly mother (Gemma Jones). Molded by years of struggle and resentment, her manner and features have settled into a stern resignation.The metaphor all but bites you on the nose: As hardened and inscrutable as the fossils she fusses over, Mary desperately needs someone to winkle her out of her stony casing. Enter Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), dainty and beautiful and fragile with grief over a recent tragedy. And when Charlotte’s wealthy husband (James McArdle) pays Mary to keep an eye on his wilting wife while he gads about Europe, the scene is set for the kind of flinty romance that viewers of Lee’s earlier film might expect.[embedded content]That’s pretty much it for the plot. Hopeful and former lovers — an older neighbor, played by the great Fiona Shaw, and Alec Secareanu as a charming young doctor — circle Mary and add texture to the simple story. And with his narrative flame on low, Lee moves his location onto center stage: The cruelly pebbled beaches and roiling ocean, battering winds and icy mud lend a wild and unpredictable momentum that offsets the movie’s occasional listlessness.And perfectly matches the physicality of the sex scenes. Beneath impatiently disrupted skirts and bodices, Stéphane Fontaine’s camera looks without leering, lavishing the same raw curiosity on erogenous zones as on Mary’s rough, nicotine-stained fingers. The lovemaking is frantic, secretive and somewhat grim, signifying an escape for one and perhaps a trap for the other.Not much is known of Anning or her life, and Lee’s script refuses to help us figure her out. Instead, he concocts what he calls in the press notes “a respectful snapshot,” one that’s arguably a mite cautious and uneventful. The movie needs Winslet and Ronan’s skills, their ability to semaphore more with sliding glances and tiny gestures than many actors manage with pages of dialogue. There’s pleasure in deciphering these signals; and after watching the film’s surprisingly wrenching final moments, I expect that Lee will always be a filmmaker who asks us to look that little bit closer and work that little bit harder for our rewards.AmmoniteRated R for smoldering sex and frigid beaches. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

While working on an assignment involving facial-recognition software, the M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini found that the algorithm couldn’t detect her face — until she put on a white mask. As she recounts in the documentary “Coded Bias,” Buolamwini soon discovered that most such artificial-intelligence programs are trained to identify patterns based on data sets that skew light-skinned and male.“When you think of A.I., it’s forward-looking,” she says. “But A.I. is based on data, and data is a reflection of our history.”Directed by Shalini Kantayya, “Coded Bias” explores how machine-learning algorithms — now ubiquitous in advertising, hiring, financial services, policing and many other fields — can perpetuate society’s existing race-, class- and gender-based inequities.[embedded content]
The most cleareyed of several recent documentaries about the perils of Big Tech (“The Great Hack,” “The Social Dilemma”), “Coded Bias” tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs. Using Buolamwini’s journey from her research to a congressional hearing on facial-detection technology as a through line, Kantayya knits together a number of local and international stories with an eye for emotional detail. A teacher in Houston recounts receiving an arbitrarily poor algorithmic evaluation despite years of experience and awards; a plucky watchdog group in London challenges the police use of A.I.-based closed-circuit TV cameras that often misidentify and racially profile pedestrians.The film moves deftly between pragmatic and larger political critiques, arguing that it’s not just that the tech is faulty; even if it were perfect, it would infringe dangerously on people’s liberties. One segment details China’s efforts to create a “social credit” program that would use face scans to track citizens’ lives and generate scores that control their access to various services.America’s not much different, warns the futurist and author Amy Webb, one of the movie’s expert talking heads (mostly women, refreshingly). She says that in the United States, social media companies, other corporations and law enforcement agencies surveil people and influence their information and opportunities in similar ways. They’re just not as upfront about it.Pronouncements like these are dystopian enough that the music and graphics inspired by “2001: A Space Odyssey” that Kantayya layers on top can feel cheesy. Even so, they do lend an aptly heroic air to the film’s activist subjects — particularly Buolamwini, whose efforts have achieved tangible legislative gains. For a documentary about automated technology, “Coded Bias” keeps its focus firmly on people: their failings, their vulnerabilities and their powers for good.Coded BiasNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch in virtual cinemas. More

“Transhood” is fixated on transition, and therefore preoccupied with time, or at least that seems to be its intention. The HBO documentary, which follows four transgender and gender-nonconforming children in Kansas City, Mo., over five years, races through their changing and evolving understanding of themselves, with barely a moment to catch its breath.Many scenes are fleeting and shorn of a more contemplative approach not only to transgender identity, but also to childhood more broadly. Part of the film’s goal is to frame these kids as just kids: rowdy, hyper, moody.[embedded content]For younger, more rambunctious subjects like Avery (7 at the beginning of filming in 2014) and the gender-fluid Phoenix (4), the camera often has to chase them, making it difficult to capture in a cohesive way how they personally explore their gender identity. Even over five years, observations about them remain shallow. But the older subjects Jay (12), who has to negotiate being out as transgender at school, and Leena (15), an aspirational model, land as more engaging. They’re old enough to speak for themselves and tell their own stories.With so much ground to cover, the scenes’ shortness can feel unsatisfying and even occasionally facile. Though conversations between parents and their children are designed to be emotional beats, there’s a peculiar staginess that comes off as jarring at times.Directed by Sharon Liese, the movie hints at more thoughtful threads, like looking at the obstacles of insurance coverage or negotiating how to distance oneself from internet fame. But if it aims to mimic Richard Linklater’s time-stretching “Boyhood” in its observations of change both large and small, those efforts fall short.TranshoodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More