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      ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ Review: Life and Death in Srebrenica

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s pick‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ Review: Life and Death in SrebrenicaBosnia and Herzegovina’s Oscar entry is the harrowing and rigorous story of a U.N. translator’s fight to save her family from slaughter.Jasna Djuricic is Aida, a high school teacher turned U.N. translator, in Jasmila Zbanic’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?”Credit…Super LTDMarch 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETQuo Vadis, Aida?NYT Critic’s PickDirected by Jasmila ZbanicDrama, History, War1h 41mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb army, under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic, overran the town of Srebrenica, which had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations. Muslim civilians sought refuge at a nearby U.N. base, but were handed over to Mladic’s soldiers, who separated them by gender and loaded them into buses and trucks. Around 8,000 men and boys were murdered, their bodies buried in mass graves, in one of the worst atrocities of the wars that convulsed the former Yugoslavia for much of the decade.At the time, many in the West wondered how this could happen — how genocidal violence could erupt in Europe barely 50 years after the end of World War II. “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” Jasmila Zbanic’s unsparing and astonishing new film, shows precisely how. This isn’t the same as explaining why, though Zbanic’s granular, hour-by-hour, lightly fictionalized dramatization of the events leading up to the massacre sheds some glancing light on that question.Mladic (Boris Isakovic) is an unnervingly familiar figure. A self-infatuated bully who travels everywhere with a cameraman, he punctuates his displays of power with litanies of grievance. But the movie isn’t really about him. He and his officers may be the authors of the nightmare, but the viewer suffers through it in the company of Aida Selmanagic (Jasna Duricic), who works as a translator for the U.N.[embedded content]In her previous life, Aida was a teacher. Her husband, Nihad (Izudin Bajrovic), was the principal of the local high school. At one especially tense moment, she and a Serb soldier exchange polite greetings: he’s a former student, who sends regards to Aida’s sons, Hamdija (Boris Ler) and Sejo (Dino Bajrovic). That encounter is one of several reminders of the prewar normal, when Serbs and Muslims lived side by side and Aida and her family pursued an uneventful middle-class existence. A flashback shows her participating in a whimsical pageant devoted to “Eastern Bosnia’s best hairstyle.”Now, she runs an increasingly desperate gantlet of contradictory demands. Her U.N. identification badge affords her some protection, which she tries to extend to her husband and children. She persuades Nihad to volunteer as a civilian delegate alongside the U.N. commander in farcical negotiations with Mladic, and uses her access to restricted areas of the base to find hiding places for Sejo and Hamdija.In her official capacity, Aida dutifully translates Serbian lies and U.N. equivocations, a role that becomes both horrific and absurd. She must convey to the panicked masses at the base — some of them her friends and neighbors — reassurances that she knows to be false. Amid the promises of safety, she can see clearly what is about to happen.Duricic’s performance is somehow both charismatic and self-effacing. Aida is tenacious and resourceful, and also terrified and overwhelmed by circumstances. The story she is caught up in moves swiftly and relentlessly, but sometimes nothing seems to move at all. The victims-in-waiting are trapped. Their ostensible protectors are paralyzed, and the predators are in no particular hurry. Who can stop them?There is relentless, dread-fueled suspense here, and a kind of procedural efficiency that reminds me of Paul Greengrass’s fact-based films, like “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93.” The rigorous honesty of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” is harrowing, partly because it subverts many of the expectations that quietly attach themselves to movies about historical trauma. We often watch them not to be confronted with the cruelty of history, but to be comforted with redemptive tales of resistance, resilience and heroism.Aida may have some of those qualities, but her brave attempts to escape only emphasize how trapped she really is. The title asks where she is going. The available answers are grim. If she can save herself, can she also save her family? And if so, what about the thousands of others whose lives are in peril?Her situation is dramatized with exquisite empathy. Pity isn’t the only emotion in play; it does battle with shame and disgust. The failure of the U.N. is almost as appalling as Mladic’s viciousness. The rule-bound, well-meaning Dutch officers in charge of the base become the general’s hostages and then his accomplices. The massacre was a war crime supervised by peacekeepers — a failure of institutional resolve, of humanity, of civilization.Eventually, Mladic was tried in The Hague and sentenced to life in prison. The final act of “Quo Vadis, Aida,” Bosnia and Herzegovina’s official Oscar entry, makes clear that many other perpetrators escaped with impunity. The war ended, and some version of normalcy returned, but Zbanic takes no consolation in the banal observation that life goes on. It’s true that time passes, that memory fades, that history is a record of mercy as well as of savagery. But it’s also true — as this unforgettable film insists — that loss is permanent and unanswerable.Quo Vadis, Aida?Not rated. In Bosnian, English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch through Angelika’s virtual cinema.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Still Life in Lodz’ Review: A Painting Becomes a Window

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Still Life in Lodz’ Review: A Painting Becomes a WindowThis documentary examines how objects can create through lines across history.A painting that hung for decades in an apartment is one of the subjects of the documentary “Still Life in Lodz.”Credit…Cavu PicturesMarch 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETStill Life in LodzDirected by Slawomir GrunbergDocumentary1h 15mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The loosely observed conceit of “Still Life in Lodz” is that certain objects bear passive witness to history. In this documentary, directed by Slawomir Grunberg, Lilka Elbaum, a historical researcher born in Lodz, Poland, starts with a painting from the apartment in Lodz where she grew up. The painting had hung on a wall there since 1893, she says. It was the first thing she saw in the morning, and its absence left a “gaping wound” on the wall when her family left Poland in 1968, emigrating to North America to escape anti-Semitism.[embedded content]Grunberg and Elbaum interweave stories of departures from different periods. Elbaum meets with Roni Ben Ari, an Israeli-born photographer whose family lived in Elbaum’s building decades earlier until leaving Poland in 1926. Paul Celler, a real-estate developer raised in New Jersey, tours Lodz with Elbaum looking for traces there from the life of his mother, who spent two years in the Lodz ghetto and was then taken to Auschwitz. Elbaum also tells the story of Pola Erlich, a dentist who lived in Elbaum’s eventual apartment before World War II. She was sent to the Lodz ghetto and the Chelmno death camp.Because Erlich lived in the apartment that later became Elbaum’s, her story fits the central through line — that an inanimate painting could open a window on successive tragedies. But much of the material feels arbitrarily chosen — and sometimes just arbitrary. (Elbaum visits a contemporary Polish flea market seeking information on the painting’s creator, who was Russian. Is that a logical place to look?) The individual stories are powerful, as are the visual comparisons between present-day and historical locations. A few animated sequences effectively evoke the evanescence of memory.Still Life in LodzNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Come True’ Review: Bad Dreams? A Sleep Lab? What Could Go Wrong?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Come True’ Review: Bad Dreams? A Sleep Lab? What Could Go Wrong?Anthony Scott Burns’s superior throwback horror film is marred mainly by familiarity.Julia Sarah Stone in “Come True.”Credit…IFC MidnightMarch 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETCome TrueDirected by Anthony Scott BurnsHorror, Sci-FiNot Rated1h 45mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.On “Come True,” the Canadian filmmaker Anthony Scott Burns is billed as the director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor and lead member of the visual-effects team. Under the pseudonym Pilotpriest, he also shares credit for the synth-driven, ’80s-style score. He acquits himself well on all counts except maybe scripting (he wrote the story with Daniel Weissenberger). Like “Our House” (2018), Burns’s underseen feature debut, “Come True” is superior throwback horror marred mainly by familiarity and, in this case, an ending that feels like a tease.[embedded content]Still, it’s hard to complain until then. The protagonist is Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), an 18-year-old we first meet as she awakes in the morning on a playground slide. Owing to unspecified home troubles, she needs a regular place to spend the night. Her ingenious solution is to sign up for a sleep lab. The researchers can’t tell her what they’re studying, but it becomes clear that Sarah has an active dream state. Her nightmares, which we can squint at in dark, labyrinthine effects sequences, involve bald, shadowy figures. Viewers of Rodney Ascher’s documentary “The Nightmare” may sense where this is going.Sarah becomes an object of obsession for one researcher (Landon Liboiron), whose repeated violations of good science and ethics warrant prompt dismissal, at least. But the characters are just the beginning of what’s creepy about “Come True.” Atmosphere is its primary virtue: Burns has an eye for medical spaces and tech that look dingy and out of date and for architecture that evokes anonymous, forgotten corners of academia.Come TrueNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu 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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘My Beautiful Stutter’ Review: Speaking Truth to Power

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘My Beautiful Stutter’ Review: Speaking Truth to PowerThe film is pitched more as a public-service announcement than as a documentary with cinematic ambitions.A moment at a summer program for children who stutter in the documentary “My Beautiful Stutter.”Credit…DiscoveryMarch 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETMy Beautiful StutterDirected by Ryan GielenDocumentary1h 30mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The goal of “My Beautiful Stutter” is to raise awareness about people who stutter and to correct misimpressions and attitudes that surround the speech disorder. Directed by Ryan Gielen, the film is pitched more as a public-service announcement than as a documentary with cinematic ambitions. Reviewing it in artistic terms seems beside the point.Primarily, the movie is a showcase for Camp SAY, a summer camp for school-age children who stutter. The acronym stands for The Stuttering Association for the Young. The association’s founder, Taro Alexander, who stutters himself, tells campers he didn’t meet anyone else who stuttered until he was 26. The camp shows children that there are others like them and builds their confidence.[embedded content]Adhering to an overworked format, the movie follows several campers. We meet Julianna, who turned to singing as an outlet, and Emily and Sarah, friends who each in their way once shied away from talking because they found it exhausting. Malcolm, from New Orleans, who witnessed a violent incident as a child, forges a friendship with the older Will, a star English student who writes a college essay about the mismatch between the language in his mind and his ability to vocalize.It may seem odd that there is no mention of Joe Biden, who dealt with a stutter in childhood, but the movie is not current. It was filmed during the camp’s 2015 session, when the summer program was in North Carolina (it is now in Pennsylvania), and the first screenings took place in 2019. The lessons — for stutterers and non-stutterers — still hold.My Beautiful StutterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Discovery+.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Kid 90’ Review: Celluloid Dreams

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Kid 90’ Review: Celluloid DreamsSoleil Moon Frye’s look back at her life as a child star in the 1990s walks the thin line between diary and documentary.Soleil Moon Frye is the subject and director of the documentary “Kid 90.”Credit…Soleil Moon Frye/HuluMarch 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETKid 90Directed by Soleil Moon FryeDocumentary, Biography, Family, HistoryFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.At the heart of Soleil Moon Frye’s new film, “Kid 90” (streaming on Hulu), is a startling drive for self-documentation. Beginning in her early teens, Moon Frye, who starred on the popular children’s show “Punky Brewster,” began recording her life with a video camera. She seems to have taken her camcorder everywhere: film sets, road trips, parties with fellow child stars, even her breast reduction surgery at age 15. When she didn’t film something, she recorded her reflections on audiotape or in her journal with precocious introspectiveness.[embedded content]In “Kid 90,” Moon Frye revisits this material after nearly two decades, walking the thin line between diary and documentary. Her home videos offer a charming portrait of celebrity right before the boom of paparazzi and social media, when being confronted with a camera didn’t yet elicit caution or studied posturing from the young and famous. Moon Frye’s ebullience brought together a vibrant circle of peers: Brian Austin Green, David Arquette, Justin Pierce, Leonardo di Caprio and many others appear in the film. They’re endearingly unselfconscious and, dare I say, normal — just kids exploring friendship, romance and the confusions of coming-of-age.If the unremarkableness of the moments captured in Moon Frye’s footage is refreshing, it also makes for a somewhat insipid film. In interviews, Moon Frye hints at the darker aspects of young womanhood and celebrity that creep at the edges of her frame: sexual abuse, drug addiction, mental illness. But the director is too enamored of the pixelated, lo-fi nostalgia of her celluloid memories — and too intent on crafting a rose-tinted arc of “self-love” — to dig deeper into these themes. The result is a film poised rather uncertainly between the personal and the cultural.Kid 90Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. Watch on Hulu.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Honeydew’ Review: Homegrown Horror

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Honeydew’ Review: Homegrown HorrorA camping trip gone wrong lands a tetchy couple at a remote farm in this horror tale.Malin Barr and Sawyer Spielberg in “Honeydew.”Credit…Dark Star Pictures/Bloody DisgustingMarch 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETHoneydewDirected by Devereux MilburnHorror1h 46mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Harold Bloom’s 1973 book “The Anxiety of Influence” looked at the crisis of poets trying to create new work while contending with the aesthetic sway held over them by their forebears. Someday, a film critic, one with plenty of viewing experience, might want to write about the irritation of influence, particularly as it applies to genre film.In “Honeydew” — written, directed and edited by Devereux Milburn (from a story he concocted with Dan Kennedy, who shot the movie) — a vintage cassette recorder placed prominently as a prop in early scenes, and a retro approach to split-screen, check off the box of a nouveau British horror player like Peter Strickland. The rural setting and the creepy simple-mindedness of some characters suggest elements of Ben Wheatley and Ari Aster. There’s a whole queue of grindhouse shockers from years past informing the plot. And never mind the man-mountain character named Gunni, pronounced “Goonie.”[embedded content]An uningratiating young couple (Sawyer Spielberg and Malin Barr) on a camping trip find themselves compelled to spend the night at a farmhouse presided over by Karen (Barbara Kingsley) the sort of wide-eyed babbling character who, if encountered in reality, would be immediately told, “You know what, we’ll wait in the car.”Food — its preparation, consumption and just what the hell its ingredients are — figures in a minimal plot that the filmmakers inflate in a variety of slick but ultimately unimpressive ways (particularly in the editing). Before various reveals aimed at churning the stomach, the movie revels in oozy atmospherics (ceiling insulation that looks like it’s breathing, a dripping pipe, static on an old tube TV). The showiness is finished, so to speak, with a misanthropy likely inspired by the 1974 “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” but miles more callow than that film.HoneydewNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Inheritance’ Review: Poetry, Visualized

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘The Inheritance’ Review: Poetry, VisualizedIn this feature, a Black collective becomes a site of robust intellectual exchange, inspired artistry, joy and humor.Aurielle Akerele in “The Inheritance.”Credit…Grasshopper FilmMarch 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe InheritanceNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Ephraim AsiliDrama1h 40mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“The Inheritance,” Ephraim Asili’s debut feature film, beautifully abandons genre to consider questions about community, art and Black liberation.The experimental film opens with the story of Julian (Eric Lockley), a young Black man who has recently inherited his grandmother’s house in West Philadelphia. Inspired by his partner, Janet (Aurielle Akerele), Julian turns the house into a collective, and it quickly becomes a site of robust intellectual exchange, inspired artistry, joy and humor. Interspersed within these scripted moments is archival footage that looks at the legacy of MOVE, a Black liberation group whose West Philadelphia row home was bombed in 1985 by the Philadelphia police. The attack destroyed 61 homes and killed 11 people. Also included are meditations on Black art, shown through still shots, from the album cover of a recording of “The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass,” as read by Ossie Davis, to a photo of Gwendolyn Brooks.[embedded content]“The Inheritance” feels like poetry visualized. Asili remixes Jean-Luc Godard’s style in the 1967 film “La Chinoise” to examine how people form or expand the scope of their own politics and the realities of shared responsibility and communal living. This investigation relies on the surprising ways the film connects the past and the present: Clips of the history-making politician Shirley Chisolm follow a scene in which Janet staples a photograph of Chisolm to a wall in the house, and current members of MOVE make appearances at the fictional collective’s meetings to share their testimonies. And although viewers shouldn’t expect easy resolutions, they should anticipate more than one viewing of Asili’s striking film.The InheritanceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Drone Video of Bowling Alley Wins Praise From Hollywood

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutGuidelines After VaccinationAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Drone Went Bowling. Hollywood Noticed.A drone video shot in a Minneapolis bowling alley was hailed as an instant classic. One Hollywood veteran said it “adds to the language and vocabulary of cinema.”A drone video, shot in a Minneapolis bowling alley, won praise from Hollywood directors for its technical prowess.CreditCredit…Jay Christensen and Anthony Jaska/Rally StudiosMarch 11, 2021, 6:26 a.m. ETA drone flies into a bar, swoops through an adjacent bowling alley and crashes into the pins.The drone’s operator, who shot the 87-second video in a Minneapolis bowling alley last week to rally support for the business, didn’t expect it to be viewed hundreds of thousands of times on social media, or to win high praise from Hollywood directors.But it was and it did.Bowling, like baseball, is one thing that lots of Americans can get behind, even at a time of intense political polarization. In that sense, the country could perhaps use a video like this at a moment like this.Fans of the video, titled “Right Up Our Alley,” marveled at what they said was a remarkable cinematic achievement: a continuous take, shot at high velocity, in tight spaces and without digital effects. (Remember those famous long takes from “Goodfellas” and “Touch of Evil”? It was a bit like that, but faster, and with bowling.)“This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” wrote the director Lee Unkrich, whose 2017 film “Coco” won an Academy Award for best animated feature. “Jaw on the floor.”It’s funny, too: Bystanders in the drone’s path can be heard quoting from “The Big Lebowski,” which is arguably — sorry, “Kingpin” — the greatest bowling movie of all time.“My foot wasn’t over the line,” a woman near the lanes says to her bowling partner. “Mark it eight, dude.”“This is bowling, there are rules,” her partner replies, an alleyside quip from “Lebowski,” the 1998 film. “I’m not counting it.”The bowling alley where the video was shot, Bryant Lake Bowl & Theater, also has a restaurant, a cabaret theater and a bar that makes “rail cocktails.” It opened in 1936 in a former garage that had serviced Model T Fords.“Right Up Our Alley,” shot by the drone operator Jay Christensen, was made as part of a project to document well-known businesses around Minnesota that are threatened by the pandemic, said Brian Heimann, a producer at Rally Studios, the Minneapolis production company that produced it.“The place is near and dear to our hearts,” he added. “So when we floated the idea to the owner, she was all for it. It was a no-brainer.”The Coronavirus Outbreak More