Movies

Every generation gets its own “Cyrano de Bergerac,” from the Steve Martin comedy “Roxanne” to Netflix’s “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser.” But Alice Wu’s new high school-set film, “The Half of It” (also on Netflix), transcends the limitations that frequently serve as obstacles to ingenuity in young adult movies. By exploring issues of race and queerness with emotional complexity, it treats teenagers with the sophistication they deserve.Wu’s Cyrano is the bookish Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), navigating the casual racism of her small town while also managing the expectations of the peers who pay her to write their essays. Her way with words makes her the ideal choice to ghostwrite letters for the cute-but-daft football player Paul (Daniel Diemer) to the object of his affection, Aster (Alexxis Lemire). Having yearned for Aster from afar, Ellie jumps at the chance to perform literary drag.[embedded content]Wu’s feature debut, “Saving Face” (2005), was one of the rare films to focus on the queer Asian-American experience. Now, “The Half of It” reflects sharpened ideas and a honed directorial voice. While the question of “fitting in” has clichéd implications in many teen movies, Wu digs deeper, considering the lonely cost of assimilation for a girl whose outsider status is layered.The husky-voiced Lewis embodies, with palpable anguish, the stinging contradictions of emotional freedom and romantic fraudulence that abound when writing these notes. In letters (or over text), you can be anybody and yourself at once, and Wu suffuses the film with a painfully mature understanding of the ache of longing for the impossible. With tenderness, humor and beauty, “The Half of It” comprehends the chasm between wanting and being.The Half of ItRated PG-13 for brief language, teen drinking and the delicate throb of unrequited love. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

Maybe it’s our gloomy national mood, the programming on Turner Classic Movies or the Columbia Noir series currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. But cinephiles have been chattering again about film noir, a category that is notoriously difficult to define but about which every movie lover has an opinion. Say you’ve heard the term, but you don’t know quite what it means — well, you have good company. Here’s a quick rundown.To rehash an old, inevitably circular set of arguments: Noir can’t simply be a genre because it transcends genre. There are noir mysteries, noir melodramas, noir costume pictures, even noir-tinged westerns and science fiction. If noir is a style, its hallmarks might include terse dialogue, an interest in seamy aspects of human behavior and black-and-white cinematography. But a cataloging would have to embrace exceptions. (“Leave Her to Heaven,” the ne plus ultra of femme fatale movies, is in Technicolor.)Noir might be a mood, but that’s a bit amorphous, like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hard-core pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Or perhaps noir was a temporary wave rooted in anxieties about World War II’s destabilization of American home life. According to this theory, noir-like work made later than the 1950s requires a separate category, the neo-noir. And if that’s the case, the neo period has gone on longer than the original.When the French critics Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton tilted at an early definition in 1955, they distinguished noirs from police procedurals, which, they said, explored crime from the outside, rather than within. In the early 1970s, Paul Schrader, a critic at the time and soon to be a screenwriter and director, took a stab at a survey, arguing that noir was primarily a matter of tone. “Almost every critic has his own definition of film noir,” he wrote, “and a personal list of film titles and dates to back it up.”I’m in favor of a big tent: If you can explain why it’s a noir, it’s a noir. But don’t you dare name any movie with insufficient subtext, psychological complexity or an atmosphere that doesn’t chill the soul. More

The fiction feature directorial debut of the Guatemalan filmmaker César Díaz is a modestly scaled picture with massive implications. Díaz’s background is in editing, and there’s a strong documentary component in his filmography. So it’s fitting that in this picture the protagonist is a forensic anthropologist — one who is working on a project that goes back decades rather than centuries, which is usually what we see in movies featuring anthropologists.The movie opens with Ernesto, the young anthropologist (Armando Espitia), in a dimly-lit room, one you might see in a lab or a morgue, laying out bones on a table until a human skeleton takes shape. Díaz shoots and edits this process to put across a sense of quietude and patience, emphasizing process. Ernesto is part of a team investigating massacres from the 1980s, amid Guatemala’s long civil war. The movie is set in 2018, when the perpetrators of such atrocities were being brought to account for their actions. Ernesto is not just looking for justice, he’s trying to find the father he believes was a guerrilla and a victim of a mass killing in a village. In one scene, a few of the characters watch a television documentary in which a narrator notes, “Military command regarded the whole population as the enemy.” Men were killed, women were imprisoned, subjugated and raped, and now the killing fields are mass graveyards, each one a place where Ernesto’s investigative team must acquire discrete permission to dig up.“If you cannot separate your life from your work, we cannot keep you here,” one of Ernesto’s supervisors warns after the anthropologist’s intrusive questioning of one older woman. Because it was often only the women who were left alive in these villages, Ernesto and his team must rely on their often reluctant testimony. His own tunnel vision doesn’t quite blind him to their continuing courage, but it does lead him to construct a narrative that will unravel by the movie’s end.In the meantime, Ernesto’s mother (Emma Dib), who seems of two minds about her son’s quest, is preparing to testify before a tribunal. Her friends and comrades are intellectuals who still like to sing “The Internationale” at gatherings. There’s a strong sense that such activities are akin to whistling in the dark. The ambivalent, uncertain present of the movie can’t separate itself from the legacy of death that Ernesto and his colleagues keep uncovering.Díaz’s approach is plain and solid, like a well-built wooden chair before varnishing. The revelations of the story are often ghastly, but “Our Mothers” doesn’t go for the emotional jugular. Near the end there’s a montage of the faces of many poor women; most of them are on the precipice dividing middle and old age but they all look practically eternal in the way their features express, without trying, vast reservoirs of pain and fortitude. Díaz presents them, and leaves the rest in the laps of the viewers. Their moment in world history may be, as far as some are concerned, past. But the implicit question here is still pertinent: Which side are you on?Our MothersNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. Watch on ROW8.com. More