Movies

The plot of “Deerskin” could fit on a postage stamp, but the titular obsession of its antihero only grows with every scene. Initially, when we accompany Georges (Jean Dujardin) as he buys a woefully unflattering vintage suede jacket from a private seller, his near-erotic delight in the fringed relic seems rather sweet. By the end, though, we suspect that Georges’s love for animal hide conceals a loathing for his own.A demented fetish comedy that escalates to startlingly nonchalant violence, “Deerskin” (written and directed by Quentin Dupieux) flickers tantalizingly between awful and awesome. In the first category is Georges’s irrational quest to ensure that his beloved jacket be the only one left in the world; in the second is his sly dexterity in enlisting help to achieve this deranged goal. Pathetic and middle-aged, with a spreading middle and shrinking cash reserves (“You no longer exist,” his wife snaps during a phone call, locking him out of their shared bank account), he settles in a remote Alpine hotel using his wedding ring as security.[embedded content]As luck would have it, the seller of the jacket has included a small video camera. Passing himself off as a filmmaker, Georges cons a local bartender, Denise (a splendid Adèle Haenel), into lending him money to finish his scriptless project. An aspiring editor and willing accomplice, Denise is impressed with the raw footage of Georges persuading hastily hired would-be actors to remove their coats, which he then destroys. Sensing genius, she eggs him on, pushing him to perform more outrageous acts while helping augment his suede wardrobe with boots, pants and gloves. The hat he steals for himself — from a corpse.For a long while, “Deerskin” idles affably in first gear, but its guilelessness is a ruse. As Georges’s compulsion to film his exploits grows, so does his cunning, the camera an excuse to fully indulge his psychosis. And as the movie’s tone flips from silly to shocking, from love story — albeit between a man and his coat — to horror, the mostly lighthearted images (the cinematography is also by Dupieux) turn sporadically sinister.Like “Rubber,” Dupieux’s 2011 tale of a homicidal tire, “Deerskin” is slight and forcefully eccentric. As with Georges’s personality, audiences will be split: The movie’s dive into one lonely man’s lunacy isn’t entirely successful. Yet Dujardin’s commitment to his batty character is unflinching. Gazing admiringly at his outfit in the mirror, Georges can’t get over his “killer style” — a self-compliment he will, perhaps unknowingly, soon be taking all too literally.DeerskinNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

In 2012, a group of activists who were undocumented immigrants willingly got themselves sent to detention facilities, where they worked from the inside to free people who were scheduled for deportation. The docu-thriller “The Infiltrators” depicts their feat, following Marco Saavedra and Viridiana Martinez, both of whom had protected status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. As part of a rigorous strategy, these two and their comrades targeted the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, where men and women were being held in custody despite their lack of criminal records.Armed with a thorough understanding of Obama-era immigration law, Saavedra and Martinez worked to inform fellow detainees of their rights, coordinating with activists outside to put public and legal pressure on officials to call off deportations. To tell their story, the directors Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera combine scripted re-enactments with documentary footage — a stylistic gambit that yields mixed results.For scenes inside Broward, actors play the central figures. These portions of the film are informative, but the performers seem timid in comparison to their real-life counterparts. The camera captures vital information — essential documents passed through trash collection, whiteboards with the names of the day’s deportees scrawled in red — but these images are perfunctory, lacking the radical spark of the documentary scenes set outside of the center.[embedded content]Jumping between wildly dissimilar styles makes for an occasionally jarring film. Yet despite this awkwardness, the movie works. The narrative approach represents a risk taken by the filmmakers, and their daring suits the story they are trying to tell. For a group of activists who took chances with their own legal status, only a comparably experimental cinematic style could do their efforts justice.The InfiltratorsNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More

At times, critics’ own words may fail them. In trying to find a proper description for “Liberté,” the new film from the provocative and occasionally (but not in this case!) sublime Catalan director Albert Serra, the words that most often sprang to mind were from Mel Brooks. That is, the hunchbacked hangman’s line from “Blazing Saddles”: “This one is a doozy.”Serra makes beautifully shot, methodically (to say the least) paced films, often of a historical nature, and sometimes fancifully so. His 2014 “The Story of My Death” could have been titled “Casanova Meets Dracula.” Here, some aristocratic pre-Revolution French pleasure-seekers drop in by a wood presumably near the manor of Duc De Walchen (played by Helmut Berger), and speak of “a vision” they are “defending.”[embedded content]At least that’s how Duke de Wand (Baptiste Pinteaux) — a figure whose particularly Gallic pomposity is almost funny — puts it. One is not quite sure whether he means a vision of a social order or of the evening of bucolic debauchery that follows, or both.After sundown, breasts are fondled, genitals rubbed, backsides are whipped with switches, milk is poured over a naked body. Urine makes a late-in-the-picture appearance. Grisly violence is enacted on an amputated limb. All the participating personages are serious and stern, and the pleasure they purport to seek is not easy. What’s mostly depicted is strain. Penises are generally flaccid. “Get out, you’re useless,” spits one dominant woman.Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — “Liberté” plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.LibertéNot rated. In French, German and Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes. Watch on Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema. More

Things go missing in “The Wretched” — a bunny, a baby, assorted children — and hardly anyone seems to notice. A darkened basement reverberates with eerie, snap-crackle-pop sounds and images that feature ghostly shots of a child’s crib. Something ancient and evil is crawling out of a butchered deer carcass. And it’s hungry.Opening with a spookily effective, 1980s-set prologue, this old-fashioned witchy brew from Brett and Drew Pierce (billed as the Pierce Brothers) jumps to the present where Ben (John-Paul Howard), a moody teenager, is having trouble dealing with his parents’ divorce. Visiting his father (Jamison Jones) for the summer, Ben takes a job at a marina and befriends Mallory (Piper Curda), a down-to-earth type and perfect sidekick. Especially when the little boy next door disappears and Ben needs help investigating his unsettling mother (Zarah Mahler).[embedded content]Blessed with shivery setups and freaky effects — here, skin-crawling is literal — “The Wretched” transforms common familial anxieties into flesh, albeit crepey and creeping. With his camera low and slow, the cinematographer, Conor Murphy, builds chills equally from a malevolent tree trunk and a scattering of rain-drenched children’s toys. And as Ben dodges calls from his mother and cooked dinners from his father’s new girlfriend, the movie’s sense of maternal need as a consuming force is repeatedly underlined.Though indebted to films like Tom Holland’s terrific “Fright Night” (1985) — whose teens spy on a neighbor they believe to be something other than human — “The Wretched” adds a twist or two of its own. And if the final, teasing image is completely expected, it won’t erase the fun you’ll have getting there.The WretchedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

“Until the Birds Return” opens with a car cruising down a winding, sun-dappled city street. This image becomes the connective tissue between three otherwise divergent stories in Karim Moussaoui’s tender, ruminative drama about life in contemporary Algeria.In the first chapter, a property developer, Mourad (Mohamed Djouhri), witnesses an act of violence after his car breaks down at night. Later, the focus switches to his chauffeur, Djalil (Mehdi Ramdani). He drives his neighbors to the wedding of their daughter, Aïcha — who happens to be his former lover. The focus shifts yet again when Aïcha (Hania Amar) and her family find a doctor, Dahman, stranded on the road. The final chapter follows Dahman (played with delicate restraint by Hassan Kachach) as he’s confronted with a terrible incident from his time in the Algerian Civil War.[embedded content]Moussaoui, making his feature debut, relates these stories at a gentle and idiosyncratic pace. Although each chapter is built around an event — a tryst or a revelation — the film comes to life in quiet, conversational details that capture the textures of people’s lives across different generations and classes. A highlight: a farmer and his son, glimpsed briefly in the film’s second section, debating the concept of private property.Occasional musical interludes interrupt the movie’s associative rhythms, including a song-and-dance routine set against the gorgeous Aurès mountains and shot with dynamic, careening camerawork by David Chambille. These sequences can feel digressive, but it’s all part of Moussaoui’s keenly observed portrait of individual and collective existence. As its characters traverse the country’s crisscrossing motorways, “Until the Birds Return” locates the singular moments that form the nodes of a shared national history.Until the Birds ReturnNot rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay-TV operators. More

The early scenes of “Tesnota (Closeness)” — the first feature directed by Kantemir Balagov, whose subsequent “Beanpole” was Russia’s 2019 entry for the international feature Academy Award — convey unsettling sexual intrigue and old-fashioned exuberance. The tomboyish Ilana (Darya Zhovner) and her brother David (Veniamin Katz), part of a working-class Jewish family living in the Russian town of Nalchik in 1998, have an unusually close relationship. A little before David’s engagement party, the siblings have a cheeky discussion on how “lucky” David’s betrothed is, given his sexual equipment. Whoa.The following celebration, though, is feisty and innocent. Balagov has a real knack for getting in close to his characters and almost participating, with the camera, in their dancing.[embedded content]After this, the trouble begins. The couple is immediately kidnapped by locals — likely Kabardians, the Circassian tribe that dominates the town.The demanded ransom is high, and while the engaged girl’s family can afford it, Ilana and David’s cannot. One potential solution involves an arranged marriage. But Ilana’s involved with a Kabardian lug, Zalim (Nazir Zhukov). As attached as she is to her brother, she can’t abide this proposed refutation of whatever autonomy she has left.This movie, which Balagov, a Nalchik native, states in an onscreen text is based on a true story, has a whole lot of “slow” and one very nasty burn. Ilana gets plastered with Zalim and his pals (one of whom says, “Jews are good — to make soap from,” not aware Ilana is Jewish), and the group watches a VHS tape of authentic documentary footage showing the slow torture and murder of a Russian. This is apparently footage Balagov himself saw under similar circumstances as a younger man. Whatever his ostensible point, its inclusion here is a deplorably truculent demonstration of directorial prerogative. It does more than cast a pall over the rest of the picture.ClosenessNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Kino Marquee. More

A sinister opening set to a pulsating score establishes a misleading tone for the Israeli domestic drama “15 Years” (out now on DVD and VOD): A man in his 40s nervously jogs alone at night until something startling makes him halt in his steps. Cloaked in dim, ambient lighting, this chain of events recurs throughout the film, though some of his late-night forays, on foot or by bicycle, are actually dreams while others are revealed as cruising. They all reflect the midlife crisis of Yoav (Oded Leopold), a Tel Aviv architect.[embedded content]Yoav starts his downward spiral after a gallery party where his best friend, Alma, announces her pregnancy. The news distresses him, while it awakens a strong paternal instinct in his partner of 15 years, Dan (Udi Persi). Leopold and Persi are both compelling performers, but the writer-director Yuval Hadadi renders their characters with little subtlety.Early in the film, Dan cloyingly coos at a baby while Yoav looks disgusted. Later, at their anniversary dinner, Yoav lashes out rudely at his guests when the topic of children comes up. From there, the couple’s relationship unravels: Yoav leaves Dan, hooks up with a teenager, and tells Alma he wishes she weren’t pregnant.At the same time he faces his own mortality, especially through his estrangement from his terminally ill father. Yoav becomes such an oppressive presence that it is difficult to empathize with him. “15 Years” is overstuffed with symbolism about his existential woes, but the narrative would have been better served by mirroring the film’s sleek, minimalistic shots, with more understated depictions of anxiety.15 YearsNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More