Movies

It’s quite a leap from playing the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (on the Netflix series “Narcos”) to embodying one of the most highly regarded men in the field of global diplomacy. And for the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura in “Sergio” (also on Netflix), it’s clearly a responsibility he feels acutely: Firing decency and charisma on all cylinders, he gives Sergio Vieira de Mello — the storied United Nations diplomat killed by a truck bomb in Iraq in 2003 — as much soul as the movie around him will allow.Returning again and again to the mound of rubble in Baghdad where Vieira de Mello and his associate, Gil Loescher (a sadly underused Brian F. O’Byrne), lie painfully pinned down, this admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment. As two American soldiers (played by Garret Dillahunt and Will Dalton) tug ineffectually at the chunks of concrete that once formed the Canal Hotel, their fruitless rescue attempt gives Sergio time to muse in flashback over a life spent tirelessly championing the rights of the downtrodden.[embedded content]An unwavering idealist whose humanitarian efforts earned him legendary status in global-diplomacy circles, Vieira de Mello risks appearing a saint. And the director, Greg Barker (fictionalizing his 2009 documentary, based on Samantha Powers’s biography, “Chasing the Flame”), flirts dangerously with hagiography.The greater problems with Craig Borten’s slushy screenplay, though, are its extreme earnestness — Sergio’s lengthy conversation with a female Timorese weaver is a sinkhole of sap — and an overemphasis on the love affair between the married Sergio and Carolina Larriera (Ana de Armas), an alluring United Nations economist. They meet in East Timor, lock lips in a downpour, and their ensuing, soft-focus romance has the effect of smoothing away any narrative grit or sense of the cerebral knife-edge that Sergio walked with such skill. Even his meeting with the infamous Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary looks like just a friendly chat.Moreover, the choppiness of the storytelling gives short shrift to the bombing and Sergio’s tense interaction with L. Paul Bremer III (Bradley Whitford), President George W. Bush’s representative in Iraq. Tasked with restoring order and enabling legal elections, Sergio and his team are appalled by what they view as the United States’ excessive use of force and human-rights violations. The two men symbolize the eternal push and pull between diplomacy and violence, and their relationship could have given the movie the intellectual heft it so badly needs.“We’re mopping up resistance,” Bremer tells Sergio at one point, curtly explaining the rising number of detainees. He forgot he was talking to a man who had made a career out of doing just that, and without detaining anyone.SergioRated R for nudity and violence. In English, Portuguese, Spanish and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

“Rising High” is a white collar crime movie with little pizazz and even less substance. Now on Netflix, the fast-paced German drama aspires to the wily satire of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but the spectacle of greed that it showcases is neither as engrossing nor as demoralizing. It’s just plain old trashy.The movie opens on a rowdy mansion party hosted by our millionaire hero, Viktor (David Kross). A baby-faced real estate mogul with a chip on his shoulder, he awakens, hung over, to a team of policemen arresting him for tax evasion, money laundering and fraud. He’s soon in prison, recounting the story of his rise to a visiting journalist. With this framework, the writer-director Cüneyt Kaya launches a wholly familiar rags-to-Corvettes tale in which Viktor cons, cheats and bribes his way from eager entrepreneurialism to the drugged-out, festive top.“Rising High” slots cleanly into a genre of rich-dude movies that encourage us to revel in their characters’ grandeur. Cocaine and sparkly gems are abundant, and Kaya animates party scenes with quick cuts and pulsating dance beats to signal that Viktor’s lifestyle is super sexy. But the abundance gets repetitive, and Viktor’s glory is rendered with too much cliché to sustain a sense of allure. Simultaneously, Kaya tries to play the goofy antics of Viktor and his lowlife buddy Gerry (Frederick Lau) for genial laughs. Most of the time instead — as when Gerry threatens to fire a roomful of employees lest they break out into song — they inspire a weak grimace.Such swaggering portraits of wealth often come with a question: Does it fetishize greed or condemn it? “Rising High” doesn’t achieve either. There is a startling amorality to its treatment of women, particularly the sex workers that Viktor, Gerry and Kaya’s camera frequently degrade. But other than its misogyny, the movie, stacked with try-hard hedonism, fails to provoke more than mild annoyance.Rising HighNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. More

Rapunzel is stuck at home. And she’s bored as hell.She’s baking. She’s doing jigsaw puzzles. She’s sweeping the floor and doing laundry and knitting an endless scarf she’ll probably never wear. (She’s also combing through 70 feet of hair, and playing hide and seek with a spunky animated chameleon. Otherwise, it’s all fairly banal.)The whole scene, from the opening number of Disney’s “Tangled,” may feel a tad too familiar right now to qualify as escapism. Rapunzel, though, is trapped in her tower by an evil maternal figure, not a pandemic; she hasn’t gone outdoors in 18 years — far longer, hopefully, than any period of self-isolation we will have to endure this year.But despite the parallels, I find myself returning to this film again and again, even during — especially during — a global crisis. It’s part classic, heartwarming princess tale, part princess fighting her way through the kingdom with nothing but a frying pan, some magic hair and a partner in crime who stumbled on her abode by mistake.“Tangled,” one of Disney’s early forays into computer animation, came at a pivotal time for the studio. Its early 2000s lineup (remember “Chicken Little”?) was a far cry from the princess blockbusters of the ’90s (like “The Little Mermaid” or “Beauty and the Beast”). Disney needed another hit, and it was this 2010 action-filled take on Rapunzel’s story that finally delivered.Nearly a decade later, “Tangled” still holds up. There’s witty dialogue, Zachary Levi, characters who blur the line between heroes and villains, Zachary Levi, delightfully emotive animal sidekicks and a swashbuckling rogue — Zachary Levi — with a smorgasbord of Hot Guy Features handpicked by the women of Walt Disney Animation Studios. (Ladies, we are forever in your debt.) More

The career-spanning exhibition of the work of Hilma af Klint that toured the world a few years ago — including a sojourn at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan — upended the conventional narrative of modern art history. This is hardly an academic matter. As Roberta Smith wrote in her review of the Guggenheim show, af Klint’s “paintings definitively explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project” — a revolution thought to have started with Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian in the years just before World War I and carried to heroic fruition by the likes of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock after World War II.But af Klint, as Smith put it, “got there first.” Born in 1862 to an aristocratic Swedish family and raised partly on the grounds of the military academy where her father was an instructor, she trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, mastering the traditional genres of portrait, still life and landscape. By the late 1880s, her notebooks and paintings began incorporating forms that, while they sometimes evoked natural phenomena (like snail shells, flower petals and insect wings), did not resemble anything in the visible world. Her work, which continued to evolve until her death in 1944, uses geometric patterns and curving, gestural lines to suggest esoteric meanings. Sometimes the images look like maps of a world that exists just past the horizon of rational consciousness.“Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,” a documentary by Halina Dyrschka, provides a thoughtful survey of its subject. It’s enriched by the dazzling charisma of her art and limited by the scarcity of biographical material. The timeline of her life is set forth, and her voice is conjured by passages from her voluminous notebooks, but the fact that she lived and worked so far from the centers of the art world means that some of the usual supporting material in a film like this is lacking. Nobody who remembers her well is still around. There are a handful of photographs of af Klint at various stages of her life, but no moving images, an absence Dyrschka addresses with discreet re-enactments that show af Klint in her studio.The thin background information is a result of the neglect of this prolific and inventive artist for more than a century. “Beyond the Visible” is a chapter in the wholesale revision of the critical and historical record that began only recently, and it enlists a passionate and knowledgeable cadre of curators, scholars, scientists and artists to press the argument for af Klint’s importance. The paintings themselves are the best evidence — even through the mediation of a home screen, their vibrancy, wit and formal command is thrilling — but the intellectual and cultural context is fascinating too.The experts link af Klint’s explorations with contemporary scientific discoveries, like radio waves and the X-ray, that pointed toward the unseen dimensions of reality, and also with the mystical movements of her time. She was drawn to the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky and to the teachings of the Austrian spiritualist Rudolf Steiner, with whom she corresponded. Her visionary interests, far from suggesting eccentricity, place her squarely in the mainstream of modernism, many of whose exponents in various arts (including Kandinsky) found inspiration in the esoteric.“Beyond the Visible” bristles with the excitement of discovery and also with the impatience that recognition has taken so long. It refreshes the eyes and the mind.Beyond the Visible: Hilma af KlintNot rated. In Swedish, English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Kino Marquee. More

This is a movie that can shake at least one of your fundamental beliefs to the core. If you consider “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys a song you could never get tired of, its use over the opening credits — prefaced by that Frank Lloyd Wright quote about how if you tip the world over, everything loose would land in Los Angeles — might refute that. The song’s dulcet tones float over drone shots and other well-composed ground-level establishing views of middle-class L.A. There’s an instant “oh, this again?” feel to it.“Bad Therapy,” directed by William Teitler from a script by Nancy Doyne, who also wrote the novel on which it’s based, then moves ahead into a tepid domestic comedy-drama and winds up as a tepid thriller.[embedded content]Rob Corddry and Alicia Silverstone play Bob and Susan, a couple suffering from the anomie that afflicts adults whose income level used to afford them a lot more affluence and status. Bob, an arguably underpaid cable television executive, is first seen slouched before the dining room table possibly ogling his 12-year-old stepdaughter, while Susan, a dissatisfied real-estate agent, darts about the kitchen, stressed about her day’s appointments.Both elated and deflated by the news that a friend’s expecting triplets, Susan initiates a marriage-counseling session with a therapist, Judy Small (Michaela Watkins). Couples therapy becomes family therapy, then Judy starts seeing Bob and Susan separately — and giving them dangerously contradictory advice.Judy, as it happens, is a rogue doctor. A former colleague (David Paymer) seeks her out to try to stop her narcissism-fueled manipulations, but Judy’s got her hooks in. Judy baits Susan with questions like, “Are you not aware that your husband is an exceedingly attractive man?” Bob, emboldened by Judy, engages in productive flirtation with a very game colleague, played by the former Dallas Cowboy cheerleader Sarah Shahi. Corddry has never had it so good in a movie as he does here.As the picture winds down into an extremely (not to put too fine a point on it) plain variation on “Fatal Attraction,” one’s inclination to question its implausibility diminishes as well. The movie’s technical competence — very few low-to-mid-budget indie productions boast so many immaculately lit shots — is commendable. But it also has the probably unwanted effect of preparing the viewer for the inevitable tidiness of the narrative’s conclusion. “Bad Therapy” is the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm water.Bad TherapyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

Watching Shailene Woodley dither between two preposterously hot men — and steamily sample both — in “Endings, Beginnings” might not be the best choice for viewers whose libidos are on mandatory lockdown.If, however, you’re into self-torture, then meet Daphne (Woodley), in her 30s and on an emotional and physical time out. Having abruptly left her job and her longtime partner for ill-defined reasons, Daphne washes up in the pool house of her married half sister, Billie (Lindsay Sloane). When not lackadaisically searching for a job, preferably at an arts-related nonprofit, Daphne wafts around in boho wear, looking gorgeously pensive and smoking like a fiend. She has temporarily quit drinking: Apparently, as flashbacks suggest, her previously profligate lifestyle was something less than fun.[embedded content]Not to worry, though, because all of her self-imposed sabbaticals will end as soon as her gold lamé frock catches the eye of Frank (Sebastian Stan) at a party. A stubbly brooder and walking red flag, Frank specializes in lustful glances and angsty conversations. Add some flirty text messages and a playlist coyly titled “Music To Suffer To” and Daphne is happily leaping off the celibacy wagon. In more than one direction, as it happens: There’s also Opposite Frank, otherwise known as his best friend, Jack, a successful Irish writer played by Jamie Dornan. Anyone still in doubt about where Daphne’s heart should land needs to carefully reread the final clause of the previous sentence.While Daphne teeters listlessly between security and passion, earnest lovemaking versus rip-them-off boinking, “Endings, Beginnings” grows marginally more substantive. Emotional and familial blanks are vaguely filled in (the script — by Jardine Libaire and the director, Drake Doremus — is partly improvised by the actors), but the movie delivers mood more successfully than information. The soundtrack is soothing, the photography (by the gifted Marianne Bakke) is soft and hazy, and the tone is pleasingly contemplative. The writing might be a tangle of limp clichés, but the actors — especially Woodley and the terrific Wendie Malick as Daphne’s mother — sweat to sell every line.Similar to Doremus’s 2011 romance, “Like Crazy,” “Endings, Beginnings” noodles around with characters whose personalities and motivations remain frustratingly indistinct. By the end, Daphne’s journey of self-discovery may have pulled you in, but, if you’re anything like me, you’ll still hate her.Endings, BeginningsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More