Movies

Our guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.CANADA NOW 2020 at IFC Center (Feb. 13-16). This traveling showcase brings several of the past year’s notable films from Canada to the United States for the first time. Sophie Deraspe’s “Antigone” (on Saturday) puts a very loose spin on Sophocles with a narrative that concerns an Algerian teenager (Nahéma Ricci) in Montreal; it won the prize for best Canadian feature at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk,” from the indigenous filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (“The Fast Runner”), centers on an Inuit man (Apayata Kotierk) who is pressed to relocate from Baffin Island by the Canadian government.212-924-7771, ifccenter.com[embedded content]‘L’INNOCENTE’ at Film Forum (Feb. 14-20). This final feature by Luchino Visconti is not necessarily one of the most celebrated films from the director of “The Leopard” and “Rocco and His Brothers,” but it is one of his most lush and delirious. Giancarlo Giannini plays a heartless aristocrat whose own dalliances (Jennifer O’Neill plays his mistress) are complicated when his wife (Laura Antonelli) becomes pregnant with another man’s child — a situation that rekindles his love for her, or at least his sense of possessiveness.212-727-8110, filmforum.orgLONG WEEKEND OF LOVE at BAM Rose Cinemas (Feb. 14-17). Is it possible to pack 18 years of romance into one weekend — or a single day? BAM will find out when it shows the films of Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy (made from 1995 to 2013) sequentially on Sunday. You might argue that it helps to have some distance between viewings of each installment, because the lovers Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) themselves are dealing with the passage of time and the slippage of memory. Still, each one is a superb movie. On Valentine’s Day proper, the series features “The Philadelphia Story” and the lesbian-cinema landmark “Desert Hearts,” and on Saturday, it hosts a 20th-anniversary screening of “Love & Basketball.”718-636-4100, bam.org[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]NEIGHBORING SCENES: NEW LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA at Film at Lincoln Center (Feb. 14-18). Eleven Latin American countries are represented in this survey of recent exports. The director Pablo Larraín (“Jackie”) returns to his native Chile with “Ema” (on Sunday), a tonally seesawing portrait of a dancer (Mariana Di Girolamo) and her choreographer husband (Gael García Bernal), who have returned the boy they adopted. “Let It Burn” (on Saturday), a Brazilian documentary, observes the downtrodden residents of a hostel in São Paulo.212-875-5601, filmlinc.orgTELEVISION MOVIES: BIG PICTURES ON THE SMALL SCREEN at the Museum of Modern Art (Feb. 19-28). Streaming platforms may have muddied the waters when it comes to differentiating between movies and television, but those have waters have been muddied before. MoMA has assembled a collection of films that were actually made to air on television, although some enjoyed runs at cinemas in other countries. The series opens with Lillian Gish in “The Trip to Bountiful” (showing on Wednesday and Feb. 23), which was a television play before it was a theatrical play, and continues with work by noted auteurs, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Fear of Fear” (on Feb. 21 and 26), with Margit Carstensen as an unraveling housewife; Roberto Rossellini’s René Descartes biography “Cartesius” (on Feb. 22 and 27); and Mike Leigh’s “Meantime” (on Feb. 22 and 28), a response to the Thatcher era, with Tim Roth.212-708-9400, moma.org More

Dyanne Thorne, who starred in one of the most notorious sexploitation movies of the 1970s, “Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS” — a head-spinning mix of Nazi fetishism, sadism and female empowerment that is still talked about by grindhouse film aficionados as well as by more serious scholars — died on Jan. 28 in Las Vegas. She was 83.Her husband, Howard Maurer, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Ms. Thorne began in show business as a singer and comedian before veering into risqué movies like “Sin in the Suburbs” (1964) and a version of “Pinocchio” decidedly not for children (1971).The release of “Ilsa,” though, in 1975, elevated her to an entirely different level of fame, at least among moviegoers of a certain stripe. The film and her character, a Nazi doctor with a taste for sex and torture, became cultural touchstones of sorts, inspiring, among other things, songs by several rock bands.The movie, directed by Don Edmonds, begins with Ms. Thorne’s character having sex with a prisoner and then presiding over his castration, her frequent punishment for those who do not satisfy her. “This was the sweetest actor in the world that they castrated,” Ms. Thorne told the website Horror Cult Films in 2011.Ilsa also conducts medical experiments on female prisoners, hoping to show that women can tolerate pain better than men and should therefore be allowed to serve in combat.The movie, shot in nine days on the studio set once used by the prisoner-of-war sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes,” became an unexpected hit, catching on overseas as well as in certain markets in the United States, including New York, when it had a long run in a then-seedy Times Square.“To our surprise, ‘Ilsa’ went through the roof,” John Dunning, a founder of Cinépix Film Properties, the production and distribution company behind the film, wrote in his memoir, “You’re Not Dead Until You’re Forgotten” (2014, with Bill Brownstein), adding, “It played more than a year in Brussels alone.”The whip-wielding Ilsa was so popular that, even though she died at the end of the movie, she was brought back for “Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks” (1976) and “Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia” (1977). (Ms. Thorne also starred in another film released in 1977 under various titles — “Ilsa: The Wicked Warden,” “Wanda: The Wicked Warden” — that is sometimes regarded as a sequel and sometimes not.)Mr. Maurer said in a phone interview that Ms. Thorne, whom he married shortly after the first “Ilsa” movie was released, was simultaneously in demand and untouchable because of the reaction to “She Wolf.” He ended up representing her in negotiations for the sequels because no agent would, he said.Her interests outside of acting included, perhaps incongruously, the ministry. She was an adherent of Science of Mind, a religious movement established in the 1920s by Ernest Holmes, and was an ordained nondenominational minister, Mr. Maurer said.The two of them had a wedding business in Las Vegas, with Ms. Thorne generally writing the ceremonies and Mr. Maurer, a musician, providing music. Some clients would opt for an “Ilsa wedding.”“She would do it in costume, in some of the things she wore in the films that we still had,” Mr. Maurer said (though never, he added, with any swastikas). “She would put in little nuances from the films that every fan recognized. Sometimes she’d use the whip. It was all done tongue in cheek.”She did her last Ilsa wedding in November.She was born Dorothy Ann Seib on Oct. 14, 1936, in Park Ridge, N.J., to Henry and Dorothy (Conklin) Seib. She was raised largely by her mother, who held various jobs, including seamstress and jeweler, Mr. Maurer said. She took courses at New York University and studied acting, including with the teacher Uta Hagen, he said.The theater was her first interest. She was a “Casino Cutie” in the original cast of “This Was Burlesque,” a revue that opened at the Casino East Theater in Manhattan in 1962 and ran for more than 1,000 performances before transferring to Broadway in 1965 (although by then Ms. Thorne was no longer in the cast).She also appeared in skits on Jack Paar’s variety show and similar TV programs in the early and mid-1960s.Mr. Maurer said a happenstance of wardrobe helped Ms. Thorne win the “Ilsa” role. She had a part-time job as a chauffeur at the time and arrived at the audition straight from a driving shift wearing her uniform.“She walked inside in this chauffeur’s jacket and jodhpur pants,” he said, “and one of the guys said, ‘That’s her!’”The movie was loosely inspired by the life of Ilse Koch, the sadistic wife of the commandant of two concentration camps, Sachsenhausen and then Buchenwald.The movie won Ms. Thorne so many fans that some were still lining up to chat with her at autograph conventions years later. Vincent Canby, however, the courtly film critic for The New York Times, was not one of them.When he saw the movie, or at least part of it, in 1975 for an article that carried the headline “Now for a Look at Some Really Bad Movies,” among the things he didn’t care for was her attempt at a German accent.“At the point I walked out of the theater,” Mr. Canby wrote, “she was having an argument on the telephone with a superior officer whom she repeatedly addressed as ‘Hair Gain-hay-ral.’” More

“Hi, I’m Cathy Yan, the director of ‘Birds of Prey.’ So we’re near the end of the movie. And this is the culminating, the final fight scene between the women and the gangs that Roman Sionis, played by Ewan McGregor, sends in to the funhouse, which is called the Booby Trap. Well, originally, it wasn’t a funhouse, actually. I believe, originally, it was a hotel. And they were supposed to fight their way down. But then, when I got together with our amazing production designer, KK Barrett, and our DP, Matthew Libatique, we kind of thought, wouldn’t it be more interesting to convey a location that felt like Harley Quinn’s mind on acid? Our actresses, they’re actually doing the majority of the stunts themselves. That was four to five months of brutal training. When we were in prep, the actors were training pretty much every day with our stunt team.” “Come on!” “Margot learned to roller skate for this movie because she ends up roller skating in a good portion of the movie. She learned to roller skate on a bank track for the derby scene. And then, obviously, she’s roller skating here. And for this moment, she is actually just roller skating. And she was so— she became so good that she was able to stop herself, which is actually the most difficult thing to do, while on a rotating carousel, which is infinitely harder than when you’re not on a rotating carousel. What was another big challenge that we only sort of realized on the day, too, was that because the background was so different, for continuity, whenever we started a take, we had to make sure that we started and ended at the same point. So the carousel became a sort of clock. And we had a number for each of the hands. And then each hand had to directly correlate with a point outside in the funhouse so that we were able to actually match up the backgrounds. If we didn’t do that, then it would have been a complete nightmare.” [MUSIC PLAYING] ”[SHOUTS] Ah. Wait.” More

Aardman Animations’ stop-motion process is labor-intensive and rigid, requiring comprehensive forethought and specificity of execution, so what’s perhaps most striking about their films is their freedom and playfulness. Their latest, “A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon” (streaming on Netflix beginning Feb. 14) required months of backbreaking frame-by-frame animation, but it has a freewheeling, improvisational spirit, a looseness that results in a giddy comic energy.Shaun’s first big-screen vehicle, the 2015 “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” was an inspired comic contraption, sending the good-hearted sheep and his flock on a big city adventure. In “Farmageddon,” the adventure comes to them, via an alien child who crashes near their farm, the conclusion of an accidental joy ride to earth. While Shaun attempts to help the alien “Lu-La” get home, Farmer John sees a moneymaking opportunity, and attempts to court the U.F.O. tourist trade by turning his farm into a comically rinky-dink theme park.[embedded content]If the setup sounds reminiscent of “E.T.,” that’s purposeful; the directors Will Becher and Richard Phelan include numerous visual references to Spielberg’s classic. They also throw in winks in the directions of alien pop culture artifacts like “The X-Files,” “Doctor Who,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which should please sci-fi fans of all ages.But the most telling homage is a reference to Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” a reminder of Aardman’s true tradition. The “Shaun” films are entirely free of dialogue — the animals don’t talk, while the humans are only heard speaking gibberish — and in many ways, these shorts and features are carrying the baton of classic silent comedy.Shaun is a resourceful “little fellow” in the tradition of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and his adventures are similarly well-constructed machines of gags, foils, everyday foibles, and comic exaggerations. As with those silent classics, the “Shaun” films boil down to their set pieces, and while none in the new film approach the Tati-esque perfection of the restaurant scene in “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” “Farmageddon” features plenty of inspired, boomeranging slapstick, executed with clockwork precision. It’s a very funny movie — and an endlessly, refreshingly cheerful one, which is just as rare.A Shaun the Sheep Movie: FarmageddonRated G. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. More

What if instead of the drama of athletes risking life, limb and loss for their countries, the Olympic Games set the scene for a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy? Such is the premise of “Olympic Dreams.”An Olympic runner, Alexi Pappas, plays the fictional Penelope, a cross-country skier whose personal best isn’t enough to bring home a medal from the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Ezra (Nick Kroll) on the other hand, is just happy to be invited. He is a dentist, part of the medical staff for the athletes in the Olympic Village, where he happily advises patients who are more familiar with pelvic fractures than dental floss. He sees Penelope in the cafeteria, and he is captivated. They strike up a flirtation, and the movie follows them through a fling that unfolds against a once-in-a-lifetime backdrop.[embedded content]The setting of “Olympic Dreams” is clearly the film’s greatest asset, and the director, Jeremy Teicher, shot in a fly-on-the-wall style during the event. Before the well-known comedian Kroll appears, it would be easy to mistake this low-fi movie for a sports documentary rather than a narrative feature. Athletes are extras, dates occur during curling practices, and there is a little thrill in being granted access to the backstage of one of the world’s most selective and stage-managed events. But compared to the drama of the competition, the story and its characters always feel slight, an excuse to hang out among Olympians rather than a movie that builds upon (or for that matter critiques) its surroundings.Olympic DreamsRated PG-13 for language. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. More

Mark Bozek had a no-brainer opportunity when he landed an interview with Bill Cunningham, the New York Times street photographer and self-described “fashion historian.”Cunningham was renowned for his eye and his minimalist personal style — a signature blue French worker’s jacket — and his bicycle, replaced dozens of times over the years, that enabled him to shoot on the go. This talking-head footage is a promising start that ultimately leads to a less than illuminating documentary.[embedded content]Bozek built this movie around that interview, from 1994. It finds its subject animated, punctuating his sentences with a toothy grin as he talks about his Roman Catholic upbringing, his early days at the fashion house Chez Ninon and his humble apartment in the old Carnegie Hall Studios. The film is peppered with rare archival photos — including many of Cunningham’s own — and narrated by the New York fashion icon Sarah Jessica Parker (a too on-the-money choice), whose voice-over delivery here lacks her playful “Sex and the City” wink.Bozek’s first feature, which he started working on right after Cunningham’s death in 2016, comes nearly a decade after Richard Press’s superior vérité-style profile, “Bill Cunningham New York.”While “The Times of Bill Cunningham” touches on many of the same topics, it makes one startling departure with this speculation: “While the attention that was brought to him via a growing number of accolades and a popular documentary in 2011 may have brought him some degree of lifetime achievement, it is more likely he regretted it,” Parker says in the film. In an attempt to distinguish his documentary from the other, Bozek delivers what feels like an unnecessary low blow.The Times of Bill CunninghamNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. More

For his first feature, “You Go To My Head,” the Belgian director Dimitri de Clercq decided to see what he could do with just four crew members, two main characters and a single, stunning location. It turned out to be quite a lot.Stranded in the Sahara after a car accident, a lovely young woman (Delfine Bafort) is found, unconscious, by Jake (Svetozar Cvetkovic), a withdrawn architect. When a doctor explains that the woman has post-traumatic amnesia, Jake names her Kitty and claims she’s his wife. Later, installed in Jake’s striking home — a place without neighbors or, more disturbingly, furniture — Kitty struggles to connect to a life, and a partner, as alien to her as the desert itself.[embedded content]Shot in Morocco between searing sunlight and pillowy dunes, “You Go to My Head” is a mysteriously elusive romance whose location is almost overpoweringly tangible. (The sensual cinematography is by Stijn Grupping.) Hacène Larbi’s eerily dissonant score is as perfectly spare as the film’s emotions, yet it imbues Kitty’s situation with a mesmerizing, inchoate danger. The movie is clamoring to erupt into melodrama, but de Clercq, content to wallow in teasingly luscious and enigmatically staged images, happily isn’t listening.Until its surprisingly effective ending, “You Go To My Head” keeps its drama under the skin. Like an animal in captivity, Bafort, who is also a model, slinks and lounges with long-limbed grace; but it’s Cvetkovic who holds the movie steady, giving Jake a secretive, worn gentleness that’s tinged with tragedy.“I feel good, like I’m coming back to life,” Kitty tells him, gazing fondly at her kidnapper. We just don’t know whose life she’s coming back to.You Go to My HeadNot rated. Running time: In French, Flemish and English, with English subtitles. 1 hour 56 minutes. More