Movies

This Netflix holiday movie offers energetic sequences, charming music and a delightful cast. More

The myth of Bonnie and Clyde dies hard, especially because of Arthur Penn’s romanticized crime film, which hit screens with a splatter in 1967. That movie’s special mix of Hollywood chic and frenzied violence rekindled the legend and kept it smoldering. Americans love their outlaws and really love them running wild, partly because the world’s most powerful country clings to its foundational us-versus-them identity.The hollow genre exercise “Dreamland” is the latest to take its lead from America’s favorite bandit couple, even as it tries to chart its own course. This time the focus is on a 17-year-old, Eugene (the very adult Finn Cole), whose failed family farm is part of a larger national catastrophe. It’s the 1930s and times are tough, or so the movie insists, even if the production design, costumes, etc. show otherwise. Eugene has the usual back story of an absent dad and stern stepfather (a fine Travis Fimmel). And, like every human to walk the earth (and most who crop up in fiction), Eugene has dreams.Eugene wants to help his family, though apparently not enough to work, preferring to wander and read pulp magazines. The promise of a hefty reward for a bank robber, Allison Wells (a criminally wasted Margot Robbie), seems to show him the way, but mostly puts his fanciful imagination into further overdrive. He decides he will find Allison, a plan that takes a far-fetched turn after she’s wounded and takes refuge in his family’s barn. The movie more or less writes itself after she hikes her skirt and he tends her wound. Dust swirls and so do passions, and before long this unremarkable pipsqueak and outlaw woman have become a wholly unbelievable couple on the run.It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie. There are honeyed landscapes, still-life shots of crepuscular, peopleless rooms and a voice-over (by Lola Kirke), which tries to elevate Eugene’s story with penny-ante psychology and a splash of mythopoetic fancy. “The land turned on us,” the narrator says early on, pinning the Dust Bowl on Mother Nature, “and then the banks came.” So Eugene hides in the barn to read Black Mask magazine and “daydream about his destiny.”We see Eugene in that barn, his eyes fixed on his magazine and one hand down the front of his pants. He’s “fantasizing about a life like his heroes,” the narrator reassures us as there’s a cut to a scene of bank robbers using hostages as shields against police fire. The implication here is that Eugene is turned on by the violence he reads about, an idea that the movie rationalizes by ending the robbery with a punctuating close-up of Allison’s face. Mass culture, it turns out, was just the first temptation for Eugene, who finds his second in another movieland Jezebel, who, the moment she appears, makes it clear that we’re watching a movie about the wrong character.DreamlandRated R for the usual gun violence and gratuitous female nudity. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

A titanic figure, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (1908-2015) got his start in the era of silent cinema and completed his last feature at the age of 105.Not every one of Oliveira’s many films, the vast majority of which were made after he turned 65, can be considered great — he was a filmmaker given to experimentation. But a good many are, and “Francisca” (1981), streaming in a digital restoration from Film at Lincoln Center, is one.A leisurely two hours and 45 minutes, set in mid-1850s Portugal with the country in unseen political turmoil, the movie tells a tale of “ill-omened passion” (its suitably Victorian term for insane romantic love). Oliveira constructs an enigmatic, unbalanced triangle consisting of a beautiful and innocent English woman, Francisca “Fanny” Owen, a louche and handsome Portuguese aristocrat, José Augusto, and the cynical writer Camilo Castelo Branco.Although resembling a 19th-century novel, “Francisca” is actually meta 19th-century; rather than making the setting seem natural, Oliveira renders it strange. The movie is an adaptation of a pastiche written by the feminist author Agustina Bessa-Luís. Branco is a real person, one of Portugal’s great writers, but Fanny and José Augusto (played by Teresa Menezes and Diogo Dória) are larger-than-life fictions. The actors who play the English angel and her Byronic cad are taller than their cast mates and — divinities come to earth — tower over the diminutive Branco.“Francisca” is both classical and postmodern, a cross between a lush Visconti period piece and the stylized expressionism of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Oliveira evokes the past as though reconstructing a dinosaur from a handful of bones. Different planes of existence intersect throughout. José Augusto is introduced at a society ball, a wax statue amid a riotous whirl of masked revelers. More than once, the aristocratic protagonists stumble upon singing peasants seemingly oblivious to the doings of their social betters.Oliveira is a frugal filmmaker and a master of camera placement. Many sequences play out in a single shot as if to document their own artifice. Fanny’s theatrical line readings alternate with deadpan grand gestures. Having been expelled from Fanny’s family home, suggestively named Paraiso (Paradise), José Augusto twice rides his horse into Camilo’s room to report the news.Mysteries proliferate. On the eve of his marriage to Fanny, José Augusto receives, courtesy of Camilo, a packet of letters written by Fanny. Reading them, he is driven into a cold fury — that can only be construed as pure plot device. Neither the content nor the original recipient of the fatal letters is ever revealed. (Nor, it should be said, is the exact nature of the couple’s perverse, self-defeating desire.)“The soul is a vice,” Fanny proclaims at one point, and, after running off with José Augusto, she dreams of Camilo bad-mouthing his rival and threatening to take her soul away. Much in the movie implies that the writer has stage-managed the whole fiction. He does have the last word — or rather, Oliveira does.For all its doomy descent into darkness, “Francisca” ends in the boîte where José Augusto received the letters, reprising the gay music of the masked ball that opened the film.FranciscaAvailable for streaming at Film at Lincoln Center, starting Nov. 12; filmlinc.org.Rewind is an occasional column covering revived, restored and rediscovered movies. More

This picture, “Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds,” is the third Werner Herzog movie to come out in 2020. Yes, he directed it alongside Clive Oppenheimer, but still. At age 78, Herzog’s productivity almost recalls that of his long-gone colleague and compatriot Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who had more feature films to his name than years lived when he died in 1982 at age 37.Herzog has to be at least reasonably good at self-care to maintain not just his filmmaking pace but his globe-trotting. Like his most recent release, “Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin,” this movie was shot around the world, including the Torres Strait Islands, Castel Gandolfo in Italy, Antarctica, Arizona and Hawaii. But it’s his intellectual curiosity and emotional availability that make his movies sing. This film rests on the fact that Mother Earth is always being called on by other worlds in the forms of comets, meteorites and asteroids — and it’s about as transportive as documentaries get.Oppenheimer is a volcanologist from the University of Cambridge who first appeared in Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World,” a spectacular Antarctica trip, in 2007. He was later in Herzog’s “Into the Inferno,” in 2016, about, well, volcanoes. Cataclysmic fire has a special place in Herzog’s filmography; his remarkable “Lessons of Darkness” (1992) treated the burning oil fields of Kuwait, set ablaze by Saddam Hussein, as an apocalyptic sci-fi scenario.[embedded content]“Fireball” looks at fire coming from the sky. But it begins very much on the ground, in Mérida, Mexico, at a celebration of the Day of the Dead. Men with painted faces perform what Herzog describes as a “fireball ritual,” derived from ancient Mayan culture; it “feels like a re-enactment,” he says. The site where they dance is one where an asteroid changed the topography millions of years ago.Oppenheimer is the onscreen interviewer and explainer for much of the movie. He shows places where meteorites affected both landscape and culture. In the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, for instance, a black stone embedded in the Kaaba, the cube at the center of Islam’s holiest mosque, is the subject of adulation; it is believed that the stone fell from paradise to show Adam and Eve where to build a shrine, according to Muslim tradition. Similarly, in Ensisheim, a commune in the Alsace region of France, a meteorite that landed in 1492 was seen as “an email from God,” Oppenheimer says.The movie introduces us to fascinating people — among them a jazz musician turned geological scientist and his research collaborator, who survived cancer four times and dresses like Wyatt Earp. It also teems with beautiful visuals illustrating mind-boggling mathematical concepts. “It gets so complicated now, we are not going to torture you with details,” Herzog drolly notes at one point.And “Fireball” makes two very credible statements. One: that, hippie rhetoric notwithstanding, you and I really are made of stardust. And two: that a world-changing (as in probably obliterating) dark-world visitor is sooner or later going to come this planet’s way. The equanimity with which Herzog and Oppenheimer’s movie frames that certainty is strangely comforting.Fireball: Visitors From Darker WorldsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

Once the terms “animated movie” and “animated cartoon” were virtually synonymous. But since computer animation and other advances drained the genre of its cartoonlike qualities, that has changed. One refreshing thing about “Wolfwalkers” is that it feels and looks like a cartoon.The characters of this fantasy tale, set in 17th-century Ireland, are stylized in a way that sometimes recalls old-school animation outfits like UPA (of the legendary short “Gerald McBoing Boing”) or the British Halas and Batchelor studio (which made a feature of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”). The flattened backgrounds hark back to Disney’s 1959 “Sleeping Beauty.” There’s a slightly rough, hand-drawn quality to the work throughout, and the colors are bold and vibrant.[embedded content]As much a joy as this movie — directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart and featuring the voice talents of Eve Whittaker, Honor Kneafsey and Sean Bean — is to behold, its scenario is more than a little overbaked and overdrawn.Robyn, the young daughter of a British soldier overseeing a province and the surrounding forest in 17th-century Ireland, stumbles upon a mother and daughter who are “wolfwalkers,” that is, humans who can take lupine form. Trouble ensues, of course, because the townspeople are fearful of wolves, etcetera.This is one of those movies where you know just what’s going to happen after the line, “You must do as you’re told, my girl” is uttered. And what happens after that. And so on.It is kind of funny, if you can roll with it, that the movie eventually endorses the “pagan nonsense” its title characters embody. And that, in a bit of dialogue near the end, offers an almost explicit denunciation of Christianity. Not many animated movies (or movies from Ireland, really) have that particular kind of nerve.WolfwalkersRated PG for themes, action. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

An intimate travelogue, “Monsoon” follows Kit (Henry Golding), a software animator raised in London, as he returns to Vietnam, where he was born and lived until he was 6 years old. Kit’s eventual goal is to scatter his parents’ ashes. His Vietnamese is no longer good, and he has faint memories of his childhood. Lee (David Tran), his cousin, paints a fuller picture of their time as boys.“Monsoon” was written and directed by Hong Khaou, who came to Vietnam as a baby, when his parents fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; they left Vietnam for Britain when he was 8. In writing the film, he drew on impressions from his own long-deferred return.[embedded content]Kit forges a romantic connection with an American, Lewis (Parker Sawyers), who is in Vietnam overseeing production for his clothing company — and happens to be the son of a Vietnam veteran, a contrivance that influences their discussion of the war. In non-romantic matters, he meets Linh (Molly Harris), who leads art tours and shows Kit how to prep flowers for traditional lotus tea, a drink Kit’s parents loved that he has never tried.This is a thoroughly personal film, in ways that don’t always translate. Driven more by mood than plot, the movie spends a great deal of time absorbing the sights and sounds of the former Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and, later, Hanoi. But the ambience doesn’t register with full force, or do the heavy lifting entrusted to it. “Monsoon” finally tips over the line that separates minimalism from a not-fully-developed movie.MonsoonNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters, virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms. More