Movies

In 1971, the lawman who does as he pleases strutted through movies like ‘The French Connection.’ But Black filmmakers found an alternative version. More

Elsa Raven, a character actress perhaps best remembered for a small but crucial role in the hit 1985 time-travel comedy “Back to the Future,” in which she establishes a pivotal plot point by lobbying to preserve the local clock tower, died on Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91.Her agent, David Shaul of the BRS/Gage talent agency, confirmed her death.Ms. Raven had dozens of film and television credits and appeared on New York and regional stages. She built a steady career of Everywoman roles. The film and television characters she played sometimes didn’t even have names; she was just “Maid” or “Prenatal Nurse” or “Mom” (as in the Season 6 “Seinfeld” episode “The Mom and Pop Store”).Perhaps none of those performances made a bigger impression than her role as “Clocktower Lady” in “Back to the Future,” the top-grossing movie of 1985. Early in the film her character interrupts the young lovers played by Michael J. Fox and Claudia Wells in mid-kiss, urging them to “save the clock tower.” The mayor, she tells them, holding out a donation can, wants to replace the clock.“Thirty years ago, lightning struck that clock tower, and the clock hasn’t run since,” she explains. “We at the Hill Valley Preservation Society think it should be preserved exactly the way it is, as part of our history and heritage.”Later, Mr. Fox’s character, who has traveled back in time to 1955, uses a lightning strike on the tower to propel himself back to his own time.Ms. Raven was not in the two “Back to the Future” sequels, but she did participate in reunions of the cast and crew from the original film, including one last year at the Hollywood Museum, at which she spoke about the lasting impact of the movie.“We didn’t know how significant it was going to be,” she told United Press International then. “We knew it was a good, solid movie. Of course we were delighted when it was such a big success. It’s an evergreen. It’s not today. It’s any day.”Elsa Rabinowitz (she took “Raven” as a stage name) was born on Sept. 21, 1929, in Charleston, S.C., to Louis and Rosalie Rabinowitz. She began her acting career in New York — her family said she worked with Joseph Papp to bring free Shakespeare to Central Park beginning in the late 1950s.Her first television credits were in small roles in 1963. One of her first larger roles was in the 1979 haunted-house film “The Amityville Horror,” in which she played the real estate agent who sells James Brolin and Margot Kidder’s characters the ill-fated dwelling.“You’re going to be very happy,” she tells them. “It’s a wonderful house.”She had recurring roles on the NBC sitcom “Amen” and the CBS crime drama “Wiseguy” in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and on the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.” Her other film credits included “The Moderns” (1988), in which she played Gertrude Stein, “In the Line of Fire” (1993) and “Titanic” (1997). In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Ms. Raven made three appearances on the long-running drama “Quincy M.E.,” which starred Jack Klugman as a medical examiner who investigates suspicious deaths.In 1985, she had another chance to work with Mr. Klugman, this time onstage at the Lawrence Welk Village Theater in Escondido, Calif., in Bernard Slade’s play “Tribute.” Mr. Klugman played Scottie, a man with cancer; she played (as The San Diego Union-Tribune put it) “a doctor who endures hemorrhoid jokes while dragging Scottie off for chemotherapy.”Ms. Raven, whose four siblings died before her, is survived by 15 nieces and nephews. More

Watch Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Lola” with the film it’s based on, Josef von Sternberg’s “The Blue Angel,” to see how these directors made art from artifice. More

The title “Mortal” wouldn’t seem to require much explanation, but this Norway-set fantasy film leads with a handy definition (“mortal [mawr-tl] n. A human being”). Its estimation of viewers’ intelligence doesn’t improve from there.Directed by André Ovredal (last year’s more appealing “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”), “Mortal” isn’t really a movie proper as it is ponderous scene-setting for a potential sequel. It centers on Eric (Nat Wolff), an American of Norwegian descent first seen as a struggling backpacker in need of a haircut. He wanders into a town, grabs some medical supplies and is hectored by local teenagers. After getting shoved, Eric warns a boy not to touch him. The kid does anyway, barely — and instantly drops dead.[embedded content]The police are baffled. Eric’s superpowers confound him as well, although, as a hangdog of few words, he initially appears more interested in brooding than in solving the mystery. A psychologist (Iben Akerlie) intuits that his abilities are tethered to his emotions. Eric’s deadly touch can also heal. And he can control weather, allowing the filmmakers to stage show-offy effects sequences like a helicopter crash or a lightning storm on a bridge. A United States government official (Priyanka Bose) fears Eric’s godlike abilities will upend the globe, because he’ll be proof that the world’s faithful are worshiping the wrong god.But is Eric a god? Or is he auditioning for “X-Men: Scandinavia”? The long-deferred answers aren’t satisfying on their own, and even less so when “Mortal” stops short just when it’s getting started. Wait for the next movie, sucker.MortalRated R. Violent weather. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In select theaters and available to rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

Early in this movie, when Ben (Edward Holcroft), tells his mom, Margaret (Fiona Shaw), that he and his girlfriend are planning a move from England to Australia, Shaw makes a face that looks as though a chisel has literally been taken to her jaw. Shaw is more often than not a better than capable performer, but this kind of overplaying seems endemic to “Kindred,” a derivative, irritating thriller directed by Joe Marcantonio. (The film has no relation to the Octavia Butler book of the same name, which, depending how you look at it, is fortunate or too bad.)Margaret presides over a crumbling manor whose décor is dominated by portraits of lily-white colonialists from centuries past. In a montage, one of those pale faces is contrasted with that of Ben’s girlfriend, Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), who is Black. Once Ben is knocked dead by a horse and Charlotte is discovered to be pregnant, Margaret and her stepson, Thomas (Jack Lowden), contrive to lock Charlotte up at the estate. The dreary picture then turns into a hostage scenario for people who thought “Get Out” was too subtle — except race is never explicitly mentioned. This is what the British call “restraint,” one supposes.[embedded content]Some poorly developed symbolic hoo-ha about birds adds a mild supernatural dimension to the movie, which at times calls to mind “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Die! Die! My Darling!” — in the sense that they’re pictures one would rather be watching.It doesn’t help that Charlotte is a completely underdeveloped character who comes off mostly as dull and ineffectual. Eventually the movie devolves into a particularly pernicious variant of torture porn. Marcantonio’s pedestrian direction is matched by Carlos Catalan’s cinematography, depicting England as an unpleasant, dull green-gray land.KindredNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

Steely Dan once famously mocked “show business kids makin’ movies of themselves.” If “Jungleland,” directed by Max Winkler, son of the actor Henry, is any indication, those kids should stick to that pursuit because they don’t have a clue about other people.The film features two brothers, one a soft-hearted boxer, the other a would-be operator who should have looked out for his sibling. No waterfront figures in this tale by Theodore Bressman and David Branson Smith, with Winkler.[embedded content]Charlie Hunnam’s Stanley has “managed” the fighting career of his brother Lion (Jack O’Connell) to the extent that Lion is banned from legitimate sport. The two now inhabit a boarded-up house in what looks like a 1980s Springsteen album ghost town.A loan shark, whom Stanley owes (of course), waves the promise of a big payday at a bare-knuckle match on the other side of the country. The catch: The brothers have to shuttle a surly young woman named Sky (Jessica Barden) to Reno and deliver her to another degenerate criminal.These three hardscrabble Americans are played by British actors. Their work betrays no condescension, and only a little self-flattery. Hunnam’s characterization is the most experimental, based on the proposition: “What if Channing Tatum, but with a beard?”During their grittily picaresque road trip, Lion becomes attached to the bumptious Sky, and the brothers start to feel bad about delivering her to certain doom. The sweaty clichés enacted along the way are uniformly tired and ultimately offensive. A love scene near the movie’s finale, Winkler’s vision of sex among the underclass, is a caricature that could comfortably fit in the new “Borat” movie.Speaking of Springsteen, the movie pulls out his cover of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” for the movie’s supposed-to-be-searing fight-scene finale. “Come on and open up your heart,” he sings. In any other context one might. Here, the only reasonable response is, “I’m good, thanks.”JunglelandRated R language, violence, sex. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

In the double-agent saga “The Informer,” the director, Andrea Di Stefano, isn’t going to wow anyone with flashy technique. But the movie has a surfeit of the sudden reversals and interlocking loyalties that can make for an absorbing time killer.It stars Joel Kinnaman as its main mole, Pete Koslow, a military veteran and ex-convict who has made a deal with the F.B.I. to serve as an informant while running fentanyl for the Polish mob. But his presence at a deal gone wrong — where an undercover New York Police Department officer is killed — puts him in a bind. In a single moment, he becomes persona non grata to his F.B.I. contact (Rosamund Pike) and a suspect for an N.Y.P.D. detective (Common). The killing also cements his obligations to the cartel’s chief, called The General (Eugene Lipinski), the man he was supposed to expose.[embedded content]The only solution that might satisfy everyone (though not with all the groups’ knowledge, naturally) is for him to go even deeper into cloak-and-dagger territory — by returning to prison, where he’ll traffic drugs for The General while secretly amassing evidence on that same drug ring for the feds.Is any of this plausible? Probably not, but the movie, based on a Swedish novel and transplanted to New York, escalates quite nicely, laying out how Pete, caught in a web of bureaucratic secrecy, can’t trust his motivationally opposed handlers to protect him or his family. (Ana de Armas plays Pete’s wife.) And Kinnaman, beefy enough to convincingly fend off a violent prison hit, helps “The Informer” make a few satisfying late forays into action territory.The InformerRated R. Violence and corruption. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More