Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘West Indies’: The Slave Ship Musical You Didn’t Know Existed

      by

      “West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty,” a 1979 African movie musical, has quietly built a devoted fan base. Now, it’s back in a restoration.It’s safe to say that the Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s “West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty” is a unique film. That might be the only safe thing about it.The first African movie musical, it traces nearly four centuries of French colonialism with unsparing clarity and relentless creativity, shot entirely on a replica of a slave ship built within an abandoned Citroën factory in Paris.Since its wonky release in 1979, it has quietly built a group of devoted fans, including the Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins, who placed it at the top of his list of the greatest films of all time for Sight & Sound magazine in 2022. But a new 4K restoration and a weeklong run at Film Forum might finally land it in the wider canon.That lack of recognition has been neither accidental nor surprising. When Hondo’s feature debut, “Soleil Ô,” a docudrama about Black immigrant life, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970, it landed him at the vanguard of the still-nascent African cinema, but its subject matter made future financing difficult to secure. He raised money for “West Indies,” an adaptation of Daniel Boukman’s play “The Slavers,” through African private investors and a loan from Algeria’s public broadcasting organization; many cast members were his friends and worked without pay.“When you watch his films, which speak truth to power in a very direct, albeit extremely artful, way, you can see why this is not a filmmaker who was widely accepted by the mainstream,” said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director of the Criterion Collection, a sister company of Janus Films, which is distributing the touring restoration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Julie Robinson Belafonte, Dancer, Actress and Activist, Dies at 95

      by

      With the singer Harry Belafonte, she was one half of a celebrated (and sometimes denounced) interracial power couple who pressed the cause of civil rights in the 1960s.Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, with the singer Harry Belafonte, one half of an interracial power couple who used their high profiles to aid the civil rights movement and the cause of integration in the United States, died on March 9 in Los Angeles. She was 95.Her death, at an assisted living facility in the Studio City neighborhood, was announced by her family. She had resided there for the last year and a half after living for decades in Manhattan.Ms. Belafonte, who was white and the second wife of Mr. Belafonte, the Black Caribbean-American entertainer and activist, had an eclectic career in the arts. At various times she was a dancer, a choreographer, a dance teacher, an actress and a documentary film producer.Ms. Belafonte with Harry Belafonte, whom she married in 1957 shortly after he and his first wife divorced. They had been introduced by Marlon Brando. via Getty ImagesMs. Belafonte traveled the nation and the world with her husband and their children during Mr. Belafonte’s sellout concert tours in the late 1950s and ’60s, presenting an image of a close interracial family that was otherwise rarely seen on television or in newspapers and magazines.She was at Mr. Belafonte’s side when they planned and hosted fund-raisers for civil rights groups, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the more militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ Review: A Wild Romanian Trip

      by

      In Radu Jude’s shambling, acidly funny movie set in Bucharest, a foul-mouthed gofer named Angela tours the troubled heart and soul of her country.Late in Radu Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” the movie shifts tones. Our heroine, a funny, foul-mouthed gofer who’s racking up miles driving in Bucharest, has just told her passenger about a road outside the city that has more memorials edging it than it has kilometers. The movie then cuts to one after another roadside memorial — some stone, others metal, some with photos, others with flowers — for an astonishing four silent minutes, and this near-unclassifiable, often comically ribald movie turns into a plaintive requiem.The woman, Angela — the sneakily charismatic Ilinca Manolache — is a production assistant toiling for a foreign company that’s making a workplace safety video in Romania. Among her tasks is interviewing men and women who have been injured on the job, the idea being that one will make a camera-friendly cautionary tale for workers. As she changes gears, and the movie switches between black-and-white film and color video, Angela flips off other drivers, acidly critiques all that she encounters, creates TikTok videos and effectively maps the geopolitical landscape of contemporary Romania. At one point, she meets the German director Uwe Boll, who’s known to have trounced a few of his critics in boxing matches.I don’t think that Jude wants to beat up critics (even if the interlude with Boll, who’s shooting a “bug-killer film,” is almost endearing); among other things, his movies tend to be well-received. Jude’s shaggy provocation “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” for instance, earned high praise as well as top honors at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021. At the same time, there’s a pushy, borderline abrasive aspect to how Jude strings out Angela’s time behind the wheel in “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” forcing you to share in her tedium. The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.It’s still dark when Angela stumbles out of bed one early morning, naked and cursing. (One of her favorite expletives is featured both in the first and final words in the movie, a fitting bookending blurt that seems like a cri de coeur and one of the movie’s more unambiguously authorial statements.) Before long, she’s dressed and out in the streets, making the first in a series of TikToks in which she takes on the guise of her bald social-media avatar, a bro named Bobita, an extravagantly offensive vulgarian who brags about hanging out with his pal Andrew Tate, the online influencer and self-anointed “king of toxic masculinity.”Tate’s trajectory is lurid and gross, but the references to him are more symbolically than specifically germane to the movie. (Tate moved to Romania in 2017; he was arrested there in May 2023 on an assortment of charges, including human trafficking.) For Angela — for Jude — Tate basically functions as yet another emblem of Bobita’s grotesqueness and of a larger worldview, one that has reduced everything to its market value. Everything is part of his unending hustle, including the Maserati he brags about owning, the women he boasts about sexually conquering and, of course, himself. “Remember,” Bobita says, “like and share!” With her avatar, Angela entertains her audience with a very sharp sting.The same can be said of “Do Not Expect Too Much,” which gradually gathers shape and force as Angela motors around Bucharest. As she does, Jude cuts between her and the title heroine of “Angela Goes On,” a 1981 Romanian film directed by Lucian Bratu about a taxi driver. Produced in the waning years of the Ceausescu dictatorship, the earlier film serves as a fascinating counterpoint to Jude’s movie visually and thematically. (The opening credits announce that this movie is a “conversation” with the 1981 film.) From one angle, not much has changed, but if the roads are still jammed and people hungry, it’s now capitalism rather than communism that keeps this world busily spinning.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Radu Jude Brings TikTok’s Chaos to the Movies

      by

      Radu Jude’s films are messy mash-ups of art, literature, advertising and social media, with some dirty jokes thrown in.Halfway through a recent Zoom interview with Radu Jude, the acclaimed Romanian director of “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” he offered a glimpse into his creative process. He pulled out one of the books he’s reading, an illustrated tome about commedia dell’arte. Then he shared his screen to reveal a collection of texts and images — Van Gogh still lifes, Giacometti sculptures, Japanese haikus — saved in folders on his computer. Jude stopped scrolling at a picture he took of a sign posted on an apartment building entrance.“It says ‘Please have oral sex so as not to disturb the other tenants,’” Jude explained, translating from the Romanian with a grin on his face.The autodidact Jude is not above a dirty joke. His work melds tragedy and farce, drawing promiscuously from art, literature, street ads and social media to fuel his brazen visions of Romanian history and contemporary life.Jude’s previous film, the Golden Bear-winner “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” starts out with the making of a humorously sloppy sex tape and concludes with a witch trial against one of the tape’s participants. His latest, “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday.The black comedy follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a film production assistant who spends most of her 16-hour workdays in her car, shuttling clients and equipment around Bucharest, Romania’s capital. One of Angela’s gigs entails interviewing former factory employees who were injured on the clock for a chance to feature in a corporate safety video. Scenes from the present-day, shot in black-and-white, are interwoven with colorful clips of another woman named Angela: a taxi driver in the 1980s also chained to a thankless job that involves navigating the streets of Bucharest.Ilinca Manolache as Angela, a film production assistant who spends most of her 16-hour workdays in her car, in “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.”4 Proof FilmWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill’ Review: Living Long

      by

      A documentary on the “Star Trek” actor unboldly goes where other profile movies have gone before.The line between star and character gets thoroughly blurred in “William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill,” a profile documentary that treats Shatner, the sole interviewee, as if he were as polished as Capt. James T. Kirk — as opposed to merely being the durable, hard-working actor who played him on “Star Trek” and a terrific raconteur.The director, Alexandre O. Philippe, churns out movie-themed documentaries that veer between insightful (“78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene”) and obsequious (“Memory: The Origins of Alien”). The fawning “You Can Call Me Bill” makes you like Shatner. Still, listening to the actor’s wit, wisdom and drippy insights for 96 minutes is enough to tempt any viewer to channel his or her inner Spock. (“Most illogical!”)“You Can Call Me Bill” is tedious when Shatner shares his thoughts on animals and spirituality (“You reach a connection with a horse that can be something mystical”) but sharp when he reflects on acting. It’s interesting to hear that he felt influenced both by the traditionalism of Laurence Olivier and the Stella Adler training of Marlon Brando; he suggests that split was related to his being Canadian, torn between British and American cultures. He probes deeply into his craft when speaking of selecting differentiated traits that an audience could identify in scenes that featured multiple Kirks and of wanting another take of his death scene close-up in “Star Trek: Generations” (1994).It’s hard not to smile during footage of Shatner, then 90, becoming the oldest person ever to travel to space. But “You Can Call Me Bill” is fundamentally a case of an actor presenting himself as he wants to be seen.You Can Call Me BillRated PG-13 for some language that would mostly pass on 1960s television. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Riddle of Fire’ Review: Tiny Terrors

      by

      Three children embark on a mystical journey in this charming but shapeless first feature.In “Riddle of Fire,” Weston Razooli’s too-fanciful-for-words debut feature, three adventuresome children set off on a mythic quest for a speckled egg. They need the egg to bake a blueberry pie; they need the pie to unlock a television password; they need the password to play their new video game. Viewers may need the patience of Job to remain in their seats.Not that this fairy-tale western is a chore to watch, exactly. Set in Wyoming (and shot in Utah by Jake L. Mitchell, using 16-millimeter film), the movie captures a natural world of golden light and rustling grassland. As Jodie (Skyler Peters), Alice (Phoebe Ferro) and Hazel (Charlie Stover) follow a family of miscreants known as the Enchanted Blade Gang into a forest, their progress is monitored by soaring mountains and stretching skies. Enya-adjacent music and a smattering of inscrutable narration enforce the dreamlike mood, as does the gang’s matriarch, a stag-hunting taxidermist (Lio Tipton) who uses witchcraft to control her brood.Despite its ethereal vibe, “Riddle of Fire” has minor flares of violence and a central trio who curse, drink and thieve with some regularity. The young actors are winsome but inexperienced, too often forced to wrangle improbably precocious turns of phrase. Razooli wants us to see the fantastical narratives children conjure to manage real-world uncertainties, but his vision lacks focus. Indoor spaces heave with clutter, and odd religious touches — the video game is called Angel, and the gang’s truck is inscribed with the weirdly punctuated “destination; heaven” — distract the eye.Aside from a cheekily entertaining opening sequence, “Riddle of Fire” is frustratingly slack and in dire need of whittling. Had Razooli reassigned his editing duties, this unusual picture might have gained the shape and volition it so clearly requires.Riddle of FireRated PG-13 for menaced kids and mumbled dialogue. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Limbo’ Review: Pensive in the Outback

      by

      Long on atmosphere and short on plot, this stylish Australian noir pulls through thanks to a haunted performance by Simon Baker.Those who know Simon Baker only as the sleek title character on the TV series “The Mentalist” might do a double take when they discover his Travis, a stern detective sent out to close a 20-year-old cold case in Ivan Sen’s “Limbo.” Projecting an austere, old-fashioned gravitas, the actor calmly stitches conventional markers from the Genre 101 textbook (drug habit, terseness, tattoos, broken relationships) into a whole that feels organic and lived in.Archetypes are very much on the mind of Sen, an Indigenous Australian filmmaker whose best-known movies, “Mystery Road” (2013) and “Goldstone” (2018), are often called neo-noir, though they’re equally neo-western. At its best, his work lays bare his country’s poisoned roots in striking tableaux. Here, Travis tries to figure out what happened to a First Nations girl who went missing in the titular desert mining town — the movie was shot in Coober Pedy, a surreal outpost where many facilities, including pubs and hotels, are underground, creating a feeling of simultaneous openness and claustrophobia. But the solving of the mystery takes a back seat to Travis’s relationship with the girl’s siblings, Charlie (Rob Collins) and Emma (Natasha Wanganeen), who must navigate their distrust.Sen, who also handled both the black-and-white cinematography and the editing, has a terrific eye for shot composition and sets a deliberate pace that feels implacable rather than merely slow. Tellingly, “Limbo” is more effective in building atmosphere than in plotting, but it’s hard not to want to know more about the haunted people we barely got to meet.LimboNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Free Time’ Review: Take This Job and Shove It. (Now What?)

      by

      Colin Burgess carries this comedy by Ryan Martin Brown about a 20-something who quits his job and finds that life without work isn’t all that thrilling.In “Free Time,” a movie written and directed by Ryan Martin Brown, it quickly becomes clear that Drew (Colin Burgess), a New Yorker in his late 20s with a steady job in data analysis, doesn’t like how his work is defining him. So one day, after querying his boss, Luke (James Webb), on his options, Drew just up and quits.“I think I’m going to go out and live life. Live life to the fullest,” Drew proclaims to his roommate Rajat (Rajat Suresh), who works from home “writing clickbait,” Rajat says, which Drew briefly considers as a new employment option.Drew spends an afternoon biking, downs four edibles before going solo bar hopping and annoys his roommate’s hostile girlfriend, Kim (the comedian known as Holmes, who’s very funny throughout) with his loud television. He is soon desperately bored and in need of another job.This may be because Drew, played with dry, middle-class-Everyman goofiness by Burgess, appears to have no interests — a cursory involvement in an unpromising music project notwithstanding — and a barely discernible inner life. He unexpectedly finds himself a guru to the unemployed before the movie winds down.Burgess carries this succinct (and arguably slight, narratively disjointed) comedy without making you want to strangle his often willfully naïve character. Which is no mean feat, especially in the scene in which he obliviously squanders an erotic opportunity that almost literally drops into his lap.Free TimeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters. More