Movies

The Punch and Judy puppet shows, once a misogynistic staple of British seaside entertainment, have enthralled — and possibly traumatized — centuries of impressionable children. In them, a barely-changing slapstick (the term derives from Punch’s weapon of choice) tableau of wife-beating, sausage-scarfing and baby-tossing unfolds, usually with inept policemen joining the mayhem.Twisting the marionettes’ appeal into a bizarre feminist revenge fable, the Australian writer and director Mirrah Foulkes gives us “Judy & Punch,” a parable of toxic masculinity that slots almost too neatly into our #MeToo moment. Scurrying into a filthy public house in a 17th-century English village named Seaside (“Nowhere near the sea,” an on-screen note admits), the camera parks us in the midst of a raucous audience. It’s waiting for Professor Punch (a menacingly jovial Damon Herriman) and his wife, Judy (Mia Wasikowska), popular puppeteers who seem destined for wider fame.[embedded content]A philandering showman equally addicted to alcohol and applause, Punch longs to be discovered by a big-city talent scout. Judy, the real genius behind the string-pulling, is naïvely hoping that success will sober him up and settle him down.“The show seems to be getting punchier all the time,” she says, worriedly. Public opinion is changing, and even the revelry of “stoning day” — a self-explanatory spectacle designed to expose witches — is being questioned. And when, unwisely, Judy leaves their baby daughter in Punch’s care for an afternoon, the savagery that follows will force her to claim sanctuary with a band of forest-dwelling outcasts while her husband sweats to cover up more than one hideous crime.Presenting violence as a contagion and mob mentality as its superspreader, “Judy & Punch” courts equilibrium between domestic-abuse comedy and vicious morality tale. Dancing from brutal to wacky — in scenes that recall the dash and whimsy of ABC’s ditsy series “Galavant” (2015) — and from silly gallows jokes to grotesque seriousness, the movie intertwines humor and tragedy in imaginative, sometimes disturbing ways. Yet despite Mirrah’s inventiveness (in one lovely scene, Judy mimes animal shadows on the wall for her delighted daughter) and Stefan Duscio’s vividly grimy cinematography, one mood tends to wash out the other.What’s left is a baroque pantomime, a heavy-handed satire of intolerance whose fun fades faster than the livid bruises on Judy’s face.Judy & PunchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, FandangoNOW and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

When it comes to the living spaces in which he situates his characters, the South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo is the anti-Nancy Meyers. In her romantic comedies, Meyers places her people in settings so impeccably spacious and kitted out that she’s sometimes said to serve up “real estate porn.” Hong’s more melancholy-infused explorations of love trouble unfold in unrelentingly plain environments. The boudoir here has no four-poster bed or even a headboard, just a single mattress on a box spring with an unstable pile of books nearby. At least the place is clean.A Hong apartment almost invariably belongs to a guy whose romantic woes are of his own contriving, or fumbling. In the droll, enigmatic “Yourself and Yours” that guy is Young-soo (Kim Ju-hyuk), who lets the gossip of a “caring” friend go to his head. Told that his girlfriend, Min-jung (Lee Yoo-young), was seen drinking to excess and getting into a fight at a bar, he calls her on it, and in the ensuing argument she walks out on him.[embedded content]
Drinking is a big deal in Hong’s films. Characters do a lot of it, and self-consciously. This movie alone expends several minutes on characters expounding on how much is enough, how much is too much, whether imbibing is going to be done on this occasion or that. Min-jung, romping one afternoon with a filmmaker who’s just getting to know her, shrugs, “Don’t we drink to get drunk?”The story spends much of its time following Young-soo in his abjection, which is well deserved — the female friend in Young-soo’s circle speaks a universal truth about Hong’s males, and perhaps the gender in general, when she pronounces “You men are really pathetic.” The more intriguing story line involves the female protagonist, or perhaps protagonists. Early in the movie, before even cutting off Young-soo, Lee’s character is sitting in a coffee shop. An older man is startled to see her, and approaches her, calling her Min-jung. She’s not Min-jung, she insists; she’s never heard of such a person.A few minutes later she relents, and says, yes, she knows Min-jung — she’s her twin sister! The man is placated, but he’ll be agitated further when he happens upon her entertaining the aforementioned filmmaker.The mystery is part of the movie’s fun, and because this is a Hong film, there’s no assurance it will be explained. Hong’s earlier films were realistic, minimalist comedic looks at romantic yearning and misery (almost always exacerbated by alcohol). In this phase of his career, he’s infusing his stories with magic realism elements either overtly (as in his 2018 movie “Claire’s Camera,” which he made after this picture, and which rests on a temporal conundrum that’s practically Borgesian) or implicitly, as in this film.Hong’s formal confidence yields a movie that’s very simply constructed and utterly engrossing. There are a lot of scenes done in a single shot, usually static, but when there’s a zoom (his preferred camera flourish) it’s unfussy and direct. He puts you in tune with the world of his sad-sack characters immediately, and their rhythm becomes the rhythm of the story. By the end of the movie, we may suspect that one character has found an entirely novel and effective way of resetting a romantic relationship. Or that something weirder and creepier is going on. The pleasure is in not quite knowing.Yourself and YoursNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on virtual cinemas. More

A bravura, multilayered lead performance by Annapurna Sriram anchors “Feral,” an intense drama about a young homeless woman’s struggles as a harsh winter begins to bear down on Brooklyn.The opening scenes of the movie, showing Sriram’s character, sometimes called Yazmine — this woman struggles not just with homelessness but with mental illness, and she often denies that this is her name — are powerful, revelatory. Yazmine has an underground hiding space near some train tracks, and the way Sriram huddles among the detritus of her corner, much of it left by homeless people who had been there before her, comes close to making her condition palpable.[embedded content]Yazmine’s hanging-by-a-thread state of being reflects in the prickly way she behaves, and this feels right. She dresses up and hits the street not quite knowing what she’s going to do there. Fragments of her past chisel their way into scenes, as do shots from an interview with Yazmine conducted at a site that we only see in the movie’s final third.But as “Feral” — directed by Andrew Wonder from a script he wrote with Priscilla Kavanaugh and Jason Mendez — moves forward, it doesn’t always do a great job of splitting the difference between a raw depiction of harsh reality and ostentatious deck-stacking.When a floppy-haired dude helps Yazmine cadge a smoke from some slumming mean girls and then “kindly” invites her to his place, he might as well be wearing a milquetoast predator sign around his neck. The depiction of a frayed social safety net feels both accurate and overdetermined. The movie can be frustrating viewing in ways its makers likely did not intend.FeralNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay-TV operators. More

Don’t mistake the cigar-chomping tycoon Alejandro Agag for a hippie. “I’m not an environmentalist. I’m a racing man,” he says to the directors Fisher Stevens and Malcolm Venville in their documentary “And We Go Green” (streaming on Hulu). Yet, when eco-conscious sponsors were beginning to steer away from Formula 1 cars, which have the miles per gallon of a military tank, Agag co-founded Formula E, a full-throttle racing series that involves pitting electric cars against one another in competitions from Hong Kong to Marrakesh. Stevens and Venville wager that glamour might be a better inducement to ditch combustion motors than statistics about greenhouse gases.[embedded content]The cheery, lightweight documentary chases Formula E’s fourth season, which was blessed by Pope Francis and one of the film’s producers, Leonardo DiCaprio, who braves an actual taste of the go-go blend of glycerin and algae that powers the engines. While Agag admits some racing audiences miss that dinosaur bone rumble, Aquafuel has its charms. Zooming past the camera, the cars go pew-pew-pew like spaceships.“And We Go Green” gives less attention to Formula E’s innovations — which, hopefully will make their way to sedate hatchbacks within the decade — than it does its generically square-jawed drivers, who are personally fueled by the need to prove they’re good enough for Formula 1. Their personal grudges struggle to propel the drama. But as the film loses focus of its own goal, one thing is clear: Everything runs on ego.And We Go GreenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

For a long time, the protean independent filmmaker Abel Ferrara has found a way to, if not thrive, then at least produce, while lost in a wilderness of his own making. With his new picture, the semi-autobiographical “Tommaso,” he reflects on the sober life, one that the filmmaker himself has reportedly been leading in Rome, where this movie is set.Willem Dafoe, a longtime collaborator of Ferrara’s whose deftness at portraying both tenderness and ferocity make him a very apt surrogate for the director, plays the title character. Early scenes see him taking Italian lessons; getting an espresso and chatting it up with the attractive woman who’s making it for him; cooking dinner with the mother of his child; and working on a film script.[embedded content]These opening scenes suggest a kind of pastorale, to the extent that one wonders: Is Ferrara, whose movies almost compulsively dig into the darkest corners of human experience, going to pull off a modest cinematic celebration of relatively serene domesticity?Well, not quite. All is not entirely well in Tommaso’s world. In a park with his daughter he sees his wife kissing another man. He struggles creatively — in crafting his script, he muses on variants of the Rimbaud pronouncement, “I is another,” and wrestles with his own ego’s place in a process that demands more empathy. After one Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (and this movie depicts such gatherings with striking, uncondescending accuracy), a fellow tells him, “Anger occupies so much space in your life, there’s very little energy for anything else.”The movie enters fantasy realms often, but “Tommaso” has a different feel than your average variant on Fellini’s “8 ½.” Maybe it’s a sense of shame, something the older film’s Guido hadn’t much of. Whatever it is, it makes “Tommaso” crackle with ideas and empathy, as Ferrara’s best work always does.TommasoNot rated. In English, Italian and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Film at Lincoln Center’s virtual cinema. More