Movies

Maybe it’s our gloomy national mood, the programming on Turner Classic Movies or the Columbia Noir series currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. But cinephiles have been chattering again about film noir, a category that is notoriously difficult to define but about which every movie lover has an opinion. Say you’ve heard the term, but you don’t know quite what it means — well, you have good company. Here’s a quick rundown.To rehash an old, inevitably circular set of arguments: Noir can’t simply be a genre because it transcends genre. There are noir mysteries, noir melodramas, noir costume pictures, even noir-tinged westerns and science fiction. If noir is a style, its hallmarks might include terse dialogue, an interest in seamy aspects of human behavior and black-and-white cinematography. But a cataloging would have to embrace exceptions. (“Leave Her to Heaven,” the ne plus ultra of femme fatale movies, is in Technicolor.)Noir might be a mood, but that’s a bit amorphous, like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hard-core pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Or perhaps noir was a temporary wave rooted in anxieties about World War II’s destabilization of American home life. According to this theory, noir-like work made later than the 1950s requires a separate category, the neo-noir. And if that’s the case, the neo period has gone on longer than the original.When the French critics Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton tilted at an early definition in 1955, they distinguished noirs from police procedurals, which, they said, explored crime from the outside, rather than within. In the early 1970s, Paul Schrader, a critic at the time and soon to be a screenwriter and director, took a stab at a survey, arguing that noir was primarily a matter of tone. “Almost every critic has his own definition of film noir,” he wrote, “and a personal list of film titles and dates to back it up.”I’m in favor of a big tent: If you can explain why it’s a noir, it’s a noir. But don’t you dare name any movie with insufficient subtext, psychological complexity or an atmosphere that doesn’t chill the soul. More

The fiction feature directorial debut of the Guatemalan filmmaker César Díaz is a modestly scaled picture with massive implications. Díaz’s background is in editing, and there’s a strong documentary component in his filmography. So it’s fitting that in this picture the protagonist is a forensic anthropologist — one who is working on a project that goes back decades rather than centuries, which is usually what we see in movies featuring anthropologists.The movie opens with Ernesto, the young anthropologist (Armando Espitia), in a dimly-lit room, one you might see in a lab or a morgue, laying out bones on a table until a human skeleton takes shape. Díaz shoots and edits this process to put across a sense of quietude and patience, emphasizing process. Ernesto is part of a team investigating massacres from the 1980s, amid Guatemala’s long civil war. The movie is set in 2018, when the perpetrators of such atrocities were being brought to account for their actions. Ernesto is not just looking for justice, he’s trying to find the father he believes was a guerrilla and a victim of a mass killing in a village. In one scene, a few of the characters watch a television documentary in which a narrator notes, “Military command regarded the whole population as the enemy.” Men were killed, women were imprisoned, subjugated and raped, and now the killing fields are mass graveyards, each one a place where Ernesto’s investigative team must acquire discrete permission to dig up.“If you cannot separate your life from your work, we cannot keep you here,” one of Ernesto’s supervisors warns after the anthropologist’s intrusive questioning of one older woman. Because it was often only the women who were left alive in these villages, Ernesto and his team must rely on their often reluctant testimony. His own tunnel vision doesn’t quite blind him to their continuing courage, but it does lead him to construct a narrative that will unravel by the movie’s end.In the meantime, Ernesto’s mother (Emma Dib), who seems of two minds about her son’s quest, is preparing to testify before a tribunal. Her friends and comrades are intellectuals who still like to sing “The Internationale” at gatherings. There’s a strong sense that such activities are akin to whistling in the dark. The ambivalent, uncertain present of the movie can’t separate itself from the legacy of death that Ernesto and his colleagues keep uncovering.Díaz’s approach is plain and solid, like a well-built wooden chair before varnishing. The revelations of the story are often ghastly, but “Our Mothers” doesn’t go for the emotional jugular. Near the end there’s a montage of the faces of many poor women; most of them are on the precipice dividing middle and old age but they all look practically eternal in the way their features express, without trying, vast reservoirs of pain and fortitude. Díaz presents them, and leaves the rest in the laps of the viewers. Their moment in world history may be, as far as some are concerned, past. But the implicit question here is still pertinent: Which side are you on?Our MothersNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. Watch on ROW8.com. More

The plot of “Deerskin” could fit on a postage stamp, but the titular obsession of its antihero only grows with every scene. Initially, when we accompany Georges (Jean Dujardin) as he buys a woefully unflattering vintage suede jacket from a private seller, his near-erotic delight in the fringed relic seems rather sweet. By the end, though, we suspect that Georges’s love for animal hide conceals a loathing for his own.A demented fetish comedy that escalates to startlingly nonchalant violence, “Deerskin” (written and directed by Quentin Dupieux) flickers tantalizingly between awful and awesome. In the first category is Georges’s irrational quest to ensure that his beloved jacket be the only one left in the world; in the second is his sly dexterity in enlisting help to achieve this deranged goal. Pathetic and middle-aged, with a spreading middle and shrinking cash reserves (“You no longer exist,” his wife snaps during a phone call, locking him out of their shared bank account), he settles in a remote Alpine hotel using his wedding ring as security.[embedded content]As luck would have it, the seller of the jacket has included a small video camera. Passing himself off as a filmmaker, Georges cons a local bartender, Denise (a splendid Adèle Haenel), into lending him money to finish his scriptless project. An aspiring editor and willing accomplice, Denise is impressed with the raw footage of Georges persuading hastily hired would-be actors to remove their coats, which he then destroys. Sensing genius, she eggs him on, pushing him to perform more outrageous acts while helping augment his suede wardrobe with boots, pants and gloves. The hat he steals for himself — from a corpse.For a long while, “Deerskin” idles affably in first gear, but its guilelessness is a ruse. As Georges’s compulsion to film his exploits grows, so does his cunning, the camera an excuse to fully indulge his psychosis. And as the movie’s tone flips from silly to shocking, from love story — albeit between a man and his coat — to horror, the mostly lighthearted images (the cinematography is also by Dupieux) turn sporadically sinister.Like “Rubber,” Dupieux’s 2011 tale of a homicidal tire, “Deerskin” is slight and forcefully eccentric. As with Georges’s personality, audiences will be split: The movie’s dive into one lonely man’s lunacy isn’t entirely successful. Yet Dujardin’s commitment to his batty character is unflinching. Gazing admiringly at his outfit in the mirror, Georges can’t get over his “killer style” — a self-compliment he will, perhaps unknowingly, soon be taking all too literally.DeerskinNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

In 2012, a group of activists who were undocumented immigrants willingly got themselves sent to detention facilities, where they worked from the inside to free people who were scheduled for deportation. The docu-thriller “The Infiltrators” depicts their feat, following Marco Saavedra and Viridiana Martinez, both of whom had protected status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. As part of a rigorous strategy, these two and their comrades targeted the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, where men and women were being held in custody despite their lack of criminal records.Armed with a thorough understanding of Obama-era immigration law, Saavedra and Martinez worked to inform fellow detainees of their rights, coordinating with activists outside to put public and legal pressure on officials to call off deportations. To tell their story, the directors Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera combine scripted re-enactments with documentary footage — a stylistic gambit that yields mixed results.For scenes inside Broward, actors play the central figures. These portions of the film are informative, but the performers seem timid in comparison to their real-life counterparts. The camera captures vital information — essential documents passed through trash collection, whiteboards with the names of the day’s deportees scrawled in red — but these images are perfunctory, lacking the radical spark of the documentary scenes set outside of the center.[embedded content]Jumping between wildly dissimilar styles makes for an occasionally jarring film. Yet despite this awkwardness, the movie works. The narrative approach represents a risk taken by the filmmakers, and their daring suits the story they are trying to tell. For a group of activists who took chances with their own legal status, only a comparably experimental cinematic style could do their efforts justice.The InfiltratorsNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More