Movies

At times, critics’ own words may fail them. In trying to find a proper description for “Liberté,” the new film from the provocative and occasionally (but not in this case!) sublime Catalan director Albert Serra, the words that most often sprang to mind were from Mel Brooks. That is, the hunchbacked hangman’s line from “Blazing Saddles”: “This one is a doozy.”Serra makes beautifully shot, methodically (to say the least) paced films, often of a historical nature, and sometimes fancifully so. His 2014 “The Story of My Death” could have been titled “Casanova Meets Dracula.” Here, some aristocratic pre-Revolution French pleasure-seekers drop in by a wood presumably near the manor of Duc De Walchen (played by Helmut Berger), and speak of “a vision” they are “defending.”[embedded content]At least that’s how Duke de Wand (Baptiste Pinteaux) — a figure whose particularly Gallic pomposity is almost funny — puts it. One is not quite sure whether he means a vision of a social order or of the evening of bucolic debauchery that follows, or both.After sundown, breasts are fondled, genitals rubbed, backsides are whipped with switches, milk is poured over a naked body. Urine makes a late-in-the-picture appearance. Grisly violence is enacted on an amputated limb. All the participating personages are serious and stern, and the pleasure they purport to seek is not easy. What’s mostly depicted is strain. Penises are generally flaccid. “Get out, you’re useless,” spits one dominant woman.Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — “Liberté” plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.LibertéNot rated. In French, German and Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes. Watch on Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema. More

Things go missing in “The Wretched” — a bunny, a baby, assorted children — and hardly anyone seems to notice. A darkened basement reverberates with eerie, snap-crackle-pop sounds and images that feature ghostly shots of a child’s crib. Something ancient and evil is crawling out of a butchered deer carcass. And it’s hungry.Opening with a spookily effective, 1980s-set prologue, this old-fashioned witchy brew from Brett and Drew Pierce (billed as the Pierce Brothers) jumps to the present where Ben (John-Paul Howard), a moody teenager, is having trouble dealing with his parents’ divorce. Visiting his father (Jamison Jones) for the summer, Ben takes a job at a marina and befriends Mallory (Piper Curda), a down-to-earth type and perfect sidekick. Especially when the little boy next door disappears and Ben needs help investigating his unsettling mother (Zarah Mahler).[embedded content]Blessed with shivery setups and freaky effects — here, skin-crawling is literal — “The Wretched” transforms common familial anxieties into flesh, albeit crepey and creeping. With his camera low and slow, the cinematographer, Conor Murphy, builds chills equally from a malevolent tree trunk and a scattering of rain-drenched children’s toys. And as Ben dodges calls from his mother and cooked dinners from his father’s new girlfriend, the movie’s sense of maternal need as a consuming force is repeatedly underlined.Though indebted to films like Tom Holland’s terrific “Fright Night” (1985) — whose teens spy on a neighbor they believe to be something other than human — “The Wretched” adds a twist or two of its own. And if the final, teasing image is completely expected, it won’t erase the fun you’ll have getting there.The WretchedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

“Until the Birds Return” opens with a car cruising down a winding, sun-dappled city street. This image becomes the connective tissue between three otherwise divergent stories in Karim Moussaoui’s tender, ruminative drama about life in contemporary Algeria.In the first chapter, a property developer, Mourad (Mohamed Djouhri), witnesses an act of violence after his car breaks down at night. Later, the focus switches to his chauffeur, Djalil (Mehdi Ramdani). He drives his neighbors to the wedding of their daughter, Aïcha — who happens to be his former lover. The focus shifts yet again when Aïcha (Hania Amar) and her family find a doctor, Dahman, stranded on the road. The final chapter follows Dahman (played with delicate restraint by Hassan Kachach) as he’s confronted with a terrible incident from his time in the Algerian Civil War.[embedded content]Moussaoui, making his feature debut, relates these stories at a gentle and idiosyncratic pace. Although each chapter is built around an event — a tryst or a revelation — the film comes to life in quiet, conversational details that capture the textures of people’s lives across different generations and classes. A highlight: a farmer and his son, glimpsed briefly in the film’s second section, debating the concept of private property.Occasional musical interludes interrupt the movie’s associative rhythms, including a song-and-dance routine set against the gorgeous Aurès mountains and shot with dynamic, careening camerawork by David Chambille. These sequences can feel digressive, but it’s all part of Moussaoui’s keenly observed portrait of individual and collective existence. As its characters traverse the country’s crisscrossing motorways, “Until the Birds Return” locates the singular moments that form the nodes of a shared national history.Until the Birds ReturnNot rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay-TV operators. More

The early scenes of “Tesnota (Closeness)” — the first feature directed by Kantemir Balagov, whose subsequent “Beanpole” was Russia’s 2019 entry for the international feature Academy Award — convey unsettling sexual intrigue and old-fashioned exuberance. The tomboyish Ilana (Darya Zhovner) and her brother David (Veniamin Katz), part of a working-class Jewish family living in the Russian town of Nalchik in 1998, have an unusually close relationship. A little before David’s engagement party, the siblings have a cheeky discussion on how “lucky” David’s betrothed is, given his sexual equipment. Whoa.The following celebration, though, is feisty and innocent. Balagov has a real knack for getting in close to his characters and almost participating, with the camera, in their dancing.[embedded content]After this, the trouble begins. The couple is immediately kidnapped by locals — likely Kabardians, the Circassian tribe that dominates the town.The demanded ransom is high, and while the engaged girl’s family can afford it, Ilana and David’s cannot. One potential solution involves an arranged marriage. But Ilana’s involved with a Kabardian lug, Zalim (Nazir Zhukov). As attached as she is to her brother, she can’t abide this proposed refutation of whatever autonomy she has left.This movie, which Balagov, a Nalchik native, states in an onscreen text is based on a true story, has a whole lot of “slow” and one very nasty burn. Ilana gets plastered with Zalim and his pals (one of whom says, “Jews are good — to make soap from,” not aware Ilana is Jewish), and the group watches a VHS tape of authentic documentary footage showing the slow torture and murder of a Russian. This is apparently footage Balagov himself saw under similar circumstances as a younger man. Whatever his ostensible point, its inclusion here is a deplorably truculent demonstration of directorial prerogative. It does more than cast a pall over the rest of the picture.ClosenessNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Kino Marquee. More

A sinister opening set to a pulsating score establishes a misleading tone for the Israeli domestic drama “15 Years” (out now on DVD and VOD): A man in his 40s nervously jogs alone at night until something startling makes him halt in his steps. Cloaked in dim, ambient lighting, this chain of events recurs throughout the film, though some of his late-night forays, on foot or by bicycle, are actually dreams while others are revealed as cruising. They all reflect the midlife crisis of Yoav (Oded Leopold), a Tel Aviv architect.[embedded content]Yoav starts his downward spiral after a gallery party where his best friend, Alma, announces her pregnancy. The news distresses him, while it awakens a strong paternal instinct in his partner of 15 years, Dan (Udi Persi). Leopold and Persi are both compelling performers, but the writer-director Yuval Hadadi renders their characters with little subtlety.Early in the film, Dan cloyingly coos at a baby while Yoav looks disgusted. Later, at their anniversary dinner, Yoav lashes out rudely at his guests when the topic of children comes up. From there, the couple’s relationship unravels: Yoav leaves Dan, hooks up with a teenager, and tells Alma he wishes she weren’t pregnant.At the same time he faces his own mortality, especially through his estrangement from his terminally ill father. Yoav becomes such an oppressive presence that it is difficult to empathize with him. “15 Years” is overstuffed with symbolism about his existential woes, but the narrative would have been better served by mirroring the film’s sleek, minimalistic shots, with more understated depictions of anxiety.15 YearsNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

You need read only a small portion of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Thomas Piketty’s towering 2013 economic and historical survey of the dynamics of inequality, to know that Piketty, a French academic, is not only a brilliant economist but also one with a gift for making complicated ideas accessible. But the text runs around 750 pages, and not everyone is prepared to plow through Piketty’s methodical analysis of capital-income ratios from 1700 to the near-present.Enter the documentary version — directed by Justin Pemberton and also called “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” — for those who prefer their econ illustrated with film and TV clips and a kaleidoscopic montage set to Lorde. Although Piketty is credited with the adaptation (along with Pemberton and Matthew Metcalfe, a producer on the film), the movie is best regarded as a supplement or potential gateway to the book, rather than a distillation. Many other academics — Kate Williams of the University of Reading in England; Suresh Naidu, an economic historian at Columbia University — get prime screen time, with Piketty, who appears as a talking head, often playing a supporting role in his own narrative.[embedded content]In the book, Piketty used examples from Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to explain how currencies and the investment value of land were understood during those authors’ lifetimes. The film opts for the cinematic correlative, excerpting movies like “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Elysium” to illustrate poverty in the past and a possible future. Piketty notes the risk that the declining share of wealth owned by the middle class could return it to where it stood a century ago, when what qualified as “middle” was almost as poor than the poorest.Much of the material is ancillary to the book. Williams gives a striking account of the acceleration of Christmas consumerism in the 19th century, when she says people would bankrupt themselves to celebrate the holiday. Once the movie reaches the Roaring Twenties and beyond, the purview becomes more erratic. Granular observations (Piketty explains how during the period of the world wars, bombings, inflation and regulations contributed roughly equally to the destruction of capital, transforming power relationships in society) share screen time with material that plays, more disappointingly, like an introductory overview — of Reagan and Thatcher’s anti-unionism, of the 2008 financial crisis, among other things.Pemberton, who has a habit of shooting his interviewees unnervingly centered in the wide frame, keeps everything engaging and clear, an accomplishment in a movie that devotes around a minute to explaining the “stagflation” of the 1970s. But the film necessarily lacks the thoroughness and interrogative qualities of Piketty’s written approach. More than the cutaways to Gordon Gekko and the Simpsons, it tends to be the economist’s own observations that satisfy the true wonk itch.There are other compensations. With fun graphics, Pemberton includes footage from a psychology experiment in which the predetermined winners of a rigged version of Monopoly started to act as if they had won on merit. And if that suggests a dark vision of human nature, Piketty ends the movie on an optimistic note. Creating a more equal society is possible from a technical standpoint, he says. The challenge is intellectual and political.Capital in the Twenty-First CenturyNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Kino Marquee. More

Set in the unfamiliar world of African-American backyard rodeos, Annie Silverstein’s “Bull” handles hot-button issues with a cool eye and a calming tone. Racism, opioid use, poverty and pain weave gently in and out of her story (co-written with her husband, Johnny McAllister) without distracting us from either its primary concerns or central relationship.Instead, there’s a matter-of-fact quality to the filmmaking, a rejection of melodrama and embrace of naturalism that slows the movie’s pulse and softens its edges. At its center is the unlikely bond between a white teenager, Kris (Amber Havard, in her acting debut), and a black rodeo wrangler in his 40s named Abe (a perfect Rob Morgan). Kris lives with her little sister and chronically ill grandmother (Keeli Wheeler) in a semirural neighborhood in Texas. Their mother (Sara Albright) is in prison, and Kris, with her quietly disengaged affect, appears beaten down before her life has barely begun.Abe’s bruises run deeper and are more debilitating. A former bull rider worn out by accumulated injuries, he now risks his life to distract the enraged animals and protect the fallen. Pills and alcohol help alleviate the pain, and ease the humiliation of clowning when he’s unfit for more agile duties. Yet he’s sympathetic to youngsters who have lost their way; when Kris and her friends trash his house one weekend, he’s willing to accept her cleanup help rather than have her sent to juvenile detention.[embedded content]Shot in a traditionally black cowboy neighborhood on the outskirts of Houston, “Bull” opens with a brutalized chicken and closes with the vague sense of wounds soothed. Between, Kris and Abe each make poor choices, suffer poignant disappointments and haltingly move forward.Yet while Silverstein’s commitment to authenticity is admirable (she spent years visiting backyard rodeos across Texas, talking with the participants), her narrative is too tamped-down and languorous to catch hold. The movie’s internalized emotions and elliptical style can allow small things to make large points — as when Kris rides, without comment, in the back seat of Abe’s truck rather than shotgun — but the overall mood rarely rises above dispiriting.Only in the rodeo scenes does “Bull” come alive. Shabier Kirchner’s dusty, electric shots of heaving beasts and bobbing riders, slicing horns and smashing hooves feel breathtakingly real. Watching, Kris can’t stop smiling: It’s an expression as foreign to her as hope.BullNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

Here are a few of the best events happening Thursday and how to tune in (all times are Eastern Daylight).Benedict Cumberbatch in ‘Frankenstein’2 p.m. on YouTubeNeed some Benedict Cumberbatch in your day, week, life? Same here. On Thursday (and Friday), the National Theater in London will air the 2011 performance of “Frankenstein,” directed by Danny Boyle and starring Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, who alternate roles as Victor Frankenstein and the creature. (On Thursday, the creature is Cumberbatch; on Friday, it’s Miller.) In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley said the show was packed with “arresting visual imagery,” and wrote: “I can’t think of a more wrenching stage portrait of the terror and wonder of being born.”When: 2 p.m.Where: The National Theater’s YouTube channel.A Daylong Conversation With Ava DuVernay and Dozens of DirectorsNoon on TwitterThe Oscar-nominated director Ava DuVernay is hosting a Twitter takeover via her arts collective, Array. For more than 10 hours, over 50 filmmakers who represent multiple genres and perspectives — including Guillermo del Toro (“The Shape of Water”), Patty Jenkins (“Wonder Woman”), Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”), Jill Soloway (“Afternoon Delight”) and Matthew A. Cherry (“Hair Love”) — will convene to share information about their craft and latest projects, take questions from film lovers and encourage people to stay home for public safety. The event is Array’s fourth since 2015, and the conversation will use the hashtag #ARRAYNow.When: Noon to 10 p.m.Where: Twitter, using the hashtag #ARRAYNow.Remembering Amy Winehouse5 p.m. on InstagramThe Grammy Museum in Los Angeles will host an Instagram Live event to mark the 13th anniversary of the release of Amy Winehouse’s platinum single “Back to Black.” The hourlong event will focus on Winehouse’s impact on music and fashion, and feature those who worked with her and were influenced by her — including the pop-R&B artist JoJo and Winehouse’s stylist Naomi Parry. On Friday, the museum’s exhibition “Beyond Black — The Style Of Amy Winehouse” will go live on the Museum’s website. The virtual exhibition is a retrospective of Winehouse’s career, biggest influences and iconic fashion moments. It includes displays of some of her outfits, as well as never-before-seen handwritten lyrics and journal entries.When: 5 p.m.Where: The Grammy Museum’s Instagram page.‘Ode’ Makes Its Streaming Debut7 p.m. on YouTubeThursday is International Jazz Day, and to honor it Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will, for the first time, stream its performance of “Ode,” from Jamar Roberts, the company’s first resident choreographer. The work, about gun violence — which is set to music by the jazz pianist Don Pullen — was a New York Times critic’s pick in December. In his review, Brian Seibert called the performance “delicate, daring and heartbreaking” and said Mr. Roberts is a “choreographer with talent and guts.”When: 7 p.m., and it will be available through May 7.Where: The Alvin Ailey All Access website and the Alvin Ailey YouTube channel. Those who go to the website will get access to companion materials, including a conversation with Mr. Roberts.Peter Libbey contributed research More