Movies

The documentary “Viral: Anti-Semitism in Four Mutations” begins with a voice-over, as the television star Julianna Margulies (who is Jewish), explains that anti-Semitism infects like a virus and spreads globally in a constant search for a new host. It’s a rich metaphor, particularly given that images of infestation have long been used as weapons against Jewish communities. But the film never explicitly places its central image within that history, and this lack of analysis continues to frustrate even when the film hits on resonant ideas.The director, Andrew Goldberg, breaks up his study into four sections, each focusing on attacks from a different quarter. Goldberg identifies these sources as the far right in the United States; the far left in Britain; anti-Semitic governments in Hungary; and Islamic extremists in France.[embedded content]The film is a journalistic undertaking, with appearances by academics, politicians, writers and members of Jewish communities who each comment on current affairs. Survivors of violence against Jews describe the loss of loved ones; anti-Semitic political candidates defend their racist worldviews. These passages are compelling as qualitative research, using individual stories as a way to show the causes and effects of racism.But the film’s journalistic ambitions suffer from a lack of historical depth, with complicated subjects like the Israelis and Palestinians given analytical short shrift. Clips from political rallies are played out of context, revolutionary language is translated without its figurative meaning. Even recent events get little more than a gloss, as when Goldberg chooses to include politicians like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton as neutral talking heads, without accompanying their appearances with commentary on their records or motivations.The trouble with this skimmed approach is that by sidelining historical analysis, the film denies its audience the best defense against distortion, a rational necessity when interpreting a conversation that often seems to happen in code.Viral: Anti-Semitism in Four MutationsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. More

Night is practically eternal in “Vitalina Varela,” the new picture from the Portuguese master Pedro Costa. In this vision, the barrios of Fontainhas, in Lisbon, where much of Costa’s work has been set and shot, seem to have mostly migrated underground. (In reality, the barrios have been so transformed over the years that they no longer exist as such.) The movie’s opening shot is exemplary: a beautifully framed (in the almost square Academy ratio) view of an alleyway, the curve of the gray wall on its left creating a visually attractive angle. At the top of the frame, black; it’s a submerged alley, and at the top right you can see some crosses planted in the ground above. Some men come through the space; it’s a funeral procession.In a little while, we see an airport tarmac, again at night. It is always startling to see things like planes in a Costa picture. A group of workers, rolling buckets and holding mops and brooms, approach one plane. There’s a close-up of the stairs at the plane’s exit: a pair of bare feet, battered and almost bloated by years of labor and who knows what else. As they move down the stairs, large drops of water splotch them. We don’t know if this is rain, or tears. The workers greet the disembarking passenger: “Vitalina, you arrived too late. Your husband was buried days ago. There is nothing in Portugal for you.”[embedded content]This is the title character, played by a woman who bears the same name — as stylized as Costa’s films now are, they never break free of the reality that grounds his ethos. In the subsequent scenes, in exchanges with mourning neighbors and a man of the cloth played by Ventura, a long time Costa performer, Vitalina plumbs the depths of the aforementioned nothing.In monologues mostly delivered in the meager quarters that Vitalina settles in, she recalls the past she and her husband shared in Cape Verde, the island many Fontainhas residents have a strong connection to. Together, they built a house. But the challenges of poverty pulled them apart. This movie has a distant affinity to the classic “Make Way For Tomorrow,” and with the more recent mortality play “The Irishman.”“You turned your face to death. You could have stayed in Cape Verde,” Vitalina cries to her dead husband. “We didn’t have much, but it was ours.”While Costa’s earlier work traded in a demanding, stylized, austere (some would call it punishingly so) realism, in recent years his view has taken on a stunning pictorialism. In the opening shots of this film, one thinks of Goya and Velasquez; the clouds in the night sky evoke El Greco.It is not inaccurate to call Costa an acquired taste. In the case of this reviewer, it was a road to Damascus experience with the 2007 film “Colossal Youth,” which required a second viewing to yield its epiphany, Like that picture, “Vitalina Varela” is socially conscious, but dreamlike, elegiac. And an inquiry, too, into the abilities and deficiencies of film as a medium to illuminate human consciousness and experience. It’s essential cinema.Vitalina VarelaNot rated. In Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. More