Movies

“Hi, I’m Cathy Yan, the director of ‘Birds of Prey.’ So we’re near the end of the movie. And this is the culminating, the final fight scene between the women and the gangs that Roman Sionis, played by Ewan McGregor, sends in to the funhouse, which is called the Booby Trap. Well, originally, it wasn’t a funhouse, actually. I believe, originally, it was a hotel. And they were supposed to fight their way down. But then, when I got together with our amazing production designer, KK Barrett, and our DP, Matthew Libatique, we kind of thought, wouldn’t it be more interesting to convey a location that felt like Harley Quinn’s mind on acid? Our actresses, they’re actually doing the majority of the stunts themselves. That was four to five months of brutal training. When we were in prep, the actors were training pretty much every day with our stunt team.” “Come on!” “Margot learned to roller skate for this movie because she ends up roller skating in a good portion of the movie. She learned to roller skate on a bank track for the derby scene. And then, obviously, she’s roller skating here. And for this moment, she is actually just roller skating. And she was so— she became so good that she was able to stop herself, which is actually the most difficult thing to do, while on a rotating carousel, which is infinitely harder than when you’re not on a rotating carousel. What was another big challenge that we only sort of realized on the day, too, was that because the background was so different, for continuity, whenever we started a take, we had to make sure that we started and ended at the same point. So the carousel became a sort of clock. And we had a number for each of the hands. And then each hand had to directly correlate with a point outside in the funhouse so that we were able to actually match up the backgrounds. If we didn’t do that, then it would have been a complete nightmare.” [MUSIC PLAYING] ”[SHOUTS] Ah. Wait.” More

Aardman Animations’ stop-motion process is labor-intensive and rigid, requiring comprehensive forethought and specificity of execution, so what’s perhaps most striking about their films is their freedom and playfulness. Their latest, “A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon” (streaming on Netflix beginning Feb. 14) required months of backbreaking frame-by-frame animation, but it has a freewheeling, improvisational spirit, a looseness that results in a giddy comic energy.Shaun’s first big-screen vehicle, the 2015 “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” was an inspired comic contraption, sending the good-hearted sheep and his flock on a big city adventure. In “Farmageddon,” the adventure comes to them, via an alien child who crashes near their farm, the conclusion of an accidental joy ride to earth. While Shaun attempts to help the alien “Lu-La” get home, Farmer John sees a moneymaking opportunity, and attempts to court the U.F.O. tourist trade by turning his farm into a comically rinky-dink theme park.[embedded content]If the setup sounds reminiscent of “E.T.,” that’s purposeful; the directors Will Becher and Richard Phelan include numerous visual references to Spielberg’s classic. They also throw in winks in the directions of alien pop culture artifacts like “The X-Files,” “Doctor Who,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which should please sci-fi fans of all ages.But the most telling homage is a reference to Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” a reminder of Aardman’s true tradition. The “Shaun” films are entirely free of dialogue — the animals don’t talk, while the humans are only heard speaking gibberish — and in many ways, these shorts and features are carrying the baton of classic silent comedy.Shaun is a resourceful “little fellow” in the tradition of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and his adventures are similarly well-constructed machines of gags, foils, everyday foibles, and comic exaggerations. As with those silent classics, the “Shaun” films boil down to their set pieces, and while none in the new film approach the Tati-esque perfection of the restaurant scene in “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” “Farmageddon” features plenty of inspired, boomeranging slapstick, executed with clockwork precision. It’s a very funny movie — and an endlessly, refreshingly cheerful one, which is just as rare.A Shaun the Sheep Movie: FarmageddonRated G. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. More

What if instead of the drama of athletes risking life, limb and loss for their countries, the Olympic Games set the scene for a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy? Such is the premise of “Olympic Dreams.”An Olympic runner, Alexi Pappas, plays the fictional Penelope, a cross-country skier whose personal best isn’t enough to bring home a medal from the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Ezra (Nick Kroll) on the other hand, is just happy to be invited. He is a dentist, part of the medical staff for the athletes in the Olympic Village, where he happily advises patients who are more familiar with pelvic fractures than dental floss. He sees Penelope in the cafeteria, and he is captivated. They strike up a flirtation, and the movie follows them through a fling that unfolds against a once-in-a-lifetime backdrop.[embedded content]The setting of “Olympic Dreams” is clearly the film’s greatest asset, and the director, Jeremy Teicher, shot in a fly-on-the-wall style during the event. Before the well-known comedian Kroll appears, it would be easy to mistake this low-fi movie for a sports documentary rather than a narrative feature. Athletes are extras, dates occur during curling practices, and there is a little thrill in being granted access to the backstage of one of the world’s most selective and stage-managed events. But compared to the drama of the competition, the story and its characters always feel slight, an excuse to hang out among Olympians rather than a movie that builds upon (or for that matter critiques) its surroundings.Olympic DreamsRated PG-13 for language. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. More

Mark Bozek had a no-brainer opportunity when he landed an interview with Bill Cunningham, the New York Times street photographer and self-described “fashion historian.”Cunningham was renowned for his eye and his minimalist personal style — a signature blue French worker’s jacket — and his bicycle, replaced dozens of times over the years, that enabled him to shoot on the go. This talking-head footage is a promising start that ultimately leads to a less than illuminating documentary.[embedded content]Bozek built this movie around that interview, from 1994. It finds its subject animated, punctuating his sentences with a toothy grin as he talks about his Roman Catholic upbringing, his early days at the fashion house Chez Ninon and his humble apartment in the old Carnegie Hall Studios. The film is peppered with rare archival photos — including many of Cunningham’s own — and narrated by the New York fashion icon Sarah Jessica Parker (a too on-the-money choice), whose voice-over delivery here lacks her playful “Sex and the City” wink.Bozek’s first feature, which he started working on right after Cunningham’s death in 2016, comes nearly a decade after Richard Press’s superior vérité-style profile, “Bill Cunningham New York.”While “The Times of Bill Cunningham” touches on many of the same topics, it makes one startling departure with this speculation: “While the attention that was brought to him via a growing number of accolades and a popular documentary in 2011 may have brought him some degree of lifetime achievement, it is more likely he regretted it,” Parker says in the film. In an attempt to distinguish his documentary from the other, Bozek delivers what feels like an unnecessary low blow.The Times of Bill CunninghamNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. More

For his first feature, “You Go To My Head,” the Belgian director Dimitri de Clercq decided to see what he could do with just four crew members, two main characters and a single, stunning location. It turned out to be quite a lot.Stranded in the Sahara after a car accident, a lovely young woman (Delfine Bafort) is found, unconscious, by Jake (Svetozar Cvetkovic), a withdrawn architect. When a doctor explains that the woman has post-traumatic amnesia, Jake names her Kitty and claims she’s his wife. Later, installed in Jake’s striking home — a place without neighbors or, more disturbingly, furniture — Kitty struggles to connect to a life, and a partner, as alien to her as the desert itself.[embedded content]Shot in Morocco between searing sunlight and pillowy dunes, “You Go to My Head” is a mysteriously elusive romance whose location is almost overpoweringly tangible. (The sensual cinematography is by Stijn Grupping.) Hacène Larbi’s eerily dissonant score is as perfectly spare as the film’s emotions, yet it imbues Kitty’s situation with a mesmerizing, inchoate danger. The movie is clamoring to erupt into melodrama, but de Clercq, content to wallow in teasingly luscious and enigmatically staged images, happily isn’t listening.Until its surprisingly effective ending, “You Go To My Head” keeps its drama under the skin. Like an animal in captivity, Bafort, who is also a model, slinks and lounges with long-limbed grace; but it’s Cvetkovic who holds the movie steady, giving Jake a secretive, worn gentleness that’s tinged with tragedy.“I feel good, like I’m coming back to life,” Kitty tells him, gazing fondly at her kidnapper. We just don’t know whose life she’s coming back to.You Go to My HeadNot rated. Running time: In French, Flemish and English, with English subtitles. 1 hour 56 minutes. More

Three men embark on a road trip in search of sex. It’s the premise of many a raunch-com, but “Come as You Are” diverges in one important aspect: Its libidinous heroes are disabled. Given the extent to which male sex comedies rely on physical humor, this simple twist in Richard Wong’s charming feature recasts the genre’s formulas in an entirely new light.The characters tick familiar boxes: Scotty (Grant Rosenmeyer), who has paraplegia, is the crass, childish one; the visually impaired Mo (Ravi Patel) is a nervous stickler for the rules; and Matt (Hayden Szeto), who uses a wheelchair, is the straight man. Despite being in their mid-20s and 30s, they’re virgins who live with overbearing parents. So when Scotty finds a Canadian brothel that caters to people with disabilities, they recruit a driver (played with lovely warmth by Gabourey Sidibe) to take them across the border.[embedded content]That the actors are all able-bodied seems to counter the film’s goal of positive representation, although Wong reportedly partnered with organizations serving people who are disabled, which pays off in his sensitive portrayal of the characters. He turns each one’s unique predicaments into hilarious set pieces — like Mo asking Scotty to describe a porn video out loud, or Scotty persuading Matt to help shave his privates — without ever slipping into mockery. The movie also cleverly pokes fun at the able-bodied: When the three men team up to drive a car with Mo at the wheel, Scotty says, “Most people drive like they’re blind anyway.”The film remakes the 2011 Belgian movie “Hasta la Vista,” based on the experiences of a disability advocate, Asta Philpot. It softens the cruder edges of the original, but the candor with which Erik Linthorst’s script regards the characters’ sexual desires — coupled with the winning performances of the actors — leavens any sentimentalism.Come as You AreNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. More

Simplicity itself, the horror movie “VFW” makes the most of its stripped-to-the-bone premise and gallons of gore. Characterized by blood-red lighting and bright-blue dialogue, the movie revels in a blasted urban setting that’s as repugnant as most of its supporting characters. And that’s before heads explode and faces are pounded to dog meat.[embedded content]Much of the splatter takes place inside a rundown meeting hall for war veterans, where Fred (Stephen Lang) and his cronies (including William Sadler, Fred Williamson and Martin Kove) drink and wax nostalgic about their exploits in Vietnam. Outside, a new drug has turned the city into a battleground where crazed addicts and punk dealers viciously collide; and when a vulnerable teenager (Sierra McCormick) seeks sanctuary from the enraged owners of the drugs she has stolen, the vets prepare for one last stand. No prizes for guessing they’re more stoked than dismayed.Essentially a geezers-fight-back siege movie (Tom Williamson plays the sole young veteran), “VFW” is riotously scuzzy and warmly partial to its rusty heroes. As they improvise weapons from pool cues and other scavenged bits and bobs, their camaraderie and newfound purpose are rather sweet. The resulting violence is almost comedically baroque, the special effects at times howlingly crass — blood geysers forth as if every blow has nicked a major artery — but none of it is meanspirited. Meantime, the director, Joe Begos, brings a grindhouse sensibility to Mike Testin’s glowering images, which are sometimes too murky to tell which body part is being crushed or chainsawed. Even so, I’m not watching it again to find out.VFWNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. More