Movies

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

The seemingly natural sparkle Anne Hathaway brings to her screen performances looks drained out of her for “The Last Thing He Wanted,” an adaptation of Joan Didion’s 1996 novel. This is apt. Hathaway’s journalist character Elena McMahon is an exemplary Didion heroine: a woman worn down to her last nerve.Directed by Dee Rees (“Mudbound”), who wrote the screenplay with Marco Villalobos, the movie plunges Elena into the 1980s geopolitical turmoil around the United States’s funding of Contras in Nicaragua. Didion’s novel keeps historical details obscured: The book never mentions Ronald Reagan or his secretary of state, George Shultz. They appear here; Schultz, played by Julian Gamble, is practically a supporting character. Elena’s misadventure motivation is personal: Her ailing father (Willem Dafoe) is himself a gun runner, and she imprudently chooses to carry out his last big score.[embedded content]With its near-telegraphic flashbacks and forwards, and first-person narration by an unnamed journalist writing in 1990s present day, Didion’s novel creates the impression of a slow-motion, backward-running film of a land-mine explosion. Rees jettisons the narrator and irons out the story into a linear structure. While never satisfactorily untangling the source material, she takes other, extreme liberties with it.The big problem with the movie isn’t the muddle, but the strain. A shot of Hathaway half-standing in a corner of a hotel room, limbs limp, bathed in the ever-so-golden light of sunrise through a window, doesn’t hit home so much as hammer the forehead. And making Ben Affleck’s uber-diplomat character look even more like George Reeves, the original Superman, than Affleck did in 2006’s “Hollywoodland,” in which he played that role, is not exactly subtle. The wolf in pop-culture-iconography sheep’s clothing! What incredible irony!The Last Thing He WantedRated R for violence, sexuality, language and George Shultz. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. More

A single Chinese billionaire, an investor and former taxi driver named Liu Yiqian, has spent at least $200 million on art in recent years, including $170 million for a Modigliani nude in 2015.With China as the second-largest market for the global movie industry, approval or rejection by the government in Beijing can make or break a movie’s bottom line.Orchestras from around the world plan tours of China years in advance, seeing them as a way to sell tickets, raise their profile and cultivate China’s growing wealthy class as donors.But now, as China struggles to get the coronavirus epidemic under control, the country is essentially closed for business to the global arts economy, exposing the sector to deep financial uncertainty. Movie releases have been canceled in China and symphony tours suspended because of quarantines and fears of contagion. A major art fair in Hong Kong was called off, and important spring art auctions half a world away in New York have been postponed because well-heeled Chinese buyers may find it difficult to travel to them.“It’s just not realistic to plan to offer things that are objects we know people want to see in person during a time when they can’t get here,” said Lark Mason, the founder of iGavel, one of six auction houses that have postponed many of their sales. “It does mean we have to scramble a bit because, OK, we don’t have this amount of revenue coming in. What are we going to do to fill the gap?”The virus has infected more than 48,000 people and killed more than 1,350 in China. As tens of millions of people are sealed off in cities there, new questions are emerging about how the virus, named SARS-CoV-2, is transmitted. Even art dealers who expect business to suffer because of closed borders and mandatory quarantines say they understand that stopping the contagion comes first.Still, there will be a financial impact. China was the third-biggest art market in the world in 2018, according to last year’s Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, accounting for 19 percent of the $67 billion spent on art that year. (The United States, at 44 percent, and United Kingdom, at 21 percent, had the top two spots.)Last week, Art Basel Hong Kong, an annual art fair scheduled for mid-March, was canceled, depriving dealers and artists of a major opportunity to show works to customers based in China and beyond. The fair attracts droves of visitors who descend on the region for art shows, cocktail gatherings and yacht parties in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Hanoi and Tokyo before, during and after the fair. Some of these have been postponed or canceled as well.In Hong Kong, the cancellations come after months of political protests that have convulsed the city and left much of the territory on shaky footing. More