Movies

A bouncy version of the old show tune “(You Gotta Have) Heart” introduces Tanya Wexler’s “Buffaloed” and its incorrigible heroine, Peg Dahl (Zoey Deutch) — a woman in constant, agitated motion. We meet her charging toward a showdown with her nemesis, Wizz (a marvelously sleazy Jai Courtney), her possession of a heart still to be determined. What she does have, though, is a mouth.Often, she uses it to insult Buffalo’s football team, its chicken-cartilage delicacies and its stagnating economy. An inveterate and gifted small-time hustler, Peg dreams of an Ivy League education and financial freedom. A stretch in jail for forgery scarcely dims her ambition; and when she’s hounded by debt collectors — and learns that delinquent debt is Buffalo’s main industry — she persuades Wizz to give her a desk in his scummy collection agency. Of course, she’s a natural.[embedded content]Simultaneously rowdy and slick, “Buffaloed” is exuberantly paced and entirely dependent on Deutch’s moxie and pell-mell performance. Brian Sacca’s script is zippily entertaining as Peg starts her own shop and hires a misfit crew of money-grabbers whose success ignites an interagency war. At this point, the movie’s focus on pitch-black, blue-collar comedy is diffused by a hectic series of escalating attacks and reprisals; but Guy Godfree’s cinematography remains bright and breezy and the supporting actors — especially Judy Greer as Peg’s worn-out single mother — never miss a beat.Reminiscent of “The Big Short” (2015), Peg’s snappy, direct-to-camera lessons on the collections industry present debtors as eternally fruitful marks. Unlike the earlier movie, though, “Buffaloed” isn’t particularly outraged; it’s just grateful that Peg and her talents have finally found a home.BuffaloedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

Paula Kelly, a tall, lithesome dancer who was one of the first African-American women to make a successful transition to movies and television from Broadway, using the musical “Sweet Charity” as the bridge, died on Saturday at a nursing facility in Whittier, Calif. She was 77. Her niece, Dina McCarthy, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ms. Kelly burst into the movies in 1969 in “Sweet Charity,” an adaptation of the stage musical about an ever-hopeful taxi dancer — a dance partner for hire — in a run-down Times Square dance hall. Ms. Kelly played the dancer Helene, one of two best friends of the title character, Charity Hope Valentine, played by Shirley MacLaine. Chita Rivera played the other.Although lesser known than the movie’s big stars — Sammy Davis Jr. also had top billing — Ms. Kelly more than held her own, especially in the seductive number “Big Spender” and the energetic “There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This,” in which the three dance-hall girls express their determination to get respectable jobs.Onstage, Ms. Kelly played Helene in the London production of “Sweet Charity” (with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and a book by Neil Simon). The director, Bob Fosse, who also directed and choreographed the show on Broadway, asked Ms. Kelly to reprise the role for the movie, which was to be his feature-film directorial debut.He called her “the best dancer I’ve ever seen.”Her performance in “Sweet Charity” landed her other acting roles in movies, among them the science-fiction thrillers “The Andromeda Strain” (1971) and “Soylent Green” (1973). It also led to multiple parts on television shows including the dramas “Hill Street Blues” and “Police Woman” and the sitcoms “The Golden Girls” and “Night Court,” in which she played a public defender, winning an Emmy Award nomination in 1984.Ms. Kelly earned another Emmy nomination for playing one of television’s first black lesbian characters, in the 1989 ABC mini-series “The Women of Brewster Place.” Adapted by Oprah Winfrey’s production company from a novel by Gloria Naylor, the mini-series, also featuring Ms. Winfrey and Cicely Tyson, was praised for showcasing the complexities of the lives of black women living in a tenement building. Ms. Kelly’s character, Theresa, lived in the building with her partner, Lorraine, played by Lonette McKee.Ms. Kelly had long caught the attention of critics. After seeing her in an adaptation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” on Broadway in 1971, Walter Kerr of The New York Times wrote, “I suspect you are going to notice her — cool and angular and with legs as elegantly articulated as an aristocratic crane’s — wherever she turns up.”“Some performers are performers,” he added; “a few are presences.”Paula Alma Kelly was born in Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 21, 1942, to Lehman Clarence and Ruth Naomi (Dempsey) Kelly. Like many black families of that era in the South, the Kellys and their three daughters joined the Great Migration and headed north when Paula was 6 months old, settling in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. Lehman Kelly became the superintendent of the apartment building where they lived, and Ruth Kelly worked in retail sales.The family arrived after the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, but many of its major figures were still there. The family’s neighbors included Billie Holiday, Johnny Hodges and Billy Strayhorn, and music was always emanating from open windows.“Before she was old enough to walk, Kelly would bob her head to the music of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Buddy Johnson,” her cousin Baron Kelly wrote in an entry in The National African-American Biography (2006).When she saw her first Broadway show, “West Side Story,” Ms. Kelly was inspired to pursue a career in dance. She auditioned successfully for admission to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and won a scholarship to the dance program at Juilliard in 1960.During her second year there, she took six months off to make her professional dance debut on tour with Harry Belafonte. When she returned, she switched to Juilliard’s bachelor of arts program. She was scheduled to graduate in 1964 but, for reasons that remain unclear, left in June without getting her degree.But she was already on her way. She had made her Broadway debut that year in the musical “Something More!,” starring Barbara Cook, and was plucked for the London stage production of “Sweet Charity.”She was soon making dance appearances on “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Dean Martin Show.” In 1967 she was a featured performer at the grand opening of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with Jack Benny, Tony Bennett and Andy Williams.Two years later she put on a solo dance performance at the Academy Awards ceremony, where Sidney Poitier introduced her as “the sensational young dancer from ‘Sweet Charity,’” accompanied by the U.C.L.A. marching band.Much in demand that year, Ms. Kelly was seen on Broadway in “The Dozens,” a comedy with Morgan Freeman, and appeared nude in a photo shoot for Playboy magazine.In a busy career, Ms. Kelly starred in black-oriented films like “Cool Breeze” (1972) and “Trouble Man” (1972), which had a soundtrack by Marvin Gaye. She played Leggy Peggy, the wife of a congressman, in “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974), a comedy starring Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby.But she never gave up the stage. In 1976 she helped choreograph a musical adaptation of “Peter Pan,” in which she played Tiger Lily. She also danced in a touring production of the Duke Ellington revue “Sophisticated Ladies” in 1982.In 1985, Ms. Kelly married Don Chaffey, a British film director, writer and producer. He died in 1990. She is survived by her longtime partner, George Parkington.Despite her many acting roles, Ms. Kelly’s first love was dance.“The only time I feel complete expression is when I’m dancing,” she told the black weekly The New Pittsburgh Courier in 1968. “Then I feel I have no problems, no worries, no hangups. I feel I could do anything in the world.” More

The French filmmaker Robert Bresson once said: “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.” In “I Was at Home, but…,” the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie — with a line, an image, a snatch of a song — offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world. (It won her the best director award at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival.)“I Was at Home, but …” begins with a hare being chased by a dog across a rugged, bleached-out rural landscape. It’s a tense race for life — the hare is fast, the dog too — and invokes countless scenes of endangered bunnies, including in Renoir’s “Rules of the Game.” (Schanelec’s title, in turn, seems to nod at Ozu’s “I Was Born, but…”) The chase appears to end with the hare resting among an outcropping of rocks. This is followed by a brief, enigmatic interlude of a charming donkey wandering in a derelict house where the dog tears at a small, dead animal, presumably our hapless hare.After this mysterious opener, we cut to a girl in a red coat sitting alone on a curb in deep twilight, framed by a stand of trees in the background, a backpack next to her. The combination of the color of the coat, the isolation of the girl and the crepuscular woods brings to mind Little Red Riding Hood, an association that settles in your mind like an unformed thought. A boy — later revealed to be the son of the protagonist — walks by wordlessly. A few beats later there’s a shot of him in front of a brick building, where the buzzing of exterior lights mixes with bird calls and insects whirs.Not long after, the movie shifts to a classroom where a girl recites a line from “Hamlet”: “Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light!” In the original, these words are spoken by the Player Queen in the play within the play, when she insists she would never remarry, an allusion that — like the Red Riding Hood imagery — settles in your head as a possible clue. As you cast about for meaning, you may remember Hamlet’s mother, the real queen, who in this same section says, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” This isn’t something one could say of Schanelec, whose narrative approach is austere and elliptical, and whose intentions can be so inscrutable that “I Was at Home, but …” can feel like a private reverie rather than one meant for sharing.The dog and the donkey return at the end of the movie, again without overt explanation. Between these bookended scenes, Schanelec focuses on a series of acquaintances, notably a woman, Astrid (Maren Eggert), who lives with her two children, including the boy seen earlier, who seems to have returned after a cryptic absence. Over time and outwardly disparate scenes — Astrid buys a used bicycle, comically harangues a filmmaker and visits her son’s teachers — a hazy yet moving mosaiclike portrait of this lonely, melancholic woman emerges. And while you end up knowing little about Astrid, you sense (and feel) her grief, which saturates this movie.Throughout, Schanelec’s color and framing are impeccable, the shots harmoniously balanced. She uses a lot of natural light, which imparts a near-radiant glow to some of the compositions and particularly to faces. The beauty of these visuals goes a long way to keeping you tethered to “I Was at Home, but…,” as do your own well-conditioned attempts to wrest a story from a movie that seems reluctant to offer you one. In most mainstream cinema, the story tugs you along — or prods you into its mazelike corridors and toward dead ends — encouraging you to wonder what happens next. Schanelec offers next to no such prompts, trusting that you’ll keep watching anyway.Whether you do will largely depend on your enjoyment of (or tolerance for) narrative ellipses, and your curiosity about how these faces, quotes, allusions and interstitial moments together create meaning. Sometimes, as with the girl in red, Schanelec seems to be drawing from a culturally shared storehouse of images, using certain visuals for their associative or symbolic resonance. That appears to be the case too with the donkey, whose presence may be a reference to the title figure in Bresson’s masterpiece “Au Hasard Balthazar.” This allusion, though, only becomes evident after — and if — you recognize that her precise framing also owes a great debt to Bresson.His influence is also apparent in the performances, which can be borderline affectless. The exception is Eggert, whose quiet eloquence serves as an anchor even when her face is drained of visible emotion, an emptiness that makes its flashes of animation more effective than they might otherwise be. In one of the most touching interludes, Astrid lies on the ground as a man sings Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on the soundtrack, the song continuing over a flashback of her and her kids dancing in a hospital room. Their audience remains offscreen, though you guess it’s the father who haunts this story. And then Astrid smiles, creating a small shock that turns into a stab of feeling as you remember the moment when the Player Queen says “If, once a widow, ever I be wife!”I Was at Home, but …Not rated. In German, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

Tom and Joan are a long-married couple whose daily routines — walking for exercise, shopping for groceries, trading affectionate pretend insults — signal deep affection and easy intimacy. The movie about a trying year in their lives is called “Ordinary Love,” and the opening scenes paint a modest, careful picture of unexceptional middle-class existence.The catch — and also the point — is that these unassuming people are played by two extraordinary actors: Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville. The film, directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn from a screenplay by Owen McCafferty, is nearly a two-hander, and the hands are played with discipline, grace and wit. Neeson, taking a break from his usual wintertime angry-dad action-movie duties, is wry and crinkly, his loose limbs and craggy features suggesting great power in repose. Manville is a sharp, quicksilver presence, her face hovering between impatience and astonishment. The two of them communicate absolute trust in each other, and inspire the same in the audience. You are prepared to believe everything they say and do.[embedded content]But you may also wish there were more. The narrative of “Ordinary Love,” which stretches between two Christmases, deals with what happens after Joan finds a lump in her left breast. There are tests, more tests, surgery and chemotherapy — the grim, anxious, absurd routines of modern cancer treatment.“There won’t be a minute that I won’t be there with you,” Tom promises, and though he is true to his word, Joan’s illness subjects their relationship to complicated stresses and shocks. They are going through it together, but in a cruelly asymmetrical fashion. The caregiver and the patient are allies, but neither one shares the other’s particular suffering, which threatens to turn them into adversaries.D’Sa and Leyburn (“Cherrybomb,” “Good Vibrations”) convey this with a sensitivity that is both admirable and frustrating, casting a tasteful, restrained hush over potentially unruly emotions. The music (by David Holmes and Brian Irvine) modulates from nervous to soothing to sad, and the editing (by Nick Emerson) folds one scene tactfully into the next. It has often been said that war movies inevitably glorify combat, and it’s also true that movies about grave illness tend to sentimentalize its ravages. That is the case here: An experience often defined by dread, indignity and tedium is softened and made beautiful.There are, nonetheless, a handful of scenes that have the rough, tender pulse of real life. The major problem is that, beyond the cancer and their devotion to each other, Tom and Joan seem barely to have lives at all. We know that they had a daughter, named Debbie, who died, though we don’t know how or how long ago that tragedy occurred. Tom and Joan have, as far as we can tell, no other family, no jobs and no friends, though they do strike up an acquaintance with a couple they meet at the hospital.Tom feeds the fish in his aquarium, and he and Joan take daily power walks and squabble about nutrition, but any cultural interests or political opinions they might have remain unspoken. Or else left blank by the filmmakers, who depend on Neeson and Manville to fill in the script’s empty spaces with the force of their personalities. It almost works, but as persuasive as the performers can be, Tom and Joan seem less real the more time you spend with them.Ordinary LoveRated R. Sexuality. Profanity. Mortality. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. More