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    ‘Padre Pio’ Review: A Movie in Need of a Miracle That Never Comes

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    In this film directed by Abel Ferrara, Shia LaBeouf gives viewers a contemporary version of the saint — that is, one who curses a blue streak.We are now in the month of June, so the idea of Shia LaBeouf in the title role of a fictionalized biography of the revered and controversial Italian cleric Padre Pio directed by Abel Ferrara has a low probability of being some kind of April Fool’s joke. This is a real movie. And alas, an occasionally rank one.Now Ferrara hasn’t even attempted a conventional biopic of the man born Francesco Forgione at the end of the 19th century, and who, according to some accounts, started displaying stigmata after an illness-plagued childhood. And that’s to his credit. Rather, he’s attempted a sometimes Brechtian consideration of the nodes of political history and spirituality.The movie is set in the Italy between two world wars, during which time Pio was a priest in San Giovanni Rotondo, where he spent his entire life. (And where a 1920 Fascist-initiated massacre of civilians took place; the movie ends with a depiction of it.) Ferrara’s narrative toggles between Padre Pio’s cloistered, spiritually tormented existence and the Socialist and Fascist factions competing to transform Italy at the time.LaBeouf essays a rather, let’s say, contemporary Pio. And completely sinks the picture. Early in the movie Pio is asked by an interrogator about the “countless” women “you had your narcissistic way with.” Who’s under scrutiny here, the character, or LaBeouf himself, who’s recently faced allegations of sexual abuse from more than one woman? Later, a male character played by Asia Argento confesses feeling lust for his own daughter, and LaBeouf’s Pio, utterly callow in spite of his prodigious beard, tells him to shut-the-you-know-what-up. He detaches the movie from the Brechtian and lands it firmly in the territory of “improv scene workshop gone horribly wrong.”Padre PioRated R for themes, violence, Shia LaBeouf’s language. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Zeros and Ones’ Review: Plague and Paranoia

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      Abel Ferrara’s lockdown experiment is a spooky political thriller with a double dose of Ethan Hawke.Cryptic to a fault, Abel Ferrara’s “Zeros and Ones” unfolds in a murkiness that’s both literal and ideological. Even its star, Ethan Hawke — speaking to us as himself in two brief scenes that bookend the movie — admits that, initially, he didn’t understand Ferrara’s script. His candor is comforting, and emboldening, encouraging persistence with a story whose destination seems as vague as its characters’ motivations.What’s clear is that the constraints of pandemic filmmaking were catnip to Ferrara, whose jittery camera patrols the deserted nighttime streets of a locked-down Rome alongside J.J. (Hawke), an elite American soldier on a mysterious undercover mission. This requires finding his twin brother, Justin (also Hawke), an imprisoned revolutionary whom we see being questioned and repeatedly tortured.Surveilled by shady foreign agents, J.J. creeps from one furtive encounter to another, constantly filming his progress. Pitiless, grainy close-ups capture him sipping tea with a mother and child — perhaps his brother’s family — in a blank apartment and, later, alongside a mullah in a mosque. A terrorist attack on the city may be imminent, but J.J. is otherwise engaged with a couple of slinky prostitutes (“They’re both negative,” their madam helpfully advertises) and a beautiful Russian woman (played by the director’s partner, Cristina Chiriac) who’s forcing him to have sex at gunpoint. By this juncture, the only thing we know for sure is that Ferrara, bless his guttersnipe soul, is still bracingly, adamantly himself.Steadfastly shouldering this rambling, barely penetrable narrative, Hawke smoothly distinguishes the implacable intensity of J.J. from the delusions of his brother (whose messianic rantings recall Hawke’s startling performance as John Brown in last year’s Showtime drama “The Good Lord Bird.”) Saddled with some of the film’s dippiest dialogue (“You hate trees!,” he screams at his unidentified tormentors), Justin serves as the enfeebled, despairing conscience of a world seemingly abandoned by God and compassion alike.With its prickling, apocalyptic aesthetic and persistent paranoia, this spooky political thriller is all about a mood: conspiratorial, sinister, unsettled. Here, the accessories of pandemic life become even more ominous: A sanitizing team on the subway recalls plague thrillers like “Contagion” (2011), and a suddenly-brandished thermometer pointed at J.J.’s forehead plays like a gun attack. When everyone is wearing a mask, how do we tell the good guys from the bad?Utterly baffling, yet never less than intriguing, “Zeros and Ones” lingers in the mind. Even after you think you’ve brushed it off, its chilly tendrils continue to cling.Zeros and OnesRated R for temptation and torture. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Siberia’ Review: Beast of the Northern Wilds

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      Abel Ferrara’s latest psychodrama sends an ever-intense Willem Dafoe into the Arctic wilderness on a visionary reckoning with his memories and sense of self.Everybody’s got a plan until a bear wallops them. That happens to Clint (Willem Dafoe) in “Siberia,” Abel Ferrara’s latest psychodrama, which is equally set in the snowy Arctic wilds and the desolate reaches of an unquiet mind. This bracingly pure dream journey starts with Clint as a frontier bartender in a cabin, serving the odd hunter or babushka, and follows him on a dog-driven sled chase through memories and visions.The bear attack comes in an unforgettable smash cut, shattering Clint’s apparent plan to hide from the world. But unlike Ferrara’s most infamous creations — the bad lieutenants, the kings of New York—Clint’s transgressions don’t seem to be spectacular. That doesn’t stop him from ruminations and self-pity — over past relationships, an Eisenhower-era father (also played by Dafoe), or losing touch with a sense of soul. (Not to mention living with the world’s legacy of atrocity, which Ferrara invokes briefly and nightmarishly.) Also: mystics!Dafoe, a close collaborator with Ferrara, brings the intensity and nakedness (not just physical) necessary for the film’s trip. I can’t think of other actors at his level who could keep a sense of true north in a nonlinear story like this, from bear scene to sex scene to earnest confrontations, amid quotations from St. Augustine and Nietzsche.Visually, Ferrara sends him on eerie flights through day-for-night wilderness and into vertiginous caverns and sanctums (haunted by wistful musical motifs composed by Joe Delia). The film (co-written by Ferrara and Christ Zois) ends enigmatically, as dreams do. That refusal to stage an orderly conclusion or redemption might be the boldest thing about the movie.SiberiaRated R for the stuff that (some) dreams are made of, such as strong sexual content and disturbing violence. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More