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    ‘DogMan’ Review: Crackers for Animals

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    An electrifying Caleb Landry Jones plays the damaged heart of this oddly wonderful tale of resilience and revenge.Drag queens, disability and dozens of canines converge in Luc Besson’s “DogMan,” which opens with a quotation from a 19th-century French poet and closes with a symbolic crucifixion. In between is the strangest, possibly silliest movie of the veteran director’s idiosyncratic career. It is also borderline brilliant.On a wet night in New Jersey, a bloodied man dressed as Marilyn Monroe (Caleb Landry Jones) is arrested while driving a truck filled with agitated dogs. An empathetic prison psychologist, Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs), learns that the man is named Douglas, the dogs are his “babies,” and that his horrifying story resonates more than Evelyn would like with a predicament of her own. Flashbacks to Douglas’s past expose a childhood terrorized by a Bible-thumping brother and brutal father, who caged the boy alongside a team of fighting dogs. He also delivered the gunshot wound that would consign Douglas to a wheelchair for most of his life.That life, unfolding in scenes that run the gamut from sweet to bizarre to heartbreaking, is a dark fairy tale of survival. Hunkered in a dank, abandoned building filled with books, security cameras and four-legged companions, the adult Douglas maintains an almost psychic bond with the only creatures to ever show him sustained affection. From his booby-trapped lair, he provides vigilante services to local supplicants, operating as a kind of godfather (dogfather?) with a pack that obeys his often wordless commands. Gigantic or tiny, fearsome or cuddly, stealing from the rich or subduing gangsters, they scamper through the film with lolling-tongued delight and discernible personalities. Not since “Amores Perros” (2000) and “White God” (2015) have so many movie canines impacted the lives of so many characters.Besson, to his credit, recognizes the wackiness in his screenplay, and plays into it without reducing Douglas’s pain to a joke. Even so, it’s doubtful if the movie would work without Jones’s astonishing commitment to, and understanding of the character. (If you saw him two years ago in Justin Kurzel’s “Nitram,” you already know he excels at playing deeply damaged individuals.) He’s mesmerizing here, skirting easy pathos to give Douglas a touching dignity that stabilizes the movie’s kooky premise. When he discovers a talent for cabaret and debuts a performance of Édith Piaf’s “La Foule,” the moment is both sad and sublime: a bona fide showstopper.People get hurt in this movie, but “DogMan,” loping along like one of its pups, doesn’t linger over the violence. Scenes flow smoothly from chilling to cute, buoyed by a cheekily over-the-top soundtrack. This isn’t a maudlin, triumph-over-adversity yarn: Douglas might be in a wheelchair, but he’s easily the most able body onscreen.DogManRated R for a brutalized child and a chomped crotch. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Nitram’ Review: Slouching Toward Infamy

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      In this unnerving drama based on a true crime, a lonely outsider reaches his breaking point.The most chilling scene in Justin Kurzel’s “Nitram” — a movie that’s rarely less than freezing — occurs near the end and shows the title character, a disturbed young man, buying multiple firearms and rounds of ammunition. His demeanor is, for the first time, confident and purposeful; his handling of the weapons as natural as if he were born to them. The scene unnerves even if we don’t know where he’s going, because we know where he has been.Tough and unflinching, “Nitram” is about the evolution of a killer. A lightly fictionalized portrait of events leading up to Australia’s 1996 Port Arthur murders, the film is terrifyingly controlled, tipping neither toward empathy nor judgment. The tone is instead coolly observational, the filmmakers betting everything on Caleb Landry Jones’s adamant yet impenetrable performance as the man known as Nitram — a derisive backward spelling of his real name (never spoken in the film) and a loathed childhood nickname.Organized to highlight the dark flags heralding the coming storm, Shaun Grant’s simmering screenplay opens in 1979 with archival footage from a hospital burn unit, showing the killer as a young boy cheerfully assuring an interviewer that he will continue to play with fireworks. This fascination endures into adulthood and is supplemented by other disruptive and dangerous behaviors. Neither his worn-out parents (a memorable Judy Davis and a very affecting Anthony LaPaglia) nor his medication seem able to prevent this straggle-haired man-child from acting on instincts only he understands.A brief period of happiness arrives when he’s befriended — and all but adopted — by Helen (Essie Davis), a reclusive heiress who’s strangely unperturbed by his evident slowness. Yet we worry for her, and we are right to do so, though we have not yet seen him be especially violent. His playfulness seems dangerous enough.With “Nitram,” Kurzel (whose 2012 feature debut, “The Snowtown Murders,” was also based on a particularly gruesome true crime) has created a bleak and passionless tale wrapped in a caul of inevitability. Rather than analyze his subject, the director steers us to the external factors — an inattentive physician, a shocking lack of effective gun laws — that eased his path to destruction. The killings themselves may remain off-camera, but the movie is still an uncomfortable watch. In Jones’s smoldering performance, we see a man stretched beyond his limits, a rubber band just waiting to snap back.NitramNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Spike Lee Accidentally Reveals Palme d’Or Winner Early: It’s ‘Titane’

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      Julia Ducournau becomes the second woman to win the top prize, after Jane Campion in 1993. The surprise reveal came at the start of a chaotic ceremony.CANNES, France — The 2021 edition of the Cannes Film Festival gave its top prize, the prestigious Palme d’Or, to the French film “Titane.”A wild serial-killer story with some of the most controversial scenes of the festival, “Titane” was directed by Julia Ducournau, who became just the second woman to win the Palme, after Jane Campion took the prize in 1993 for “The Piano.”And though “Titane” had been hotly tipped as a prime contender for the Palme, that reveal came much earlier than intended: At the beginning of the closing ceremony, when the jury president, Spike Lee, was asked to announce the first prize of the night, he misunderstood and read off the first-prize winner instead.“Don’t do it!” shouted the actress-director Mélanie Laurent, a jury member seated next to Lee. But the cat was already out of the bag.(At a news conference after the ceremony, Lee said that he had no excuses and that “I messed up,” adding, “I’m a big sports fan. It’s like the guy at the end of the game in the foul line, he misses the free throw or a guy misses a kick.” He also said he apologized to the Cannes organizers. “They said forget about it.”)The accidental “Titane” reveal was only the first of several chaotic moments at the ceremony, as the spoiled Palme reveal was followed by a best-actor prize for Caleb Landry Jones for the Australian tragedy “Nitram.” When a nervous-looking Jones took the stage, he appeared sick to his stomach, said, “I cannot do this,” and beat a hasty retreat.Still, by the time a teary Ducournau was brought out at the end of the ceremony to finally accept her Palme, she had embraced the chaos. “This evening has been perfect,” she said, “because it’s so not perfect.”Julia Ducournau, left with her star, Agatha Rousselle, became the second woman to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes history.Eric Gaillard/ReutersOther major winners included Leos Carax, who took the best-director prize for his eccentric musical “Annette,” best-actress winner Renate Reinsve for the Norwegian romantic dramedy “The Worst Person in the World,” and a pair of ties: The second-place prize was split between “A Hero,” from the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, and the Finnish drama “Compartment No. 6,” while the third-prize tie went to the Nadav Lapid film “Ahed’s Knee” and “Memoria,” starring Tilda Swinton.At the last Cannes film festival, held in 2019, the Palme winner was “Parasite,” the first major prize Bong Joon Ho’s film took on its path to the best-picture Oscar. Though “Titane” is far too gory to become a major Oscar contender, its Palme win firmly establishes Ducournau as a major international director only two feature films into her career.Correction: July 17, 2021An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the winner of the best director prize. He is Leos Carax, not Leox Carax. More