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      ‘The People’s Joker’ Review: A Wild Card

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      Pure chaos is at play in a scrappy and unauthorized new parody about a character who looks a lot like the Joker. It’s a daring slice of queer cinema.The director Vera Drew got in hot water making this DC Comics-inspired origin story about a transgender simulacrum of the Joker, Batman’s frozen-smile nemesis. A disclaimer that now starts the film calls it an unauthorized parody, and any trademark infringement “was not done intentionally.”Drew’s fearless but illicit approach to filmmaking tracks the film itself: It’s aggressively self-indulgent, cinematically topsy-turvy and exhausting. It’s also singular, daring and an uncompromisingly cannonball into the queer cinema pool.Co-written by Drew and Bri LeRose, the story is standard queer movie stuff: A young, closeted transgender girl gets the hell out of small-town America and comes to terms with her identity in big bad Gotham City. But as she’s stymied in her quest for romance and stardom, our heroine morphs into a droll, nasty-minded comedian named Joker the Harlequin.Visually, the film is a manic but charged assemblage of live action, low-watt digital effects, crude animation and even puppetry. It’s as if Drew storyboarded using the angry diary entries and superhero doodles of the 100-some artists she collaborated with on the film. Too bad her relentless, insider jabs at New York’s comedy scene — she’s no fan of “Saturday Night Live” or Lorne Michaels — come across as sour grapes, offering few universal stakes for people who don’t know U.C.B. from a USB.Within the film’s confessional chaos lives the spirit of Vaginal Davis, Ryan Trecartin and other maverick queer filmmakers who toyed with genre to torpedo gender. It’s reviving to see an artist take up the cause.The People’s JokerNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Housekeeping for Beginners’ Review: Daddy Nearest

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      Sad news forces a diverse group of friends to take unorthodox action in this volatile, affecting drama.For his third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” the writer and director Goran Stolevski returns to his birthplace, North Macedonia, to capture the tumbling energy and volatile emotions of a household in crisis.The home, a haven of sorts for racial and cultural outsiders, belongs to Dita (Anamaria Marinca), a middle-age social worker whose partner, Suada (Alina Serban), has received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. While Dita anxiously seeks treatment options, the more abrasive Suada accuses her doctor of ill-treating patients who, like her, belong to the maligned ethnic group known as Roma. Suada fears for the future of her daughters: Vanesa (Mia Mustafa), an astringent teenager, and little Mia (a ridiculously charming Dzada Selim). Desperate to give them a better life, she begs Dita to adopt the girls and fraudulently register them as white. And as lesbians are not permitted to adopt, Dita will have to marry a man.This setup might sound depressing or even farcical, but “Housekeeping” is deeply sincere and occasionally joyous. As Dita and a gay housemate, Toni (Vladimir Tintor), reluctantly plan a Potemkin wedding, Naum Doksevski’s supple, hand-held camera swerves and dodges around raucous dance parties and rowdy arguments, visually mapping the residents’ tangled fates and churning feelings. A furiously grieving Vanesa rebels by seeking out her Roma grandmother. And playful Ali (a terrific screen debut by Samson Selim), Toni’s latest hookup, entertains Mia and mediates quarrels. Intimate, partly improvised conversations affirm the group’s rough affections and peppery personalities.This stylistic pliancy is a far cry from Stolevski’s beautifully controlled feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone” (2022), yet both share an interest in difference and the restrictions of approved gender roles. In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.Housekeeping for BeginnersRated R for bad language and good vibes. In Macedonian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The First Omen’ Review: The Days Before Damien

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      A prequel to the original franchise, this debut feature from Arkasha Stevenson is a thrilling mash-up of horror tropes that gives the story new life.If the “Omen” franchise left us with memorable tropes — the boy Antichrist, lurking among us; those dreaded three repeated numbers — the content of the movies themselves did little else. The original horror trilogy, kicked off by “The Omen” in 1976, never had the sticking power of other classics in popular consciousness, and a 2006 revamp came and went. What could another attempt, this time a prequel to a middling franchise, really offer?In Arkasha Stevenson’s hands, it can take us on a pretty fun ride. “The First Omen” is about everything before Damien (a.k.a. the Antichrist incarnate), following Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American nun-to-be that is sent to an orphanage in 1971 Rome, where social mores are shifting and things quickly begin to get weird. It’s a period piece that Stevenson’s debut feature plumbs effectively, giving the story both scale and some nice compositional punches, while setting the stage for an often delightfully pulpy narrative (the Catholic Church is not so holy after all) to how the Antichrist came to be.The film revels in mashing up familiar genres: the monster movie, body horror and the Gothic church thriller. But it injects a revitalizing juice into the franchise — smartly edited and well paced, with a good cinematic eye.And most important, Free is a game partner to Stevenson’s vision. She naturally embodies the seemingly delicate innocence of young Margaret, a softness that, of course, must eventually harden against darker forces. Eventually she is taken over, her body jolting and writhing to something beyond her control in an arresting scene that gives the oft-discussed subway sequence from Andrzej Zulawski’s “Possession” a run for its money. It’s another familiar nod with just enough of its own delirium.The First OmenRated R for violent content, grisly images, and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Beast’ Review: Master of Puppets

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      Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers in three different eras, is an audacious sci-fi romance.Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” is an audacious interdimensional romance, techno-thriller and Los Angeles noir rolled up in one. This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate.The prologue shows a green-screen shoot in which Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) takes directions from a presence off camera and, with expert professionalism, braces herself to confront an imaginary monster. The effect is uncanny, wryly funny, weirdly sensual and very sad. Bonello sustains this unsettling tone throughout the film, although the individual parts are less consistent. This is the toll of shifting time periods, from a costume drama to a modern mockery of incel culture.With computer-generated imagery, any opponent — and any era — can materialize in the background. What does this mean for actors? The feeling that great forces move us like puppets runs through Bonello’s genre-bending work (in his 2017 film, “Nocturama,” a gang of teenage terrorists hide in a shopping mall and see themselves reflected in the consumerist sprawl).“The Beast” follows Gabrielle and Louis (George MacKay), who are lovers, in three incarnations, through three timelines: Paris circa 1910, when the city flooded; Los Angeles in the 2010s; and Paris in 2044, a near-future in which artificial intelligence has almost overtaken the work force.In 2044, Gabrielle is struggling to get a job. A disembodied voice at an eerily vacant employment agency tells her that her emotions make her unsuited to work, and a purification process that scrubs people of their pesky feelings is recommended. “All of them?” Gabrielle asks nervously. She is a pianist and an actor in earlier timelines, so she values her capacity to be moved and react authentically.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Old Oak’ Review: The Audacity of Hope

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      A family of Syrian refugees connects with a once-thriving mining town in Ken Loach’s moving drama.“The Old Oak” is named for the pub where much of its action happens — an old drinking hole in a village outside of Durham, England, that’s seen better days. Its back room, once a gathering place for the miners and their families who populated the town a generation ago, has been locked up for many years, fallen to disuse. Its walls are still hung with photographs of those miners taken during the lengthy strike of 1984-1985, a labor effort that ended without the resolution the miners sought and with weakened trade unions. But during the action, the village marched in solidarity — at least for a while — and came together to share meals in that back room, to support one another, a point of pride for the men who were children back then.When the movie begins, it is 2016, the year of the Brexit vote. It’s hard to imagine that kind of unity happening any more. The village has slowly emptied out, closing down places like the church hall, which had been a gathering spot. The village’s real estate is being bought up at auction by entities abroad, driving down the value of houses owned by locals, leaving them with nothing to live on in old age. Jobs are scarce. Money is tight. Children barely have enough to eat. And so in the Old Oak, a handful of regulars sit around, bitterly decrying the state of things.They have lately found a target for their rage: a few families of Syrian refugees who have been settled in the village, helped along by a local charity worker named Laura (Claire Rodgerson) and Tommy Joe Ballantyne (Dave Turner), who goes by TJ and owns the Old Oak. He’s the one who has to listen to the regulars gripe and spew racist epithets about the refugees, always clarifying that they’re “not racist.” He says nothing. He doesn’t think he can. He needs their business to scrape by. He knows their private lives are no picnic either. And if the pub isn’t there, they’ll just go home and wind one another up on the internet anyhow.But TJ is lonely, and cares about the newcomers, though he’s afraid at first to become too involved with their lives. He strikes up an unlikely friendship with Yara (Ebla Mari), a young Syrian woman who speaks English, having learned after two years of volunteering with nurses while living in the refugee camps. Yara has arrived in town with her mother and several younger siblings. They don’t know where their father is because he was taken from them by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Her life has been worse, by any measure, than those of the men in the pub — but it feels almost obscene to make the comparison.You’d know “The Old Oak” was directed by Ken Loach (from a screenplay by his long-running collaborator Paul Laverty) even if his name wasn’t in the credits. His late work is unmistakable, driven by fierce moral clarity and outrage on behalf of the people whom capitalism and Britain’s government, supposedly constructed for citizens’ benefit, have left behind. His previous film “Sorry We Missed You,” for instance, is a blindly infuriated (and infuriating) film about a father who takes a job as a delivery driver to make ends meet, only to discover that everything about this job is designed to prosper the owner but ruin his life and his family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Música’ Review: Rudy Mancuso’s Debut Feature

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      Rudy Mancuso stars in and directs an inventive debut feature about a man with synesthesia who tries to manage his complicated life and relationships.The artist Rudy Mancuso has a prolific career that’s hard to define. He sings, shoots puppet skits and films wistful live action shorts set to his own piano tunes. Mancuso uploads most of his output online; however, he opened for Justin Bieber in Brazil, where he once lived. “Música,” Mancuso’s phenomenal feature debut, is a comic trip inside a mind that’s forever feverishly creating — even against his will. In the first scene, Rudy (Mancuso), his semi-autobiographical lead, gets dumped at a diner because his synesthesia won’t allow him to focus on a serious talk about the future. His brain can’t ignore a knife chopping, a broom sweeping, a spatula clanking. The percussion swells, the clatter harmonizes and his romance collapses, leaving Rudy alone in his bedroom with a lamp attached to — oh dear — a Clapper.Mancuso crams all of his passions into the movie, including the puppets (which, with his cartoonish coif, he resembles). He’s playing a character who is occasionally too passive. Yet, he’s made a film that’s confidently, intentionally overwhelming. In Newark, where the movie is set, there’s always life, noise, inspiration banging away in the background. Rudy can’t control his distractions, but he can conduct the cacophony. An interlude involving a boisterous park of people playing checkers, basketball and double Dutch lets him do just that.As balance, the script, written by Mancuso and Dan Lagana, is a tidy coming-of-age tale. Rudy bounces between the needs of three women: his college girlfriend, Haley (Francesca Reale), a charismatic fishmonger named Isabella (Camila Mendes) and his bossy Brazilian mother, Maria (played by his real mother, Maria Mancuso), who turns their living room into a singles bar for potential daughters-in-law. (She serves caipirinhas with paper umbrellas.) Occasionally, Rudy ventures out for advice from a shawarma truck operator (J.B. Smoove), who, when drunk, acts like a trickster sprite.Mancuso, 32, is part of a digital generation that treated the internet like a self-taught film school. Eyeballs were his pass/fail grade. A low-budget, high-imagination director, he’s learned to delight viewers with practical effects and sharp physical timing, citing Charlie Chaplin as his inspiration. (Come to think of it, they have the same hair, too.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      #MeToo Stalled in France. Judith Godrèche Might Be Changing That.

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      Judith Godrèche did not set out to relaunch the #MeToo movement in France’s movie industry.She came back to Paris from Los Angeles in 2022 to work on “Icon of French Cinema,” a TV series she wrote, directed and starred in — a satirical poke at her acting career that also recounts how, at the age of 14, she entered into an abusive relationship with a film director 25 years older.Then, a week after the show aired, in late December, a viewer’s message alerted her to a 2011 documentary that she says made her throw up and start shaking as if she were “naked in the snow.”There was the same film director, admitting that their relationship had been a “transgression” but arguing that “making films is a kind of cover” for forms of “illicit traffic.”She went to the police unit specialized in crimes against children — its waiting room was filled with toys and a giant teddy bear, she recalls — to file a report for rape of a minor.“There I was,” said Ms. Godrèche, now 52, “at the right place, where I’ve been waiting to be since I was 14.”Since then, Ms. Godrèche has been on a campaign to expose the abuse of children and women that she believes is stitched into the fabric of French cinema. Barely a week has gone by without her appearance on television and radio, in magazines and newspapers, and even before the French Parliament, where she demanded an inquiry into sexual violence in the industry and protective measures for children.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Eli Noyes, Animator Who Turned Clay and Sand Into Art, Dies at 81

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      His innovative stop-motion animation influenced a generation of filmmakers, including the creators of Wallace and Gromit.Eli Noyes, a filmmaker whose use of clay and sand in stop-motion animation garnered an Oscar nomination and shaped the aesthetic of Nickelodeon and MTV during the early days of cable television, died on March 23 at his home in San Francisco. He was 81.His wife, the artist Augusta Talbot, said the cause was prostate cancer.Mr. Noyes made his first film, “Clay or the Origin of Species,” in 1965 as an undergraduate student at Harvard. To the accompaniment of a jazz quartet, clay model animals whimsically portray evolution in the movie, which lasts just under nine minutes.Though stop-motion filmmaking had existed for decades and clay was used in the 1950s to create animated characters like Gumby, directors and cinephiles credited Mr. Noyes’s rookie effort with reviving interest in the technique at a time when hand-drawn characters were more popular.“Clay or the Origin of the Species” (1965), Mr. Noyes’s first film, was nominated for an Academy Award.via Noyes familyThe film was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short subject.“This recognition served as a tremendous boost to the credibility of clay as an animation medium, bulldozing a path for even greater works,” Rick Cooper, a former production manager for Will Vinton Productions, a Claymation film company, wrote in the journal Design for Arts in Education.Peter Lord, a founder of Aardman Animations, the English studio that used clay in the production of the “Wallace and Gromit” films, “Chicken Run” and other popular animated features, recalled seeing “Clay or the Origin of Species” on British television when he was getting started as a filmmaker.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More