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      ‘The Penguin Lessons’ Review: A Unique Approach to Teaching

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      Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, an English teacher in 1970s Argentina, whose small new friend makes his class a hit.A movie aspiring to be a droll animal-led comedy and an examination of a dictatorship has an intimidating number of needles to thread. The director of “The Penguin Lessons,” Peter Cattaneo, also made “The Full Monty,” so he has some experience with crowd-pleasing films, at the same time being deft with unusual subject matter.The movie begins with a familiar disclaimer that it’s based on true events. The actor Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a teacher from southern England who is unhappily assigned to an upper-class boy’s school in 1970s Argentina. (Jeff Pope’s script is based on Michell’s memoir of the same title.)On an idle day at the beach in nearby Uruguay, Tom encounters a penguin emerging from an oil spill. Hoping to impress a woman he’s met there, Tom brings the creature back to his hotel, cleans it off and tries to return it to the ocean. No luck. The penguin believes he’s made a friend.Once Tom returns to Argentina, he contrives to make the penguin he has named Juan Salvador a teaching tool, and his English class becomes wildly successful. (While Juan Salvador is supposedly a creature of the wild, he executes all sorts of cute bits that only a trained performer can pull off.)Things get serious when one of Tom’s housekeepers is swept up in the military dictatorship. Tom opts to abandon his apolitical facade because the penguin has taught him how to care about others. While Juan Salvador is a shameless exhibitionist, Coogan’s performance is understated; he conveys Tom’s softening without nudging the viewer too much. On the other hand, the misuse of Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky” on the soundtrack is egregious. The rest of the picture is largely winsome and inoffensive.The Penguin LessonsRated PG-13 for language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Holland’ Review: Nicole Kidman Goes Dutch

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      Set in a Michigan town designed to evoke the Netherlands, this thriller has red herring on the menu.“Holland” is set circa 2000 in Holland, Mich., a real town founded by Dutch settlers and distinguished by its windmill, tulips and other tributes to the Netherlands. Red herring is also on the menu in this second feature from the director Mimi Cave. The film’s unusual backdrop, unresolved subplots and dream-sequence fakeouts are ultimately all distractions from a story that doesn’t make much sense.Cave’s dating thriller “Fresh” (2022), starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan, was also not a model of narrative logic. This time, there are signs that connective tissue may have gotten lost in the editing. (Rachel Sennott, from “Bottoms,” appears for what barely qualifies as a cameo.) Yet there is just enough effort to tie up loose ends that “Holland” can’t be hand-waved as accidental avant-garde.Nancy (Nicole Kidman), a home economics teacher, suspects that her husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), an optometrist, is having an affair because he so often goes on business trips. She persuades Dave (Gael García Bernal), who teaches shop and harbors a reciprocated crush on Nancy, to help investigate. (Dave’s life before his move to Holland is one of many matters that Cave and the screenwriter, Andrew Sodroski, tip as important and then mostly ignore.)It is hard to catalog the plot holes without giving too much away, but between the gluteal surgery in “Fresh” and a stabbing here, Cave is apparently not a stickler for continuity when it comes to injuries. A framing device suggesting that some events might be imagined acts as little more than a shoddy excuse.HollandRated R for some violence and sex, but this is hardly Paul Verhoeven’s Holland. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      ‘Grand Tour’ Review: A Quiet Knockout

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      The Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’s black-and-white film follows a colonial official on a 20th-century odyssey across Asia, with his fiancée in pursuit.In “Grand Tour,” a lush, melancholy story of yearning, a man treks across Asia in flight from his fiancée. But this one-sentence plotline barely scratches the surface of the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s magnificent black-and-white film, which mixes mannered studio footage with fluid documentary images to build a world that doesn’t abide by traditional rules of time, space or scale.It’s 1917, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a colonial official working for the British who is stationed in Burma, is awaiting the arrival of his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate). Conflicted about the relationship, he abandons his bird of paradise bouquet and embarks on a jagged journey across the continent. As he traverses city and jungle, Molly scrambles behind, sending him telegrams as she follows his every move.Shot on soundstages during the pandemic, these narrative sequences evoke the refined grandeur of classic Hollywood epics. Cloaking the screen in moody chiaroscuro, Gomes finds mystique in Edward’s stoicism and poetry in Molly’s heartbreak. But “Grand Tour” also complicates this splendor. In pairing scenes of the couple with present-day footage from South and East Asia, Gomes gestures at a troubling history of cinematic distortions.He drives his ideas home by periodically cutting in footage of performances — marionettes, karaoke, puppetry. These cultural shows urge the audience to consider how we relate to entertainment, to grapple with what engages us and why. Beauty is pleasurable, but the film’s use of evocative visuals to focus on storytelling more broadly is what makes it a quiet knockout.Grand TourNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Viet and Nam’ Review: A Soft Kiss Underground

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      Truong Minh Quy’s haunting romance between two Vietnamese coal miners contemplates war and loss with pained elegance.Portrayed with an entrancing hush by the actors Duy Bao Dinh Dao and Pham Thanh Hai, Viet and Nam are coal miners — and lovers. They are also the title characters in “Viet and Nam,” the director Truong Minh Quy’s haunting, meticulously paced drama set in Vietnam in 2001.If you surmise Quy is up to something with these two names, you’re right. From its start in the blackness of a mine shaft to an indelible image of a shipping crate adrift, the movie meditates on juxtapositions, among them: South and North, the public and the private, staying and going, darkness and light, mothers and fathers.Early on, as a television station broadcasts the names of the Vietnam War’s still-missing soldiers, Nam and his mother, Hoa (Nguyen Thi Nga), putter around their home. Count the two among the families still hoping to find their loved ones’ unmarked graves.While Nam, Hoa, Ba (Le Viet Tung), who fought alongside Nam’s father and carries a secret, and Viet travel south to find the burial site, Nam is also making plans to leave Vietnam. His impending departure injects another kind of melancholy into the picture. (The film was banned in Vietnam for what censors saw as its dark portrayal of the country.)Quy treats the love affair between Viet and Nam with exquisite tenderness. One of the movie’s scenes — startling for its frankness but also its visual beauty — finds the men reclined in the dark of the mine. The film makes clear that even though Nam and Viet must be wary they are also achingly in love.Viet and NamNot rated. In Vietnamese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Holy Cow’ Review: How to Become a Big Cheese

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      Louise Courvoisier’s debut feature follows a teenager in the French Alps who, when thrust into caring for his sister, forges a path in cheese making.The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story “Holy Cow” emerge gradually but steadily. Set amid the rolling slopes of the Jura, a mountainous region in eastern France, the movie traces a teenager’s progression from carefree, at times careless youth to adulthood after a life-altering tragedy. That might lead to a rainstorm of tears elsewhere, but this is a world of dry-eyed pragmatism. And here everything does ripen, an eventuality that this movie charts with wry humor, appreciable regional sensitivity and many wheels of artisanal cheese.The writer-director Louise Courvoisier fills in the contemporary story with light, brisk economy. Shifting between the specific and the general, she quickly lays out the narrative coordinates, introducing a people and a place that are at once geographically isolated and interdependent. The first time you see the 18-year-old Totone (Clément Faveau) he’s at a county fair — where people are milling about with cows — soused and demanding beer. One moment, he is standing on a table and being goaded to take it all off by the raucous crowd; in the next, a cigarette is dangling from his mouth and his briefs are puddled around his ankles.Totone’s striptease turns out to be a prelude for his character’s ensuing, more freighted adventures. With quick-sketch portraits, Courvoisier fills in Totone’s life, including his testy relationship with his father, a cheesemaker who’s soon out of the picture. Abruptly unencumbered by parents (his mother is missing-in-action), Totone becomes the sole caretaker for his sober-eyed 7-year-old sister, Claire (Luna Garret). He also finds himself without much of a safety net. With only some friends to help — unlike in many French films, no government functionaries come to the rescue — he fends for him and his sister largely on his own. He sells most of his father’s equipment and takes a job with another cheesemaker.Courvoisier grew up in the Jura, where her parents are farmers. She has an insider’s unforced ease with this world, which she economically opens up with piquant details, lived-in spaces, careworn faces and just enough shots of the landscapes to convey both its beauty and its isolation. It’s never clear if Totone truly sees this loveliness and how pretty the cows look on the misty fields. Like all the performers in the movie, Faveau is an nonprofessional actor, and while he has a bright, expressive affect, Totone is one of those characters whose inner life is largely expressed externally through his grins and grimaces, his gestures and actions.Even so, from the movie’s amusing opening image of a calf inexplicably standing inside a small, otherwise empty car, Courvoisier underscores the intimacy between the region’s people and their world. These connections come more into play once Totone begins working at the dairy, a multigenerational family enterprise that produces prizewinning Comté. There, the story begins gathering momentum as he finds tension and trouble, along with a romance with the owner’s daughter, Marie-Lise (Maïwène Barthelemy), who tends the cows. Also crucially, Totone discovers that the awards the dairy has won come with hefty cash payouts so he does what you’ve expected him to do from the start: He tries to produce his own cheese.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 Friend’ Review: The Writer vs. the Great Dane

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      Naomi Watts plays a writer in mourning who is given a formidable gift from a friend in this adaptation of the Sigrid Nunez novel.Across the compact space of a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, a frazzled writer and a dog the size of a small pony exchange pleading looks. It’s a classic odd-couple setup, and you might call the central duo in “The Friend” unlikely roommates. But, more to the point, they’re two grieving souls, brought together by the death of a man who was a pivotal figure in both their lives.As the writer, Iris, Naomi Watts is an engaging fusion of intellectual acuity and emotional translucence. The role of Apollo goes to a magnificent fellow named Bing, a harlequin Great Dane with one brown eye, one blue, and an exceptionally expressive pair of eyebrows. Left to Iris by her friend and mentor Walter, a literary lion and a bit of a cad played with a mournful gaze by Bill Murray in a few well-deployed flashbacks — or perhaps merely hoisted upon her by Walter’s dog-averse widow (Noma Dumezweni) — Apollo is no magical creature, no cuddly cure for writer’s block. He’s a full-fledged character, and a mysterious one at that.At first the screen adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s exquisite novel of the same name, a quiet miracle woven of wry glances at New York literati and a piercing ache, feels too smooth, too glossy. But if Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the writer-directors, can’t match the novel’s sharp first-person narration, they find the sweet spot between sardonic and openhearted as Iris and Apollo get to know each other, and as she sorts out the complexities of her friendship with Walter. Theirs was a bond that inspires a bit of envy on the part of his widow and former wives (a sympathetic Carla Gugino and Constance Wu, in hissable frenemy mode).Refreshingly, Iris’s single status is not viewed as a problem to be solved. The problem is whether she should keep Apollo, and given his size, it’s a situation that announces itself to the world, sparking the warnings of her building’s superintendent (Felix Solis), the concerns of a neighbor (Ann Dowd) and snarky cracks from strangers.McGehee and Siegel (“Montana Story”) juice this smart, affecting feature with sly nods to big-screen New York romances. This is a love story, after all, and one with a keen grasp of the mournful, curious glances between its two leads — of how much goes untranslated between them, and how much is conveyed.The FriendRated R for sexual references and doggie genitalia. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Death of a Unicorn’ Review: Into the Woods (Chomp, Chomp)

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      Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play a father and daughter who run down a mystical beast and end up running amok with a monstrous brood.There’s no real spoiling “Death of a Unicorn,” an unabashedly nonsensical movie that doesn’t take anything too seriously, itself included. There are misty-eyed parent-child moments, digs at the wealthy, nods at the environment. Mostly, though, the whole thing is a wall-to-wall goof, despite the grandeur of its mystical attraction, whose traditional rangelands have included the King James Bible, illuminated manuscripts, medieval tapestries, fantasy literature, pop culture, children’s playrooms and Ridley Scott films (well, two: “Blade Runner” and “Legend”). Here, it nearly ends up as roadkill on a remote Canadian highway.The guy behind the wheel, Elliot (Paul Rudd), is busy yammering and trying to placate his demonstrably unhappy daughter, ahem, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), when he hits something big with his rental car, causing it to spin out. Elliot is en route to his boss’s remote family compound to deal with some pressing business that he hopes will insure his and his daughter’s future. They’re clearly loving but also clouded with grief from the death of Ridley’s mother, a tragedy that informs Elliot’s determined careerism and Ridley’s melancholy, both of which flicker on and off throughout the movie, amid jokes and pratfalls, scheming and dealing, firing guns and rampaging monsters, some with two legs and others with four.What happens next is a high-concept, middlebrow, low-stakes comedy about the haves and the (kind of) have-nots that’s effectively an elevator pitch — be afraid of unicorns, be very afraid — stretched to feature length. The setup is a mush of old standbys (the comedy of rich fools, the horror of other people) spiced up with myth, headline news and cinematic allusions. The writer-director Alex Scharfman has, for one, borrowed visual and thematic ideas from the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters, the medieval branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he’s clearly watched nerve-shredders like “Alien.” As he’s noted in interviews, he has also drawn inspiration from the Sackler family, the longtime owners of Purdue Pharma.The story kicks in once the unicorn in question goes splat. Much of what ensues takes place at the boss’s preposterously grandiose lodge — nay, castlelike fortress — tucked in wilderness and protected by armed guards. There, Elliot and Ridley pull up with a small motionless unicorn in the car that soon proves very much alive; high jinks ensue with enough scrambling silliness to suggest that Scharfman is also familiar with Abbott and Costello. To that comic end, Rudd and Ortega soon run amok with the rest of the sterling cast, starting with the peerless Richard E. Grant as Odell Leopold, the paterfamilias whose villainous bona fides are evident the minute you hear that this brood owns a pharmaceutical giant.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 Ballad of Wallis Island’ Review: A Sour Note

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      Carey Mulligan briefly warms this damp, downbeat comedy about two lonely men and their musical obsession.Like many of us nowadays, I needed a reason to laugh. My mistake — encouraged by the offbeat bona fides of the British performers Tom Basden and Tim Key — was expecting “The Ballad of Wallis Island” to provide one.Bereft of chuckles or even a substantial story, this maudlin musical fable never escapes the drag of a lead character with supporting-player energy. From the instant Herb McGwyer (Basden) washes up — quite literally, having tumbled out of a rowboat — on the fictional Wallis Island, it’s clear he’s a drip. A decade earlier, Herb was a big deal in folk music as one half of the popular duo McGwyer Mortimer; now he’s a struggling solo artist who can’t even finance his latest album.All of which explains his sodden arrival on this depopulated rock, the home of an eccentric lottery winner named Charles (Key), who has offered Herb an astonishing half-million pounds to play a single concert. Herb’s annoyance at the lack of a showbiz welcome — no car, no publicist, no fancy hotel — intensifies when he learns that his host, a lonely widower, will be the sole audience member. And that this McGwyer Mortimer superfan has also persuaded Herb’s former bandmate and erstwhile lover, Nell (Carey Mulligan), to join them, apparently hoping that the two will rekindle their artistic, and perhaps even their romantic alchemy.For the sake of Nell, who now prefers cooking chutney to composing tunes, viewers should hope otherwise. Petulant and whiny, Herb is such a charmless sourpuss it’s a relief when Nell shows up with a cheery husband, Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), in tow. Yet rather than mine this awkward ménage for much-needed humor, Basden and Key’s screenplay hustles Michael hastily offscreen to search for puffins. (Lest we be left in suspense, he pops back at the end to confirm he found them.)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