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      Did This Couple Inspire Edward Albee’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’?

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      A newly preserved Andy Warhol film documents a combative artist couple the playwright knew. The movie is premiering in MoMA’s To Save and Project.Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton put their marital demons on film in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966). But neither they nor their director, Mike Nichols, can take credit for being the first to try to bring Edward Albee’s 1962 play to the screen, or even for being the first movie couple to draw on their own real-life discord in that context.In April 1965, Andy Warhol shot what the writer Sheldon Renan described as a “remake” of Albee’s drama, according to the Whitney Museum’s catalog of Warhol’s early film work. The stars were married artists — the underground filmmakers Marie Menken and Willard Maas — and the concept was consistent with some Warhol films of the period: Set the camera in a fixed position; shoot two reels of 16-millimeter stock as the personalities in the frame engage in a mix of self-dramatizing and simply being; then let those two reels, totaling around 66 minutes, run unedited.The result was titled “Bitch,” and it will receive what is probably its first-ever public presentation on Saturday as part of To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art’s annual program of film preservation work.Warhol never made a print of the movie, Greg Pierce, the director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, said in a phone interview. “There is a hierarchy to Warhol’s films,” he explained. There are those in the canon, the titles that Warhol stood by, including “Empire” and “Chelsea Girls,” that were printed and shown. But there are dozens of others that Warhol felt didn’t work; in those cases, he simply moved on.Yet he also didn’t discard those failures. “There is very little footage that is quote unquote ‘lost,’” Pierce said. “Warhol saved everything.” And before his death in 1987, he gave all his physical film material to MoMA, where “Bitch,” in a new digital scan, will screen on a double bill with Nichols’s drama.Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”Warner Bros.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?  More

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      ‘The Settlers’ Review: Writing the History of Modern Chile, in Blood

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      This harrowing drama takes place in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago in the southernmost part of South America, in 1901.Not long after the Chilean film “The Settlers” opens — after the first shot has been fired and the first blood spilled — an aristocratic-looking horseman rides up to some workers on a grassy plain. Wearing a wide-brim hat and a mustache, a scarf around his neck, he settles into a spacious tent. There, seated at a desk set on a handsome rug, he summons his foreman, whom he instructs to find a route to the Atlantic for his sheep. To accomplish this, he coolly explains, “you will have to clean the island” — a grotesque, civilized euphemism for murder.Among the more unsettling shocks in “The Settlers,” a harrowing, historically based drama that takes place in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago in the southernmost part of South America, is its time period. It opens in 1901 on a vast plain framed by sloping hills and grazed by both sheep and long-necked guanaco (a relative of the llama). During the day, the small team of men erect a wood and metal fence so impossibly long that its terminus disappears into the horizon. At night, the workers cluster around campfires, gnawing on roasted meat. It’s a scene reminiscent of old and new westerns, though not one like this.The aristocrat is Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), who, like the Scottish foreman, Alexander MacLennan (an effective Mark Stanley), is a villain so flamboyant and outlandish that he seems fake but is in fact based on a real figure. (You may recognize Castro from his roles in Pablo Larraín movies like “No” and “Tony Manero.”) Shortly after Don José delivers his instructions to MacLennan, the foreman sets out on his bloody mission accompanied by Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a young mestizo with sharpshooter skills, and by Bill (Benjamin Westfall), a coarse white American gun for hire. On horseback, they cross a vast, rough and heart-skippingly beautiful land into unspeakable horror.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?  More

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      ‘Self Reliance’ Review: Find a Friend, Save a Life

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      In this fleetingly amusing comedy, a lonely loser becomes the target of reality-show killers.The R rating awarded to “Self Reliance” for its language only proves the heavy-handedness of our rating system, as you’ll strain to hear anything in this genially bonkers comedy that couldn’t have been written by an 11-year-old. Which is exactly the age group most likely to enjoy it.Playing Tommy, an overfamiliar movie sad sack, the likable Jake Johnson (directing his first feature) radiates a shaggy warmth and appealing haplessness. Lost in middle age, Tommy lives with his mother, endures a tedious desk job and wonders why his longtime girlfriend has kicked him out. So when Andy Samberg (playing himself) sidles up in a limo and announces, “Congrats! You’ve been selected,” Tommy almost doesn’t care what for: Anything would be better than his humdrum existence.Tommy’s selection, it turns out, is as a contestant in a dark-web reality show. To win a million dollars, he has to survive for 30 days while an international pack of ninja-like assassins tries to kill him. A loophole forbids his murder unless he’s alone, so Tommy must persuade someone to shadow him 24/7 — bedroom and bathroom included. His family believes him to be delusional, hinting obliquely at earlier suspected breaks with reality; but Johnson’s screenplay would rather add another chase scene than address the more compelling issue of Tommy’s mental health.Tonally wobbly and sappily simplistic — without companionship, living is impossible — “Self Reliance” sends Tommy on a flailing quest for human connection. Both Anna Kendrick and the charmingly named Biff Wiff are diverting as temporary cronies, but the movie is too juvenile and too timid to acknowledge the real-world chill of its online cabal of murderous social misfits. The issue is not whether Tommy will survive, but why we should hang around to find out.Self RelianceRated R for unacceptable language (I guess) and unchecked silliness (I’m certain). Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Mean Girls’ Review: ‘Get in, Loser,’ Regina George Is Back

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      Still puffily padded but no longer particularly tart, this shape-shifting classic about the girls you love to hate retains its ingratiating charms.Can a movie musical based on a Broadway musical based on a film comedy that in turn was based on a parenting book be any good? Sure — if only because the writer-producer Tina Fey and the producer Lorne Michaels have made sure that little has changed in their money-printing property since the first movie hit theaters in 2004. Few stories, it turns out, are as comically and horrifyingly reliable as those set in high school; few villains are as dependably hissable as a desirable young woman with an ostensibly cold heart.In keeping with this material’s cheerfully derivative history it seems right to start with the New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell, who called the original film — directed by Mark Waters and starring a preternaturally self-assured Lindsay Lohan — “tart and often charming.” Fast forward to 2018 when the paper’s former theater critic Ben Brantley described the Broadway musical as “likable but seriously over-padded.” For its part, the new “Mean Girls” lands somewhere between these two takes. It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact.Once again, the story — by Fey, who also wrote the first movie and the Broadway show — drops Cady (a sweet Angourie Rice), a bright home-schooled teen fresh from Kenya, into a high-school hellscape. There, she meets nerds and jocks, alphas and betas, and attracts the notice of the queen bee, the aptly named Regina (Reneé Rapp, who played the role on Broadway). Flanked by her vassals, Karen (Avantika) and Gretchen (Bebe Wood), Regina reigns supreme at school where, as the student body’s most attentively studied subject, she is feared, desired and loathed, at times simultaneously.As in the original film, the latest Cady is a quick study and soon learns her new habitat’s rules on her way to self-actualization and group acceptance. She befriends a pair of too-cool-for-school art kids, Janis and Damian — the tag-teaming scene-stealers Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey — who encourage her to insinuate herself into Regina’s clique, a.k.a. the Plastics, to learn its secrets. Cady does and the usual complications ensue, including a chaste romance with Regina’s ex, Aaron (Christopher Briney), a heartthrob with floppy hair. Betrayal, comeuppance, repentance and triumph follow.In making the transition from stage to screen, the filmmakers have cut many of the show’s songs by Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics). The remaining tunes blur together with the exception of “Meet the Plastics” and “World Burn,” Regina’s character-defining lung-busters. Nothing if not a show-boater, she enters in black fetish-wear for “Plastics,” belting it out with such old-school diva command that she smacks the movie awake. She doesn’t have the nuance of Rachel McAdams, who played the role in the 2004 film. But Rapp gives the character oomph and swagger (the dominatrix-lite get-up helps), and when Regina howls “I don’t care who you are,” you readily believe her.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?  More

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      ‘Household Saints’ at IFC Center: An Italian American Tale

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      Nancy Savoca’s 1993 film, a mystical, multigenerational Italian American family saga, opens for a revival run at IFC Center.Nancy Savoca’s 1993 film “Household Saints,” a warmhearted fable spiced with magic realism and zesty performances, may be the most endearing of multigenerational Italian American family sagas and is likely the most mystical. Heavy on folk belief, it flirts with Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” and the divine madness the Greeks called theia mania.Seemingly overlooked by the 1993 New York Film Festival, “Household Saints” was included as a restoration last October; it’s opening for a revival run on Jan. 12 at IFC Center.Savoca and the producer Richard Guay adapted “Household Saints” from Francine Prose’s well-received 1981 novel. If the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer were a product of Little Italy, he might have spun a similar yarn. Amid a 1949 heat wave so hellish the annual feast of San Gennaro has all but been shut down, a rakish young butcher named Joseph Santangelo (Vincent D’Onofrio) wins a wife, Catherine Falconetti (Tracey Ullman), in a game of pinochle. God’s grace or Joseph’s thumb on the scale?Catherine is the sullen daughter of Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo), a none-too-bright radio repairman. The Santangelos and Falconettis are unfriendly neighbors. Joseph’s superstitious mother, Carmela (played with alarming gusto by Judith Malina), hates her prospective daughter-in-law. Blessings battle tribulations. Savoca contrives a wedding night as filled with rococo confections as the interior of a Palermo church. A curse — disturbingly visualized as a bloody, stillborn infant — is lifted after Carmela dies and a healthy daughter, Teresa, is born.Among other things, “Household Saints” refracts 25 years of the Cold War through a Mulberry Street lens. Teresa and her playmates are obsessed with the prophecies of Our Lady of Fátima, received by three country children in visions that coincided with the triumph of Russian Bolshevism. As an adolescent, Teresa (Lili Taylor) writes a prizewinning essay on the dangers of Communism. She also becomes a fanatical devotee of her namesake, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, associating piety with a devotion to domestic chores.Madness runs in the family. In a parallel obsession, Teresa’s Uncle Nicky (Michael Rispoli) searches Chinatown for a dream Madame Butterfly. In the meantime, forbidden by her parents to take Carmelite vows, Teresa enters an earthy relationship with an awkward but ambitious law student (Michael Imperioli). Happily ironing his shirts in their disheveled, casually psychedelic East Village pad, she has an ecstatic vision of Jesus amid an abundance of checkered garments.“The story is filled with strange, homespun miracles,” Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review when the film was originally released, adding that “this single-minded little film could be counted as one of them.” So too its evocation of Mulberry Street. Largely shot on a North Carolina backlot built for the film “Year of the Dragon,” “Household Saints” seems the most authentically simulated New York movie since Sam Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street.” (The flavorsome line readings are supplied by a bevy of native New York actors, among them Argo, D’Onofrio, Malina, Rispoli and Imperioli.)“Household Saints” never tips its hand. Eventually institutionalized, the beatific Teresa informs her parents of celestial pinochle games, noting that God (like her dad) cheats at cards. While the once credulous Catherine thinks her daughter has suffered a psychotic break with reality, the anticlerical Joseph takes Teresa for a saint. Thanks to the spell the film casts, they’re both right.Household SaintsOpens on Jan. 12 at IFC Center, Manhattan; ifccenter.com. More

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      ‘Driving Madeleine’ Review: A Nonagenarian in Paris

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      The beloved French singer Line Renaud plays a woman who forms an unlikely bond with a surly cabdriver in this heart-warmer.A prickly cabdriver gains perspective thanks to a chatty nonagenarian.Sound vaguely familiar? From “Driving Miss Daisy” to “Green Book,” there’s a whole subgenre of feel-good social drama in which unlikely connections are formed between passengers and drivers. “Driving Madeleine,” directed by Christian Carion, takes this dynamic and scrubs it of any real friction, like race or class.Instead, it’s a heart-warmer about respecting your elders. In the film, a glossy modern-day Paris is set against the personal history of a woman in her 90s named Madeleine (Line Renaud), whose life has echoes in major touchstones in history: World War II, the Vietnam War, the women’s rights movements of the 1970s.The bulk of the film unfolds over half a day. Charles (Dany Boon), a surly driver, takes a gig transporting Madeleine from her place in the suburbs to a retirement home, but in between the two take a drive through her old neighborhood — stopping for a bathroom break, then a meal — and contend with the horrors of Parisian traffic.Charles’s paycheck gets fatter as the meter runs, but as Madeleine regales him with stories of her affair with an American G.I. — and, more shockingly, an attempted murder case involving her abusive ex-husband — their relationship sweetens into a genuine friendship. Flashback scenes of these fiery melodramas (Alice Isaaz plays young Madeleine) run alongside lackluster bonding moments. Etta James’s “At Last” plays repeatedly, forcing a soulfulness the film doesn’t possess.Boon is best known as a star and director of middlebrow comedies in his native France (Americans may recognize him as the Parisian inspector in both “Murder Mystery” movies), but in “Driving Madeleine” he plays it straight, unconvincingly so as he looks back at his passenger with a rictus grin. With her sparkling baby blues and honey-dipped voice, Renaud comes off like an angel — a fitting role for the French icon and songstress, even if that means she’s less human as a result.Driving MadeleineNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Inshallah a Boy’ Review: Where the Male Line Is the Only Line

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      In this film by Amjad Al Rasheed, a young widow in Jordan strains against the tradition, underpinned by law, that without a man she is nothing.Before things take an unjust turn in Amjad Al Rasheed’s tense and accomplished directorial debut, “Inshallah a Boy,” a wife and husband lie in bed discussing the timing to conceive a second child. There is something sweet in the exhaustion of the husband, Adnan (Mohammad Suleiman), and surprising in his admission to his wife, Nawal (Mouna Hawa), that he’s the cause of their fertility issues. This promising exchange will be their last.Adnan’s death throws Nawal into a tailspin she fears she cannot navigate, but she manages in ways that are at times resolute and at others desperate. To forestall her brother-in-law Rifqi (Haitham Omari) from pressing his legal right to seize the home where she and her daughter, Nora, live, Nawal tells a judge that she is pregnant. True or false, it’s the kind of declaration that has a fast-approaching expiration date.The first Jordanian film to compete at Cannes, “Inshallah,” from its very title, promises to delve into a patriarchal system that values men over women. (If only Nawal, god willing, had a son, ownership of the house would not be an issue.) But the filmmaker — and his fellow writers, Rula Nasser and Delphine Agut — also tussles with economic tensions that have implications beyond gender.Hawa, a Palestinian actress, is commanding as a woman whose future and faith are buffeted by her narrowing options. And the ensemble that buttresses the film — Nawal’s brother Ahmad (Mohammad Al Jizawi); Lauren (Yumna Marwan), the haughty and unhappily pregnant daughter of the Christian family that employs Nawal as a nurse; and Hassan (Eslam al-Awadi), a physical therapist who wants to be more than her colleague — makes Nawal’s alliances appear transactional, fraught and so very fragile.Inshallah a BoyNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Book of Clarence’ Review: Messiahs Wherever You Look

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      LaKeith Stanfield leads a predominantly Black cast in a retelling of the story of Jesus that’s both irreverent and devoted.The subject of a Jesus movie is technically Jesus. But every movie based on the biblical account of Jesus — and there are many such movies, stretching back to 1898 — says at least as much about the people who made it as it does about the man himself. Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” paints a heavily Catholic, heavily bloody image of a suffering hero. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” draws a romantic, Rennaisance-derived portrait of a lush, otherworldly Christ. “The Jesus Film,” produced for evangelistic purposes, takes its text entirely from the biblical account, attempting to render a literalist version of a savior. William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” functions almost like a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of the story, with the main character crossing paths with Jesus only occasionally while experiencing a more broadly appealing revelation about radical forgiveness and loving one’s enemies. (And, yes, racing chariots.)“The Book of Clarence” is something entirely different than these and dozens of other renderings. But it bears some passing resemblance to another contemporary Jesus hit: “The Chosen,” a wildly popular television show that was crowdfunded and produced by Angel Studios (of last year’s megahit “Sound of Freedom”), and was so popular on streamers that the CW bought the rights to broadcast the first three seasons in 2023. (The fourth season will premiere exclusively in theaters this February.) Its popularity owes as much to a broad appetite for faith-inflected content as to its central concept: This is Jesus and those around him as you’ve never seen them before. They’re humans, with lives and dramas — not flat figures on a stained-glass window, or storybook characters, or ethereal saints. (It helps that the Jesus of “The Chosen,” unlike many other representations, actually looks like he’s from the Middle East.)As with that series, “The Book of Clarence” is a highly ambitious attempt at relatability, with an added reverence for the old-school “Ben-Hur”-era Hollywood biblical epics. Jeymes Samuel, who wrote and directed the film, clearly knows and loves the Bible story. He also doesn’t feel particularly beholden to a literalist rendering of the text. Here, Jesus and the apostles and their neighbors and friends are played by Black actors from around the diaspora, mostly in their own accents. The white actors play the Romans, a colonizing force of oppression.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?  More