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      ‘Miller’s Girl’ Review: Teacher’s Dirty Looks

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      Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega fight pheromones and cliché in this eye-rolling duel between a teacher and his student.You can almost smell the arousal wafting from the screen as “Miller’s Girl” wends its overheated way through lubricious conversations and a comically on-the-mark soundtrack. Even the camera turns dreamy whenever the improbably named Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) — a microskirted tease and the film’s linchpin — activates her pout, especially if she’s chewing or smoking. It should be said that either is preferable to her talking.And oh, how she talks, her pretentious narration as grating as her precocious reading habits. A trust-fund teenager with absent parents and a Southern mansion at her disposal, Cairo arrives for her initial high-school writing class having already inhaled everything on the syllabus. Her professor, Jonathan Miller (an uncomfortably miscast Martin Freeman, who may have lost his professional bearings along with his English accent), is understandably turned on: A languishing writer who lacks both literary inspiration and behavioral boundaries, Jonathan is easy prey for Cairo’s jailbait shtick.A work of glaring artifice, “Miller’s Girl,” written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate. Bugs crawl on windowsills and a lighted cigarette drifts lazily to the floor in a movie that traps gifted actors in a fog of pheromones and cliché. Jonathan’s disappointed wife (Dagmara Dominczyk) slinks around in various states of undress and sobriety, like one of Tennessee Williams’s ruined heroines; Cairo’s best friend (Gideon Adlon, a standout) lusts after a baseball coach (a jovial Bashir Salahuddin), who lusts right back. Of course Cairo’s favorite author is Henry Miller.“This is inappropriate,” a chastened Jonathan finally admonishes Cairo, having climaxed while reading her term paper. She may be a minx, but he’s the real monster.Miller’s GirlRated R for smutty language and puerile poetry. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Mambar Pierrette’ Review: Cosmic Misfortunes

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      A gifted seamstress, played by the filmmaker Rosine Mbakam’s cousin, has to put out a string of fires in this rich portrait of Cameroonian womanhood.Pierrette, a gifted seamstress and a mother of three, can’t seem to catch a break. After a hard day’s work at her humble shop in Douala, a busy city in Cameroon, she’s mugged by a motorcycle taxi driver. It’s also the rainy season and her home — and later her shop — is flooded overnight. It’s a foul time to be broke: The kids are heading back to school and their supplies aren’t cheap.The events of “Mambar Pierrette” are fictional, but the film’s nonprofesssional actors play versions of themselves. The drama is the first narrative feature by Rosine Mbakam, a Cameroonian filmmaker based in Belgium. Over the past decade, Mbakam has distinguished herself as a formidable verité-style documentarian; her subjects, Cameroonian women at home and overseas.Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat, cast in the title role, is Mbakam’s cousin, and many of the figures who orbit Pierrette’s life are the actress’s neighbors and relatives.A rich community portrait unfolds as Pierrette prepares her clients’ orders and flits around town putting out fires. We get a sense of the patriarchal customs that dictate village life; the frictions between modern, enterprising women like Pierrette and tradition-bound ones like her mother. These and other realities are made apparent in a beautifully organic manner, through the kind of intimate chatter that happens between people who’ve known each other for decades.Pierrette’s rotten luck is no joke. We see, with startling clarity, how a stolen wallet turns into a missed payment, and an electricity shut-off means a sewing machine that can’t sew. Yet the film’s gentle naturalism (at times edging on the uncanny, courtesy of cheeky editing rhythms and an unsettling-looking mannequin) gives her tribulations a cosmic undertone.Mbakam hits a remarkable balance. The sociopolitical truths that make up Pierrette’s losing streak are evident, without the miserable patronizing so common in films about struggle in Africa. Also palpable is a more universal gut feeling: the half-serious suspicion that one has been cursed.Mambar PierretteNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Peasants’ Review: A Village Rendered in Oils

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      The filmmakers DK and Hugh Welchman apply a painstaking oil painting technique to render this sweeping drama set in a 19th century Polish village.The painstaking process behind “The Peasants,” the new painted film exercise from DK and Hugh Welchman, is only laid out after the film ends. As the credits roll, the directors show clips of painters viewing reference footage and then reproducing the images in oil on canvas, sometimes frame by frame.The filmmakers pioneered the inventive animation technique on their previous feature, the Oscar-nominated “Loving Vincent,” and they apply it here to a story of sweeping scale. Based on Wladyslaw Reymont’s novel, “The Peasants” follows Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska), a young woman in 19th century Poland who is driven into a loveless marriage with a wealthy widower (Miroslaw Baka) despite her ongoing flirtation with his strapping son, Antek (Robert Gulaczyk).The world of the film is insular and provincial, stacked with themes of family and faith and peopled with vulnerable girls, resentful wives and brooding men quick to trade punches over perceived affronts to their pride or dignity.“The Peasants” is divided into four seasons, and its inventive visual style proves richest when rendering landscapes — scenery that shifts in color and stroke with the climate. But as the story’s melodrama grows repetitive, so do the visuals. The painted animation is especially deficient in close-up shots (of which there are many); the smudgy brushstrokes blunt facial expressions. In these moments, the technique seems to be working against the film’s emotion rather than for it.The PeasantsRated R for sexual violence and nudity. In Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘American Star’ Review: Armed and Vacationing

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      Ian McShane stars as an assassin killing time in the Canary Islands.“American Star,” the latest film to showcase the travel benefits of being a professional killer, opens with Wilson (Ian McShane) arriving in Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands. After parking his rental car off the side of a desert road, he peeks in the trunk to find a photograph of his latest mark, who of course lives in a sleek, modernist home nearby.But the mark isn’t there, which leaves Wilson consigned to killing only time. Keeping a low profile in a jet-black suit that matches the rental car and attracts the attention of nearly everyone — he befriends a kid (Oscar Coleman) who wants to know why he hasn’t brought swim trunks — Wilson hits it off with a bartender, Gloria (Nora Arnezeder). She appears to be the mysterious blonde who turned up while he was scoping out the (sleek, modernist) house.Citing local wisdom, Gloria says there are only three types of people in Fuerteventura — residents, tourists and those who are running from something. By that point, she has accompanied Wilson to the site of a wrecked ship that provides the movie’s central metaphor. Gloria’s mother (Fanny Ardant) says her daughter has always found that “heap of scrap metal” fascinating. The viewer is meant to conclude that Wilson, a psychologically scarred Falklands veteran, is her new favorite scrap.There is also a younger assassin (Adam Nagaitis), a son of Wilson’s war buddy. He says he is on the island to make sure the hit comes off — an ominous sign. But much of “American Star” is more engaging than a summary makes it sound. Despite an oddball taste for wide-angle lenses, the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, can sustain a solid slow burn. Still, neither McShane nor the scenery can take the rust off the basic scenario.American StarRated R. Vacation or no, he’s still a hit man. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Glen Powell at the Sundance Film Festival

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      The star and co-writer of “Hit Man” heard that his film had wowed audiences, but because of the actors’ strike, he couldn’t see for himself until now.Glen Powell doesn’t want for much these days, after co-starring in “Top Gun: Maverick” and watching his new film, the romantic comedy “Anyone but You,” cross $100 million at the worldwide box office. Still, for the past few months, there was one little thing he felt he had missed out on.It has to do with “Hit Man,” a comedy Powell co-wrote with the director Richard Linklater that casts him as a hapless teacher who must pose as an assassin for hire. I first saw it at the Venice Film Festival in September, where it proved so crowd-pleasing that the audience broke into applause midway through the movie. A week later at the Toronto International Film Festival, the response was also through the roof.But for months, Powell had only heard about all that secondhand. Since the Screen Actors Guild strike was still going strong during the fall tests, Powell wasn’t able to attend a premiere of “Hit Man” until it played Monday night at the Sundance Film Festival. Afterward, he called me from a car that was speeding him toward celebratory drinks.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 Underdoggs’ Review: Guess Who the New Coach Is, Kids

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      Snoop Dogg, as an egomaniacal retired football star, turns community service into a sport when he sees a chance to rekindle romance with a player’s mom.It’s not until the film’s postscript that “The Underdoggs” suddenly makes sense: The movie, starring Snoop Dogg as a retired athlete coaching a Pop Warner team, is inspired by the Snoop Youth Football League, the real-life organization that he started in 2005. The film, directed by Charles Stone III, is perhaps best understood as something meant as a fun dedication to the program — but it makes for a forgettable, often aggressively perfunctory work.Snoop plays Jaycen Jennings, a former star wide receiver who’s become an insufferable has-been and, after a reckless driving charge, is forced to do community service in his hometown. After running into his old flame (Tika Sumpter), whose son is on a helpless youth football team, he decides to coach the squad to burnish his public image and cozy up to his former sweetheart.It’s a familiar narrative — an embittered narcissist, down on his luck, forced by circumstances to coach, and eventually connect with, a ragtag group of kids — a situation the film knowingly plays with, making frequent references to the Emilio Estevez character in “The Mighty Ducks.” But it can’t come up with any memorable jokes or genuine heart to fill in the beats that it mostly slogs through. The kids in the film are simply too young to make an impact, and Snoop, who is fine enough as an actor, ultimately doesn’t possess the charisma necessary to elevate a lazy script.What we’re left with instead is the occasional chuckle from Mike Epps as the hapless class clown he usually plays, and the vague outline of other movies that have done this story with more charm.The UnderdoggsRated R for pervasive language, sexual references, drug use and some underage drinking. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      ‘Tótem’ Review: The Girl Who Sees Too Much

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      In Lila Avilés’s second feature, a 7-year-old girl begins to grasp the severity of her father’s illness while birthday preparations are underway at home.There are worlds inside worlds in “Tótem,” a soulful drama populated by an array of creatures, some with two legs and sad smiles, others with feathers, fur and shells. Set largely in a rambling house on a single momentous day, it focuses on a serious-eyed girl, Sol, who serves as the story’s luminous celestial body. You see much of what she sees, the warmth and disorder. Yet because Sol is just 7, you also see what it means to be a child in that messy reality known as adulthood.The Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés plunges into the mess the minute Sol (Naíma Sentíes), wearing a red clown nose and a floppy rainbow-colored wig, arrives at her grandfather’s house. There, amid the homey clutter of a house that actually looks lived in rather than art directed, two of her aunts are busily, and none too efficiently, prepping an evening birthday party for Sol’s gravely ill father, Tona (Mateo García Elizondo). As people and animals exit and enter the story — a raptor portentously flies overhead early on, part of a menagerie that includes bugs, dogs and a goldfish in a plastic bag — one aunt bakes a cake as the other dyes her hair.Avilés soon maps the house’s labyrinthine sprawl, swiftly building a tangible sense of place with precise, well-worn details and quick-sketch character portraits. “Totem” is a coming into consciousness story about a child navigating realms — human and animal, spiritual and material — that exist around her like overlapping concentric circles. Yet even as the story’s focus sharpens, what matters here are the characters: their emotions and worried words, how they hold it together and fall apart, their individual habits and shared habitat. (Avilés’s 2019 feature debut “The Chambermaid,” set in a hotel, is about another ecosystem.)Sol serves as a narrative through line in the movie, which opens with a kind of prelude set in a single-room public bathroom. She’s parked on the toilet, and she and her mother, Lucia (Iazua Larios), are chatting and laughing. Lucia tells Sol to finish (“push it out”), encouragement that amusingly evokes Freud’s theory about the anal-retentive stage. Whether Avilés herself is pushing, as it were, a Freudian take or not, the scene works as a run-up to what follows. Sol’s childhood reality is expectedly circumscribed, its limits expressed by the boxy aspect ratio and the closely attentive, hovering camerawork. Her reality is also changing, as becomes painfully clear by the contrast between her mother and her fast-fading father.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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      ‘Sometimes I Think About Dying’ Review: Life, in Drab Gray

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      Daisy Ridley stars as an office worker who’s just going through the motions.Fran thinks about dying, but not gruesomely. Her mental tableaux of death look as if they were staged by the artist Gregory Crewdson. Sometimes her body is draped dramatically over driftwood on a serene beach or posed in a foggy forest on a soft green bed of moss. She imagines standing alone in a nondescript finished office basement as a giant snake slithers by. She imagines death, essentially, as peace in the midst of ever-changing nature.Her reality is less beautifully hued. By day, Fran (Daisy Ridley) dons drab business casual and works in the sort of space that makes the environs of “The Office” seem like a magical wonderland. A small group of people perform clerical tasks to keep the local port in their tiny Pacific Northwest town running smoothly, and spend most of their time on crushingly banal chatter. Why is this cruise ship docked in such a way that it blocks the views of the mountains? Where are the mugs?By night, Fran’s life isn’t much more interesting, but at least she’s in control of it. She goes home, pours a glass of wine and takes a long, restorative sip, then reheats some kind of insipid patty and eats it with a side of cottage cheese. Sudoku, brush teeth, bed, repeat. It feels like she’s starring in her own one-woman play, one where all other people are background noise — her mother’s phone call goes to voice mail — and nobody is watching.“Sometimes I Think About Dying,” directed by Rachel Lambert, comes by its theatricality naturally; it’s based, in part, on the play “Killers” by Kevin Armento. (The other credited writers are Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead, the latter of whose credits include “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Knick.”) The play entwined the tale of a young woman who thinks about dying with a secondary story about a young woman obsessed with killing, and though I haven’t seen it, I assume that means its themes were very different. But onscreen, “Sometimes I Think About Dying” can do what it could never do as easily onstage: We float in and out of Fran’s mind, entering her mood, her lethargy, her fixations on the back of people’s heads or their mouths while they speak. We start to become a little bit Fran.Perhaps the best term for Fran’s persistent mood is acedia, that feeling of not caring much about anything, especially one’s position in the world. (Ancient monks called it the “noonday demon.”) It’s often equated with depression, but there’s a particular torpor provoked by a soul-sucking office that can bring it on. Many a new college graduate has discovered, quickly, that a 9-to-5 job can become unbearable even if the work itself is simple, pleasant and well-paid. Something about the prospect of everlasting sameness can sap the will to live.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