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      Review: In the ‘Ernest & Celestine’ Sequel, a Prodigal Cub Returns

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      The delightful odd couple of the Oscar-nominated French film head to the mountains in ‘A Trip to Gibberitia.’ Every frame brims with painterly detail.One of the many enduring pleasures of “Ernest & Celestine,” the 2014 French film about the unlikely bond between a bear and a mouse, is its rhapsodic bridging of music and imagery. The tale (based on books by Gabrielle Vincent) is rendered with gossamer line drawings so wedded to their accompanying score that the images sometimes ripple, swell and curl in tandem with the musical notes.“Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia” is the gem of a sequel to that Oscar-nominated film, centering the story this time around on music as the sine qua non of community. The plucky, petite mouse Celestine (voiced by Pauline Brunner) and the surly troubadour Ernest (Lambert Wilson) trek to Ernest’s hometown, Gibberitia, a majestic but autocratic city in the mountains where music is no longer legal. Not even birds are exempt; tuneful warblers are shooed and hosed down by the police.While the earlier film tilted toward Celestine, “A Trip to Gibberitia,” directed by Julien Chheng and Jean-Christophe Roger, hangs on Ernest, a prodigal cub who soon learns that his father, a state judge, instated the ban out of spite.The brisk, lively plot has shades of a French Revolutionary spirit — a band of insurgent musicians call their underground movement “the resistance” — but the film’s real magic lies in the illustrations. Backdrops brim with painterly detail, and tiny changes in characters’ faces convey worlds of feeling. In a film whose moral emphasizes the necessity of artistic freedom, there is a deceptive simplicity to this aesthetic style that makes it all the more special.Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to GibberitiaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fremont’ Review: Rapid Transit

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      This dry, understated film follows a young Afghan refugee looking for connection in her new home, the San Francisco Bay Area.“Fremont” takes its title from the Bay Area city of the same name. Often called Little Kabul, it’s home to one of the largest enclaves of Afghans in the United States, with many immigrants gravitating toward it for a sense of community. That’s what Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is searching for: Community. Connection. Love. These are difficult pursuits for anyone in these atomized times, but especially for Donya, a young refugee and former translator for the American military.Being in Fremont, living among other Afghans, isn’t a huge comfort for Donya. Perhaps because her memories of home aren’t cozy — in fact, they fill her with dread and guilt. The details of what she left behind aren’t the focus here. It’s enough to know that they keep her awake at night; that she prefers the lightly numbing, Zenlike routine of her unglamorous job at a fortune-cookie factory in San Francisco.The British Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali captures Donya’s existential plight with the dry, contemplative mood of a film by Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismaki, both masters of deadpan dramedies infused with melancholia. Shooting in milky black-and-white, Jalali situates Donya in a world of outcasts and loners — people disaffected and worn out yet also capable of compassion and change. Salim (Siddique Ahmed), a fellow insomniac who lives in Donya’s apartment complex, gives her his slot with a psychiatrist, Dr. Anthony (Gregg Turkington), who sees him pro bono.An appointment isn’t like a movie ticket that you can just hand over to a friend, Dr. Anthony explains, fussing over protocol. Donya persuades him to take her on anyway, beginning a series of droll (if not exactly helpful) consultations. After Donya is promoted to fortune writer at the factory, her boss’s vengeful wife (Jennifer McKay) discovers that Donya has written her phone number on the paper in one cookie. She calls for Donya’s firing. Her husband (Eddie Tang) sees it differently: If anything, Donya’s attempt to reach out to another lost soul makes her precisely the kind of person who should be inventing dreamy maxims.Jalali and his co-writer, Carolina Cavalli, point to the ways in which bureaucratic rigidity and cutthroat capitalism can cripple us. They stop short of reducing the film to a story about social injustices while deftly steering clear of an overly cutesy tone and messaging about our shared humanity, or whatever. Expressionistic interludes — shadows mingling on a stairwell wall, a globe spinning at a blurred speed — capture the uncanny nature of social interactions among the displaced and disoriented.Jalali complements this wistful mood with a jazzy score from Mahmood Schricker, which, driven by sitar and low-pitched horn, seems to cut through the dead air of Donya’s impassive encounters. If the humor in these moments doesn’t always click, it’s because there’s only so much awkward-giggle mileage in Jalali’s drawn-out takes of two people talking face-to-face.A first-time actor who fled Afghanistan in 2021, Wali Zada emits a natural warmth and poignancy as she delivers intentionally vacant line readings. This flattens some of the wryer scenes but makes Donya’s measured expressions of longing and hopefulness sing. She’s what makes the final act — which features a solitary mechanic played by Jeremy Allen White (of “The Bear”) — so moving and romantic. Jalali maintains a mysterious ambiguity, but Wali Zada conveys what matters: Donya has found somewhere she wants to be.FremontNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Choose Love’ Review: Pick Your Own Cliché

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      This interactive Netflix rom-com lets viewers make choices on behalf of the main character, changing the story. But each path is banal.Netflix’s latest interactive movie, “Choose Love,” is an attempt to apply a dating simulator experience to a standard-issue rom-com. Its choose-your-own-adventure interface — like the one in the 2019 “Black Mirror” movie “Bandersnatch,” another Netflix production — allows viewers to make decisions for Cami Conway (Laura Marano), a young woman who suddenly finds herself having to choose between three suitors. The choices that viewers select with the click of a button (Should Cami kiss this man or dodge his advances? Should she wear this dress or that one?) will ultimately inform which guy she ends up with.Except, there’s not as much choice left to the viewer as meets the eye. The movie’s opening scene is a tarot reading where you get to help Cami decide whether she wants “good news” or “bad news” first. But either way, it’s the same set of cards. After a pleasant but banal double-date night with her long-term boyfriend, Paul (Scott Michael Foster), she runs into an erstwhile high school heartthrob, Jack (Jordi Webber), while dropping her niece off at school, learning that he’s now a professional photographer with humanitarian priorities. He takes pictures of children for charity.She meets her third suitor, a famous pop musician named Rex Galier (Avan Jogia), when he rents out space at the recording studio where she works as a sound engineer. Rex asks for her advice on a new track he’s producing, and — whether or not you pick “lie and say it’s good” or “brutal honesty” — he takes a liking to her expertise and asks her to record with him. Cami’s longtime dream of a singing career is reawakened, and she finds herself faced with three potential life paths: play it safe, reconnect with the one who got away or chase stardom with a famous beau.The interactive features in “Choose Love” more or less boil down to two or three pivotal scenes that determine which man Cami will spend her life with — and of course, as the credits roll, Netflix encourages you to go back and click a different button for an alternative ending. If only the film were compelling enough to warrant that.While “Bandersnatch” and Netflix’s other attempts at interactive storytelling, like the “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” special “Kimmy vs. The Reverend,” were not without their flaws, their unpredictability — whether through dystopian thrills or comedic timing — kept the gimmick somewhat afloat. But the main selling point of “Choose Love,” directed by Stuart McDonald, seems to be that viewers get to pick which stale rom-com trope they see play out onscreen. Predictability aside, “Choose Love” resembles less of a comforting rom-com than it does the forgone conclusion to streaming’s algorithm-powered media: a series of disconnected, shallow interactions, each leading to a different predetermined cliché.Choose LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Mountain’ Review: Stone-Faced in Nature’s Splendors

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      In this drama directed by and starring Thomas Salvador, an urbanite plunges into treacherous conditions.Thomas Salvador’s “The Mountain” is a lightweight parable about a man who abandons modernity to connect with the earth. On impulse, a Parisian robotics engineer named Pierre (Salvador, who also wrote the script with Naïla Guiguet), extends a work trip to scale France’s snow-capped Mont Blanc. “I can’t resist,” he says, and for a while the film plays like a silent comedy about a transcendence junkie itching for a fix. Pierre’s cable car is too crowded, his new ice crampons look silly alongside other tourists in tees, his scenic glacier-top tent is hemmed-in by more tents. Nevertheless, he prefers not to rejoin civilization — he’s Bartleby the Backpacker, holding out for something he can’t explain.Though this is a story about an urbanite plunging into treacherous conditions, the camping itself appears easy. Pierre looks impressive scaling cliffs. “A change from the climbing gym,” he says placidly. It’s equally incredible that, when the weeks begin to blur, he maintains his neat goatee without ever appearing to shave — and even catches the eye of a quixotic resort chef (Louise Bourgoin) despite having the conversational skills of a rock.Truly communing with nature, however, proves difficult. That is, until the film’s one surprise, a hallucinatory twist which comes so long after the audience has been lulled into the quiet contemplation of snow and clouds that it almost feels like we, too, might be low on oxygen. Some might see the final act as body horror. To the director, it’s a metaphysical sacrament — and all along, his camera has hinted that mankind must commit to the planet before it’s too late.The MountainNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Venice Film Festival Finds Drama Without Zendaya

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      Day 1 brought challenges but not “Challengers,” the film that had been scheduled to open this usually starry event until it was delayed by the strikes.The sky in Venice wept on Wednesday, for there were no pictures to be taken of Zendaya in couture clambering from a speedboat.No? Too much? Well, it’s hard not to sound melodramatic at a film festival where the movies are big but the mood swings are even bigger. Let me clear my throat, take a swig of this Aperol spritz, and start again …The 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off on this rainy Wednesday with several big-name auteurs in attendance but few of the stars that this event has come to count on. With dual strikes by the writers and actors guilds forcing a Hollywood shutdown, and the actors forbidden from promoting studio films during the labor action, Venice will inaugurate a fall film season that is still in significant flux.The first day was meant to be turbocharged by the presence of Zendaya, who turned heads here two years ago in a series of stunning dresses while publicizing the first installment of “Dune.” But the shutdown cost Venice the new film she stars in, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” in which she plays a tennis pro who has to make a romantic choice between two best friends, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (the cheeky marketing materials tease that on at least one night, she chooses both).Without its lead available to support the film, MGM delayed the release of “Challengers” to spring 2024 and yanked it from the Venice lineup. Taking its place as the festival’s opening-night film was “Comandante,” a World War II film told from the point of view of Italian submariners. While it’s well-shot and full of suspenseful battle sequences, “Comandante” features exactly zero tennis hotties contemplating a threesome, which may hinder its ultimate appeal with a Venice audience that was promised starry romantic high jinks.Though the festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, admitted at a news conference on Wednesday that the likes of Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) will not be attending Venice because of the strike, other actors who hail from more independent productions have managed to secure guild waivers, including “Ferrari” star Adam Driver, “Memory” lead Jessica Chastain, and the cast of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” They’re expected to show up on the Lido this week alongside a posse of high-powered directors that includes David Fincher (“The Killer”), Ava DuVernay (“Origin”) and Richard Linklater (“Hit Man”).Still, the strikes loom large. At Barbera’s news conference, the jury president, the filmmaker Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), dressed for maximum solidarity, donning a “Writers Guild on Strike!” shirt and a similar button on the lapel of his sport coat. He noted that as of Wednesday, the writers had been on strike for 121 days, with the actors joining them for the last 48 days, and he called on studios to compensate those artists fairly.“I think there’s a basic idea that each work of art has value unto itself, that it’s not just a piece of content, to use Hollywood’s favorite word right now,” Chazelle told reporters, adding that that idea “has been eroded quite a bit over the past 10 years. There’s many issues on the table with the strikes, but to me, that’s the core issue.”Chazelle was joined by the directors Martin McDonagh and Laura Poitras, who both wore shirts supporting the Writers Guild. They are part of a jury that includes the filmmakers Jane Campion and Mia Hansen-Love, among others.“I’m not sure I entirely deserve this spot, but I will do my best to live up to it,” Chazelle said. “I thank Mr. Barbera for his foolishness in letting me try it out.”Though Chazelle has been to Venice a few times before, to debut “La La Land” and his follow-up, “First Man,” he said he still found the place quite surreal. “That fact that you take a boat to a screening, it’s silly,” Chazelle said. “Cinema, to me, is a waking dream and that, to me, is Venice.”See what I said about melodrama? When you’re in Venice, where even the paint peels in the most picturesque way, you just can’t help yourself from indulging. That’s how your columnist felt last night in the rain, mulling over two of the worst disasters to hit Italy in quite some time: St. Mark’s Square was flooded, and there was no Zendaya. But at least the sun will come out tomorrow here, as will the new films by Michael Mann and Wes Anderson. More

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      Venice Film Festival 2023: What to Watch For

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      New films from David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay and Michael Mann will make up for the absence of stars kept away by the Hollywood strikes.A year ago, the Venice Film Festival had enough star power to put even celebrity-worshiping Cannes on notice. Highlights were quickly beamed all over the world, including the notorious “Don’t Worry Darling” kickoff that fueled endless speculation about the film’s director, Olivia Wilde, and her stars Florence Pugh and Harry Styles; the news conference where an unexpectedly sagacious Timothée Chalamet predicted imminent societal collapse; and the tearful Brendan Fraser comeback that began on the Lido and culminated in his best actor Oscar win.But without all of those celebrities, can Venice still go viral?The 80th edition of the festival, which begins on Wednesday, will be significantly affected by continuing strikes by the Screen Actors Guild (or SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America, since the actors’ union has instructed its members not to do press for any studio movies until the strike against those companies is resolved. That puts Venice in a bind, as it’s regarded as one of the best places for Hollywood to unveil starry awards-season titles. Few major actors will even be permitted to attend this year.The actors’ strike has already cost Venice its original opening-night film, Luca Guadagnino’s sexy tennis romance, “Challengers,” since MGM delayed it from September to spring in the hopes that its lead, Zendaya, will be allowed to promote it several months from now when the strikes might be resolved. (A low-profile Italian film is opening instead.) And I’ve heard of a few more starry fall films that were earmarked for Venice but opted for the Telluride Film Festival instead, since that event is less driven by the photo ops and news conferences that are no longer feasible in Italy.Despite some of those trims, the Venice lineup is still enticing, with an auteur-heavy list featuring directors nearly as famous as their leads. And Venice has proved before that it can adapt to unfavorable limitations: Amid the pandemic in August 2020, the festival opted for a smaller, partly open-air edition that still went on to premiere the eventual winner of the best picture Oscar, “Nomadland.”Emma Stone, left, and Mark Ruffalo in “Poor Things,” from Yorgos Lanthimos. Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressThis year’s program includes two films about assassins-for-hire: David Fincher’s new thriller, “The Killer,” stars Michael Fassbender, while Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” features the “Top Gun: Maverick” breakout Glen Powell, who also served as a co-writer. I’m curious about the off-kilter comedy “Poor Things,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”) and starring Emma Stone as a sexually curious Frankenstein’s monster. Ditto “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s second directorial effort, after “A Star Is Born.” He’s cast himself as the composer Leonard Bernstein, opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, and his decision to wear a prosthetic nose has already set off controversy.Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” was a big hit last year, but what will that story look like through Sofia Coppola’s lens? The “Lost in Translation” and “Marie Antoinette” director puts her spotlight on Elvis Presley’s wife with “Priscilla,” featuring Cailee Spaeny as teen bride Priscilla Presley and the “Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi as the singer. Ava DuVernay has adapted the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste” for her new film, “Origin,” which stars the Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis in an examination of racism and systemic oppression. And though Michael Mann has secured a guild exemption that would allow the cast of “Ferrari” to promote it in Venice, I’m curious whether his new film’s press-shy lead, Adam Driver (as the racer-turned-car-magnate Enzo Ferrari), is willing to do a full-blown media blitz for the movie, which the hot indie studio Neon is releasing in theaters on Christmas Day.Two years after the release of his Oscar-winning breakthrough “Drive My Car,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi returns to the festival circuit with “Evil Does Not Exist,” which originated as a dialogue-free short and became a feature-length film about ecological collapse. And two months after releasing his feature-length “Asteroid City,” the director Wes Anderson is opting for something shorter with “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a 37-minute Roald Dahl adaptation for Netflix.Harmony Korine premiered his biggest film, “Spring Breakers,” at Venice back in 2012, and he’ll return with the mysterious “Aggro Dr1ft,” which stars the rapper Travis Scott and was shot solely using infrared photography. He’s not the only director taking chances: Pablo Larraín, the director of “Jackie” and “Spencer,” has set the divas aside for a moment to make “El Conde,” a black-and-white supernatural fable that reimagines the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a bloodsucking vampire.And then there are the chances that Venice itself is taking when it comes to three auteurs: It is premiering “Dogman” from Luc Besson, who was accused of sexual assault but cleared by prosecutors; “The Palace” from Roman Polanski, who was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor but fled before he could be sentenced; and “Coup de Chance” from Woody Allen, who has denied sexual abuse accusations by Dylan Farrow, his adopted daughter.Venice will also serve as an elegy of sorts for the director William Friedkin, who died earlier this month and whose final film, the naval drama “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” will premiere posthumously on the Lido. Adapted by Friedkin from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk, it stars Jake Lacy and Kiefer Sutherland. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Claim to Fame’ and ‘Family Law’

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      The ABC reality show hosted by Kevin and Frankie Jonas wraps up, as does Canadian legal drama on the CW.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Aug. 28-Sept. 3. Details and times are subject to change.MondayCLAIM TO FAME 8 p.m. on ABC. While Kevin Jonas tours with his other brothers (the Jonas Brothers), and Frankie Jonas is up to his usual TikTok shenanigans, the show they co-host, about people who have a celebrity relative, is coming to an end. After a season of challenges, detective work and the elimination of relatives of former President Jimmy Carter, Dolly Parton and Jenny McCarthy, there are four celebrity relatives left to uncover. Even though we have our suspicions (*cough* Gabe is related to Nick Cannon *cough*), some contestants like Monay have held tightly to their secret relation. On Monday, all will finally be revealed.STARS ON MARS 8 p.m. on Fox. What happens when you send some “celebranauts” (Fox’s wording, not mine) into a Mars simulation? This week we are getting the answer, as Porsha Williams Guobadia, Cat Cora, Tinashe, Paul Pierce and Adam Rippon compete to assemble a satellite tower and broadcast a message back to Earth. The stakes couldn’t be lower, as obviously they aren’t really on Mars.A still from “Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland.”ALAMY/Alain Le GarsmeurONCE UPON A TIME IN NORTHERN IRELAND 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, Northern Ireland saw no shortage of nationalist and sectarian violence. This new documentary series combines archival footage with profiles of people who lived through the conflict.TuesdayJUSTIFIED: CITY PRIMEVAL 10 p.m. on FX. This show is a sequel to “Justified,” with Timothy Olyphant returning as Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. This time Givens is joined by his daughter, played by Olyphant’s real-life daughter Vivian Olyphant. The show takes place in Miami, 15 years after Givens left Kentucky. This eighth episode wraps up the first season.WednesdayA computer screen showing the Ticketmaster website.Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesSOLD OUT: TICKETMASTER AND THE RESALE RACKET 11 p.m. on Vice. If you, too, tried and failed to get tickets to Taylor Swift’s tour this year, you are no stranger to mayhem in concert sales. This Vice documentary follows malicious brokers who buy face-value tickets and sell them for much more — and how a Ticketmaster and Live Nation monopoly allows them to get away with it.ThursdayTHE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940) 9:45 p.m. on TCM. Based on the novel of the same name, this movie follows the Joad family as they head to California to start a new life after their farm in Oklahoma was seized by the government. “What we’ve been trying to say is that ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is just about as good as any picture has a right to be; if it were any better, we just wouldn’t believe our eyes,” Frank S. Nugent wrote in his review for The New York Times.FridayFAMILY LAW 9 p.m. on The CW. This Canadian law drama has followed Abigail Bianchi (Jewel Staite) as she rehabilitated herself and her image after showing up to court drunk. This season she has continued to work at the family practice, Svensson and Svensson, while managing her crumbling marriage. The finale will put that all into perspective as she has to choose between her family’s law firm and a lucrative offer at her former firm.SaturdayTopher Grace, left, and George Clooney in “Ocean’s Eleven.”Warner Bros., via Everett CollectionOCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001) 8:30 p.m. on TBS. This movie gave us three rules to live by, or keep while committing crimes: “Don’t hurt anybody, don’t steal from anyone who doesn’t deserve it, and play the game like you’ve got nothing to lose.” The story follows Danny Ocean (George Clooney), Rusty (Brad Pitt) and their friends as they plan a heist from a casino owner who is not-so-coincidentally the lover of Danny’s ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts). Watch for the truly random foods — popcorn, fruit cup, lollipop? — that Brad Pitt’s character is eating in each scene.SundayTHE INCREDIBLES (2004) 6 p.m. on Freeform. This animated movie about a family of superheros who try to keep their individual superpowers under wraps gave us some amazing characters: Jack-Jack (the bizarrely strong baby of the family), Frozone (everything he touches can turn to ice) and Edna Mode (“My God, pull yourself together!”). “‘The Incredibles’ may resonate more strongly with adults than with children, as it is, at its heart, a story of midlife frustration and compromise, examining the toll that unfulfilling work can exact on a marriage, and the heady rebirth that professional satisfaction can bring,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. If you can’t get enough of this superhero family, INCREDIBLES 2 (2018) is airing immediately after on the same channel. More