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      ‘Bottoms’ Review: Physical Education

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      In this buddy comedy, senior outcasts played by Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri attempt to woo two cheerleaders through a fight club.Josie and PJ are high school seniors, and they have some pressing unfinished business. “Do you want to be the only girl virgin at Sarah Lawrence?” PJ (Rachel Sennott) asks Josie (Ayo Edebiri) during the dark-night-of-the-soul conversation that begins “Bottoms.” Yes, Emma Seligman’s comedy takes off with tires screeching.It is imperative for our buddies to have sex, stat, but that is a complicated proposition: Not only are they unpopular outcasts — “the ugly, untalented gays,” as opposed to the ones who breezily sashay down the hallways — but they have set their sights on two unapproachably hot cheerleaders. It is obvious that PJ and Josie will need some devious scheming to win over their crushes.Going along with a rumor that they’ve spent time in juvenile detention, the pair acquire an instant reputation as tough girls and the school lets them start a self-defense club in which the most vicious brawls are somehow allowed. Even Josie’s object of desire, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), is impressed by consciousness-raising through punching, even more so after she learns her quarterback boyfriend (Nicholas Galitzine, of “Red, White & Royal Blue”) is cheating on her.Seligman and Sennott’s first collaboration was the quietly unsettling “Shiva Baby” (2021), which took place almost entirely over the span of one afternoon at the title wake, and progressively ensnared Sennott’s character in a web of deadpan, discomforting humor. For their follow-up, the collaborators (Sennott wrote the movie with Seligman) have gone down a completely different stylistic road, putting a queer spin on teenage sex comedies à la “Superbad” and “American Pie.” They have replaced the death by a thousand cuts of “Shiva Baby” with a gleeful broadness. It ultimately fizzes out, but “Bottoms” confirms that Seligman and Sennott are major new forces in American comedy.A lot does click here, including several delicious supporting performances, most notably the former N.F.L. running back Marshawn Lynch as the fight club’s loopy faculty adviser and Ruby Cruz as Hazel, a cool classmate whom, naturally, PJ does not even see. The script also lands many corkers, as when a student named Annie (Zamani Wilder) complains “this is the second wave all over again” after realizing PJ and Josie were prioritizing self-serving goals over sisterhood.That last aspect is what feels most undernourished and, in the end, unexpectedly timid. Not much is made of the fact that PJ is one of the biggest liars and bullies of the story and uses her gift of gab to cynically deploy empowerment messaging. And while the movie is set in a surreally heightened universe in which football players never leave their uniform and teachers read girlie magazines in class, it is oddly more comfortable goofing off with outrageous violence than elementary sexuality.For most of its tight running time, “Bottoms” hovers on the cusp of greatness. It’s often funny but it also never delivers satisfying set pieces, and stops short of questioning — not to mention subverting — the warped high school stratification that remains one of America’s building blocks.BottomsRated R for typical teen language, fight-club violence and football run amok. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bank of Dave’ Review: A Dave and Goliath Story

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      This sometimes sleepy feel-good drama follows the story of a working-class man’s battle against London’s financial elite.Not only are major global banks as we know them too big to fail, but local, community-oriented ones are sometimes too small and well-intentioned to even exist. It’s the reality of a system that left Dave Fishwick dismayed, and what serves as the premise for “Bank of Dave,” a film loosely based on the true story of Fishwick’s battle with Britain’s financial system to create a community bank meant to help the little guys.A man of the people who has made a modest fortune selling vans, Dave (Rory Kinnear) is a Ted Lasso of sorts within his small English town of Burnley, where he makes a habit of loaning money to local businesses and friends in need. After Dave gets the idea to institutionalize his generous streak with the Bank of Dave, where all profits will go to charities, Hugh (Joel Fry), the stiff London lawyer Dave has hired to help, comes into town expecting to disabuse Dave of his idealism. A new bank has not been approved in 150 years, and the powers that be were set up solely to protect the elite.Yet, after following Dave around for a couple days and catching feelings for his niece, Alexandra (Phoebe Dynevor), Hugh quickly becomes a convert to Dave’s mission.It all makes for an inoffensively pleasant David (or, rather, Dave) and Goliath story. The conflicts involving complex, powerful interests are set up and solved with simplified, clean emotional beats — helped along in particular by Fry and Kinnear, who do the legwork to support a sometimes sleepy feel-good drama from the director Chris Foggin. Even if the movie is about one small win, there’s a sedate pleasure in seeing it play out, especially knowing a version of it happened in real life.Bank of DaveRated PG-13 some strong language. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Perpetrator’ Review: Campy, Creepy and Buckets of Blood

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      High school horror gets a supernatural twist in this ultragory feature.Blood — viscous and dark, venal and menstrual — soaks all the way through “Perpetrator,” Jennifer Reeder’s hyperbolic stab at the high school slasher movie. Noses seep and floors are awash, the treacly ooze serving as both a coming-of-age symbol and a lubricant for a story whose misandry burns bright and hot.“Girls like you just don’t know what you’ve got till it’s all gone,” a masked sadist breathes, hovering over Jonny Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan), a savvy high school senior. He’s not the only predatory weirdo who threatens the school’s jumpy female students, including a creepy principal (Christopher Lowell) who oversees supposed self-defense classes that warn against biting and screaming. Dating a chiseled alpha male named Kirk (Sasha Kuznetsov) seems especially perilous, given that his crushes rarely reappear in school.Jonny’s home life is scarcely cozier. Lodged with a witchy great-aunt whose love language is snarling (Alicia Silverstone, disappointingly underused), the motherless teenager must navigate the ancestral superpower that her 18th birthday has recently bestowed: a turbocharged empathy that allows her to physically mimic another person. And perhaps catch a killer.Screwy and strange, “Perpetrator” is gleefully unsubtle, but its ensanguinated excess is part of the fun. (As is the casting of actors who appear to be on their 10th repeat of 12th grade.) The tone swivels from campy to menacing, outrageous to comic; but Sevdije Kastrati’s oleaginous photography has the surreal power to nail some of the movie’s dottiest sequences, like the killer siphoning his victims’ blood through a wound that resembles an angry anus.The film’s most enjoyable idea, though, is its positioning of female empathy as armor instead of Achilles’ heel. Gazing into the mirror, Jonny’s face wobbles and shifts; when the perpetrator is revealed, will she be ready?PerpetratorRated R for a disembodied heart and a disgusting dessert. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Piaffe’ Review: A Sound Obsession

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      In this beautiful and beguiling tale of transformation, a young woman’s altered body unlocks her true self.The clicks and whirs of a gigantic, peep show-like contraption known as a zoetrope fill our ears as an enigmatic botanist (Sebastian Rudolph) observes the image of a slowly unfurling fern. Watching him is Eva (Simone Bucio), a timid young woman for whom sound has become something of an obsession.Her nonbinary sibling, Zara, played by Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, has had a breakdown, and Eva must take over Zara’s job as a Foley artist for a drug company commercial. She must learn to make the sounds of a horse prancing in place, a dressage move known as a piaffe.With “Piaffe,” the filmmaker and visual artist Ann Oren, extrapolating from her 2020 short film “Passage,” has made a silken study of physical and erotic transformation. Like the horse that stars in the commercial, Eva exists in a kind of stasis, restrained from moving forward.Learning to mimic equine behavior emboldens her, and her body responds by sprouting a fleshy appendage that grows rapidly from a penile protuberance to a full-length tail. Timid no longer, Eva pursues a series of erotic encounters with the botanist, who tells her that ferns are hermaphrodites: Like Zara, they embody more than a single gender.Gorgeously shot by Carlos Vasquez using 16-millimeter film (and filmed in part in the famous Warsaw Fotoplastikon), “Piaffe” is ideologically abstract and beguilingly weird. Its experimental style, marked by long, dialogue-free stretches, color flares and pristine sound effects, can seem calculated and off-putting, the narrative slight and dramatically slack. Yet the film’s provocations have a playfulness and generosity that are enormously appealing. In the same way as the fern, Eva has unfurled from a defensive crouch to an open embrace of who she was meant to be.PiaffeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Golda’ Review: Chain-Smoking Through the Guilt

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      Helen Mirren, under heavy prosthetics, channels the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in this wartime biopic.“Golda” — as in Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister who resigned in 1974 over her administration’s handling of the Yom Kippur War — films its title character in confrontational close-ups of her red-rimmed eyes, nicotine-stained fingers and swollen ankles. Somewhere under the prosthetics is Helen Mirren, formidably shouldering Meir’s suppressed anguish over the war’s death toll.Extreme costuming often feels gimmicky, but here, it humanizes the director Guy Nattiv’s terse accounting of guilt. As one imagines the burden of wearing Meir’s artificial skin, you can practically hear Nattiv hiss: Now imagine putting yourself in the actual woman’s orthopedic shoes. Or as Mirren’s Meir cracks to Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber), “Things could be worse. You could have my feet.”Israel has been surprise-attacked by Egypt and Syria, and Kissinger is concerned with keeping the Soviets calm and oil prices low. The script, by Nicholas Martin, doesn’t argue the righteousness of the conflict. Instead, it frets over the body count — and though we’re with Meir and her fractious advisers as they clap for the massacre of Egyptian soldiers, the camera reacts by going all woozy like it’s nauseous.Niv Adiri’s dense sound design and Dascha Dauenhauer’s impactful score turn war into a living nightmare. For good measure, we also go inside Meir’s bad dreams. Awake, however, the polarizing leader is the kind of stoic who chain-smokes through her lymphoma treatments. The film is structured by her cigarettes. Edits cut from one puff to another; the minister of defense, Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger), uses packs and lighters to stand-in for military units; ashtrays fill and fill again. We’re left with the sense that the stress of those thousands of lives cut short may have killed her, too.GoldaRated PG-13 for pervasive smoking. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Before, Now & Then’ Review: Love and War

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      Set amid the upheaval of 1960s Indonesia, this drama tells the story of a woman caught in an unhappy marriage and haunted by the traumas of war.Kamila Andini’s “Before, Now & Then” is a domestic drama set against a tumultuous historical backdrop: In 1960s Indonesia, as communists are massacred by the state and the authoritarian president Suharto seizes control (with the backing of the United States), the film alights on the story of one woman, Nana (Happy Salma), who is caught in an unhappy marriage and haunted by past traumas. It’s a daring narrative mix of the personal and the political, though Andini struggles to find the right balance between the two.The movie begins in the aftermath of Indonesia’s fight for independence in the 1940s, with Nana on the run, fleeing nationalist soldiers who are forcibly taking women from villages. Nana’s husband is presumed dead, and, in a startling scene, she imagines her father being beheaded by a group of men. A temporal jump then transports us to her new life 15 years later, when she is the wife of a wealthy, absent and adulterous plantation owner. From the high-stakes prologue we switch, jarringly, to a languid, mist-swept melodrama about Nana’s fraying relationship with her unfaithful husband and her friendship with his younger mistress, Ino (Laura Basuki).The political and historical contexts fade into the background, emerging only in stray scenes of locals discussing current events, which Andini inserts like punctuation marks in an otherwise typical midcentury tale of a woman awakening to her independence. It doesn’t help that this feminist arc is a little too cute, particularly after the brutality that precedes it: All it takes to bring Nana out of her shell is Ino — a manic-pixie figure — encouraging her to dive into a lake fully clothed. It’s a pity for both Salma and Basuki, whose expressive faces convey depths of feeling that the script and direction cannot quite match.Before, Now & ThenNot rated. In Indonesian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Brief Encounters’ and ‘The Long Farewell’ Review: Kira Muratova’s Soulful Soviet Dramas

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      A pair of newly restored films from Kira Muratova about restless, disaffected women hold a special, subversive power.Through the 1970s and much of the 1980s, Kira Muratova’s stirring films “Brief Encounters” and “The Long Farewell” went unseen, banned by the Soviet Union. “The Long Farewell” provoked such outrage from censors that Muratova, then a new voice in cinema, was stripped of her film degree and prohibited from filmmaking for years.A blacklist is, obviously, an undesirable home for any worthy feature. But as I watched the exquisite 4K restorations of these two films (a collaboration between StudioCanal and the Criterion Collection), I was struck by how much their stories harmonize with their embattled history. The works, which were Muratova’s first solo outings as a director, overflow with restless, disaffected women beating against the boxes in which society has confined them. The female characters pine, ache and, amplified by the dramas surrounding them, seem to scream: Life is hard! Let us free!Both films were eventually released during the era of perestroika, and Muratova, born in what is now Moldova in 1934, went on to direct more than a dozen other features, earning international acclaim. Yet her couplet of debut films still hold a special, subversive power.“Brief Encounters,” from 1967 and my favorite of the pair, is an audacious portrait of two women on the cultural fringes pining after the same man. Muratova plays one of the leads, Valentina — a brusque regional councilwoman in Odesa, Ukraine, who’s in charge of the water supply for local buildings. The film opens on Valentina cast in chiaroscuro, groaning over unfinished work and dirty dishes. Her malaise is interrupted by the arrival of Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), an impressionable girl from the countryside who becomes Valentina’s housekeeper.The texture of domestic items and the soft geometries of light and shadow enhance every frame of this wry relationship drama, which regularly jumps back in time to scenes from Valentina’s and Nadia’s separate romances — and rifts — with the impish, nomadic Maxim (Vladimir Vysotsky, a heartthrob folk singer of the time). Muratova mirrors the brokenness of these entanglements in concrete objects: fractured dinner plates, faucets that won’t run, a guitar with popped strings, a tattered leather jacket. Some prove fixable. But the tragedy of “Brief Encounters” is that, despite the film’s frequent excursions into the past, life can’t just be restrung or repaired.A projected image of Oleg Vladimirsky as Sasha in “The Long Farewell.”Janus FilmsA more bourgeois milieu takes center stage in the “The Long Farewell,” which was produced in 1971. It charts a strained relationship between an erratic, overbearing mother, Evgeniia (Zinaida Sharko), and her angsty teenage son, Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky). As Sasha comes of age and pulls away, Evgeniia grows fragile and then melts down entirely. (Muratova was never sure why the film was an affront to censors, but she later guessed that it had to do with its avant-garde aesthetic.)If Valentina’s job inspecting water taps in “Brief Encounters” reflects her desire to restore the flow of love between her and Maxim, Evgeniia’s career as a translator belies her ongoing failure to communicate with Sasha. In one dazzling image, Muratova conveys Evgeniia’s loneliness: She shows the mother simulating being next to Sasha by projecting photos of him on the walls of her apartment. Standing in the projector’s glow, Evgeniia gazes at the images, enduring social artifacts that — like Muratova’s films — hold small universes of comfort and pain.Brief EncountersNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.The Long FarewellNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Honey, I Blew Up the Family Film

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      What ever happened to the live-action adventures and G-rated titles adults and children could watch together in the theater?My son’s first movie was “La La Land,” which he watched strapped to my chest during a baby-friendly matinee in Brooklyn. He was 7 months old then, hungry and appropriately fussy, which means that I spent most of the movie standing at the back of the theater — nursing, jiggling, shushing — and that neither of us has seen “La La Land” all the way through. But you can’t say I didn’t start him early.For me, moviegoing is a pleasure learned in the 1980s from my own mother. She mostly took me to movies that she wanted to see — “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Heat and Dust.” That decade brought plenty of kid-centered blockbusters too: “E.T.,” “The Goonies,” “The Princess Bride.” Moviegoing is a habit I’ve hoped to instill in my own children. A theatrical experience insists that we all watch the same thing at the same time. At home, on movie night, I’m as likely to be dealing with the dishes or scrolling on my phone. In a theater, we share the experience. Also: popcorn.But as we’re not superhero fans (and unlike my mother, I balk at taking school-age kids to R-rated films), our moviegoing has been sporadic. Most months, there’s nothing we want to see in theaters. We’re not alone.In the spring, Matt Singer, the editor and critic at ScreenCrush.com, posted on Twitter, “As a parent of little kids it would be great if there was literally *any* movie in theaters right now I could take them to.” His choices at the time were “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” a PG-13 sequel with a body count that would have terrified his 5-year-old, or “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” which had already been running for four months, mostly because exhibitors keen to attract a family audience had no other options.G-rated titles have largely disappeared. Even the Pixar film “Elemental” was rated PG.Disney/PixarNow, in August, there are a few more films in wide release. My kids, 7 and 10, recently saw “Elemental,” Pixar and Disney’s latest animated collab, with my mom. (Her tastes have mellowed.) Theaters are still showing the live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid” and the computer-animated “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken” seems to have come and gone more quickly, though it remains available on demand.David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers, estimates that family films will earn about $4.9 billion this year, commensurate, or nearly, with recent prepandemic totals. But there are only 12 major theatrical releases currently scheduled for the whole of 2023, about half as many as in 2019. And the lineup, which includes the current “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” and the forthcoming “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie” and “Trolls Band Together,” is not particularly inspiring.“The companies aren’t in it for charity,” Gross said. “They’re going make movies that have an advantage.”Of these 12, a third could reasonably be called original: “Elemental,” “Ruby Gillman” and the forthcoming “Wish,” with Ariana DeBose voicing Disney’s latest animated heroine, and “Migration,” about a family of ducks written improbably by Mike White (“White Lotus”). The others all depend on pre-existing intellectual property — cartoons, video games, books. Many of these movies, though by no means all, have a lowest-common-denominator feel, testifying to conservatism among studios and a deficit of imagination and ambition.So what happened to the great family movie?Well, a lot of things. “It’s cultural, it’s technological, it’s financial, it’s sociological,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst at Comscore, a media analytics company.“Wish,” from Disney,” is one of the few original films aimed at children this year.Walt Disney Animation StudiosWhile certain stressors on the family film predate 2020, the pandemic obviously compounded the current predicament: It disrupted the supply chain, pushed many families out of the moviegoing groove and diverted quality releases to streaming services. Of the major genres, the family film has been the slowest to rebound theatrically, which has made studios reluctant to take chances on a wide release for riskier material.“Right now, the question is what does it take to get any movie in the theater that isn’t giant branded I.P.,” said Nina Jacobson, a producer and a past president of the Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group, a studio in the Walt Disney Company. The theatrical marketplace, she suggested, has largely stopped taking those chances, creating a closed loop. “If you don’t give people anything to go to see other than Marvel movies, then you can say only Marvel movies work,” Jacobson said.But family films have been undergoing a shift that predates both 2020 and Marvel dominance. The G rating, a stalwart of the films of my childhood, has nearly disappeared, a corollary to the reluctance of producers of family films to admit that they’re meant for families.“My entire career, there has been a shortage of movies that the youngest kids can see in the theater,” said Betsy Bozdech, an editorial director at Commonsense Media, a site that rates and reviews media aimed at children. “The G rating basically doesn’t exist anymore.” This year, we will probably see no full-length G-rated movies. (Even the “Paw Patrol” sequel is PG.) Only a decade ago, there were 18. In 2003? More than 30.The dearth of family films is also a function of the much chronicled demise of midbudget movies — including ones that Jacobson oversaw, like “Freaky Friday” and “The Princess Diaries.” Midbudget movies don’t have to work as hard to earn back their investment and they can afford to appeal to a narrower tranche of the moviegoing public, meaning the releases can be more particular in tone and style.Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a related move away from live-action theatrical family films and toward animation. What live action there is, as in the case of Disney’s high-grossing remakes, often relies on so many computer-generated effects that it doesn’t seem live at all. (Compare the recent, dutiful live action “Beauty and the Beast,” with 1989’s delightful “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” or 1991’s delirious “Hook.”) These movies can still delight and make meaning, as with the ecstatic kid reactions to Halle Bailey’s Little Mermaid. But there’s particular wonder and possibility in seeing characters who look like you or behave like you onscreen, in real-world or real-world adjacent situations.“To see a young lead in a movie who you identify with, to see a story with you in mind, to see that you matter in that storytelling as a young person, those are movies that you hold onto,” Jacobson said.No one has to go to the movies anymore. Wait a month or two or six and you can see these same films from the comfort of your couch. And quality may not even matter absolutely. Certainly there are days — rainy or too hot — when the temptation of a climate-controlled seat and Raisinets suffices, no matter the movie on offer.But if we want movie theaters to survive, that will mean building the moviegoing habit in children, which means giving them an experience, beyond the candy counter, that keeps them coming back. A third “Trolls” movie may not offer that. Instead studios will need to get comfortable with some risk and some trust, making movies for children that don’t talk down to them.“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a Netflix movie, shows that auteurs are still interested in making films for young viewers.Netflix, via Associated Press“Kids are more sophisticated and have the emotional capacity to be able to absorb things that traditional Hollywood doesn’t think they can absorb,” said Todd Lieberman, a producer whose coming-of-age World War II tale, “White Bird: A Wonder Story,” will be released later this year.We can’t expect an “E.T.” every year, or even movies commensurate with the gems I recall from my youth: Agnieszka Holland’s “The Secret Garden,” Alfonso Cuarón’s “A Little Princess,” John Sayles’s “The Secret of Roan Inish.” But we should expect better. And better remains possible.Prestige directors are still interested in family movies — see “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” and planned Narnia movies. And have you seen the “Paddington” movies? Perfection. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine a future in which there are more and finer children’s movies in theaters, ones that send you back out into the light blinking and amazed. As an adult moviegoer, I often feel spoiled for choice. If we want children to return as adults, we should spoil them, too.“Give people great original family content and they will show up,” Jacobson said. “But it’s on us to give it to them.” More