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      ‘La Syndicaliste’ Review: Power Plays

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      Isabelle Huppert plays a union representative swept up in a byzantine conspiracy in this French movie, which is based on a true crime.Sometimes the best reason to watch a movie is because Isabelle Huppert is in it. That’s pretty much true of “La Syndicaliste,” a tangled if certainly watchable French true-crime drama about dirty political doings in the nation’s nuclear energy industry. Filled with men and women with furrowed brows, running and declaiming and sometimes explosively blowing their tops, the movie yearns to be a 1970s-style American thriller but is basically just a vehicle for Huppert’s talents. Even when it’s unclear what her character — a labor representative — is up to, she commands your attention with feverish focus and urgency.Huppert plays Maureen Kearney, a leading union representative of Areva, a state-controlled French nuclear technology company. A no-nonsense, hard-charging official, Maureen takes her mandate seriously — Areva has more than 50,000 employees when the story opens in 2012 — and her resentful male colleagues somewhat less seriously, at least outwardly. She’s brassy and a bit flashy (she likes perilously high heels and slashes of red lipstick) and close to her boss at Areva, Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Foïs), a smooth number who’s about to lose her job because, as she explains, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to replace her before the next election.It isn’t obvious why Sarkozy thinks that firing Anne will help him; she suggests it’s because she’s a woman, stoking the gender war that percolates throughout this movie. Whatever the case, Sarkozy fires Anne, eventually losing the presidency to François Hollande, all of which adds real-world context to the story without illuminating it. The director Jean-Paul Salomé gives the movie a lively pace, but he crowds it with filler scenes, too many characters and political arcana. He also throws in an allusion to Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” — cue the blond chignon — that does his movie no favors. (Salomé wrote the script with Fadette Drouard.)“La Syndicaliste” follows Anne as she tries to work with her new boss, Luc Oursel (an amusingly villainous Yvan Attal), a patronizing sexist who cozies up to Maureen even as he busily conspires against her. The extent of his schemes begin to emerge after a whistle-blower sneaks Anne a document showing that a shadowy figure who heads up another state-controlled utility, E.D.F., is clandestinely negotiating with a Chinese consortium to build low-cost plants. (Got it?) The idea is to turn E.D.F. into a world nuclear power and ruin Areva, which Maureen helpfully explains, “will be awful for our employees.”The scheme proves worse for Maureen, who tries to bring attention to the E.D.F. plan, only to be largely met with indifference. As she continues rattling cages, she is met with escalating hostility, and then one grim morning while she’s home preparing for a big government meeting, an intruder puts a mask over her head and rapes her. Much of the rest of the movie involves Maureen navigating the aftermath of the assault as she submits to invasive medical examinations and police interviews that grow progressively antagonistic. The cops are stumped — there are no fingerprints, witnesses or surveillance visuals — and then they accuse Maureen of inventing the rape as a way to gin up sympathy for her political struggles.Based on a 2019 book of the same title by Caroline Michel-Aguirre, “La Syndicaliste” never satisfyingly meshes the story’s corporate-political thriller elements with Maureen’s traumatic ordeal. Salomé’s handling of the rape doesn’t help. The movie opens right after a maid finds the bound Maureen in the basement of her home, and then the story flashes back several months at which point it begins to unwind chronologically. That’s fine, even if the structure is drearily familiar, but it ends up turning the rape into a narrative high point, which is just gross. Huppert, who makes her character’s pain and rage visceral, is enough.La SyndicalisteNot rated. In French and Hungarian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘Eileen’ Review: Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway Thrill in Adaptation

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      Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labeled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of “Barbie,” more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.The pleasure of “Eileen” is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some gray, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional center is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)One day right before Christmas, the new prison counselor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasizes her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetizing. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her center of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, though more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasizes, Radcliffe) in early ’60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signaled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behavior: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on fecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller “Lady Macbeth,” introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit molds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned “Barbie,” the forthcoming “Poor Things,” among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.EileenRated R. A whole lot of nasty business. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Eileen’ Review: Sudden Fire, Sudden Danger

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      Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labeled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of “Barbie,” more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.The pleasure of “Eileen” is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some gray, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional center is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)One day right before Christmas, the new prison counselor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasizes her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetizing. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her center of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, though more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasizes, Radcliffe) in early ’60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signaled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behavior: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on fecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller “Lady Macbeth,” introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit molds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned “Barbie,” the forthcoming “Poor Things,” among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.EileenRated R. A whole lot of nasty business. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Silent Night’ Review: On the First Day of Christmas, Kill.

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      John Woo’s latest is as violent and merciless a revenge thriller as you can imagine.It’s a widely-held proposition that great artists mellow as they age. That hasn’t held true in filmmaking. Robert Bresson ended his career in his 80s with two of his most fevered and angry works, “The Devil Probably” and “L’’Argent.” Martin Scorsese, now 81, put out the tortured and indignant “Killers of the Flower Moon” this year. And now the inspired action filmmaker, John Woo, 77, delivers the merciless revenge shoot-em-up, “Silent Night.”Woo’s pictures have always operated on the “pure cinema” principle. Simply put, he prefers showing to telling. And what he shows are emotional extremes and their violent fallout. For this picture he put his prodigious staging, shooting and cutting skills to a test that won’t surprise his fans: The movie is practically free of dialogue. Joel Kinnaman plays Brian, a father living near California gang turf, driven mad by grief after seeing his young child killed by a stray bullet fired during a battle. In his initial maniacal reaction, he’s shot in the throat by a drug dealer with slashes of black tattooed on one side of his face.The attack happens around Christmas, and once Brian emerges from a monthslong drinking binge, he shapes up, takes up arms, and marks the next Christmas on his calendar: “Kill them all.” And so it goes. Car chases, motorcycle chases, stabbings, shootings, bone-breaking. Even without the talking (Catarina Sandino Moreno, as Brian’s beleaguered wife, mutters “OK” once or twice), there’s a lot of sound and fury and it works: This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.Silent NightRated R for, well, violence. No language, though! Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Review: Bigmouth Strikes Again

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      Japan’s famous monster franchise returns with an appetite for destruction but also a notably sober outlook.You have to like Godzilla’s style. Confident, with an almost stately groove to his step — and why not? With “Godzilla Minus One,” the giant prehistoric lizard is heading toward the 70th anniversary of his Toho studio franchise. Once again, Japan emerges from World War II only to face this atomic colossus, whose appetite for destruction remains unabated and a reliable spectacle.In a prelude, Godzilla makes landfall during the war on an island where a kamikaze pilot, Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), has just detoured to desert. Koichi survives the monster’s attacks, becoming a ball of guilt and shame. He resettles in Tokyo’s rubble with a stranger, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who’s caring for someone else’s baby.They’re a nuclear family, as it were, but remain unmarried, simply co-survivors. Koichi’s camaraderie with crew members on a mine cleanup ship lightens the mood, but soon Godzilla rears his leathery head again with attacks on ships, streets and the people unfortunate enough to be there.Less vengeful or bored than just a phenomenon, Godzilla stomps and chomps away, spiky, dead-eyed, his hide rough as cooled magma. Signature moves include the snap-and-toss (grabbing and flinging a human or train-car aside) and his blue ray (not the high-resolution disc but rather an explosive thermonuclear beam). The writer-director, Takashi Yamazaki, integrates crowds and effects with a sure hand, and endows the violence with a dour air.The mood suits as citizens band together and decry Japan’s wartime disregard for life. The heroic arc is creaky, but despite the chintzy clichés about Godzilla movies, this one keeps bringing blockbuster brio to heel with a sometimes heavy heart.Godzilla Minus OneRated PG-13 for monster mash. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘May December’ Review: She’ll Be Your Mirror

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      In Todd Haynes’s latest, Natalie Portman is an actress studying the real-life model for her character, (Julianne Moore), a woman with a tabloid back story.Much of Todd Haynes’s sly, unnerving “May December” takes place in and around a picture-perfect home, that favorite movieland setting for American dreams turned nightmares. This one comes wrapped in a dappled, hazy light that blunts hard lines and brightens every face, so much so that characters sometimes look lit from within. Even the evening has an inviting velvetiness, as if all of life’s shadows have been banished. In characteristic Haynes fashion, though, nothing is as it first seems in this shimmering Gothic, including the light that becomes more like a queasy, suffocating miasma.“May December” is the story of two women and their worlds of lies. They meet when a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visits Gracie (Julianne Moore), the inspiration for her next role. Gracie lives in a large waterfront house in Savannah with her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), their teenage twins and two Irish setters. They have another kid in college, jobs they seem to enjoy and a complicated history that’s summed up by the box Elizabeth finds at their front door, and which Gracie opens with a shrug of familiarity. It’s feces, she explains coolly, and this isn’t the first such package.That box is a blunt metaphor for the ugliness at the core of “May December” — years ago, Gracie became tabloid fodder after she was caught having sex with Joe when he was in seventh grade — a setup that Haynes brilliantly complicates with his three knockout leads, great narrative dexterity and shocks of destabilizing humor that ease you into the story. The first time I watched the movie, I almost clapped my hand over my mouth during one absurd moment, unsure if I was supposed to be laughing this hard. Of course I was: Haynes is having fun, at least for a while, partly to play with our expectations about where the movie is headed.A progenitor of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Haynes likes to dig into that space between the world that exists (or we believe exists) and the world of appearances. He’s a virtuoso of paradoxes. That partly explains why he’s drawn to the woman’s film, with its focus on ordinary life, its domestic spaces, moral quandaries, political dimensions and tears. These films evoke what the critic Molly Haskell once described as “wet, wasted afternoons” and reveal what lies “beneath the sunny-side-up philosophy congealed in the happy ending.” She might as well have been talking about this movie.Written by Samy Burch — it’s her first produced screenplay — “May December” is a woman’s picture in a distinctly Haynesian key. As he has in some of his earlier films (“Far From Heaven,” “Carol”), Haynes at once embraces and toys with genre conventions. He uses beautiful images (and people), bursts of lush music, pointed metaphors and floods of feeling to provide the familiar pleasures of a well-told, absorbing narrative film, even as he picks it apart at the seams. This can create an uneasy dissonance, and there are instances when it seems as if you’re watching two overlaid movies: the original and its critique, a doubling that works nicely in “May December,” which soon becomes a labyrinthine hall of mirrors.Gracie’s character is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who in 1997 was arrested for having sex with one of her sixth-grade students, abuse that started when he was 12. She pleaded guilty to child rape and eventually served time in prison, where she gave birth to their first two children. (They later married.) The case generated a predictable tsunami of grotesque media slavering and found putatively serious journalists referring (and continuing to refer) to the sexual assault as a “tryst” and “forbidden love,” language that prettied up the crime as a passionate romance.Gracie rationalizes her relationship with Joe on her own terms, which emerge as Elizabeth gathers intel. As Elizabeth plays detective — she scans old tabloids, interviews family and friends — she helpfully establishes the back story. Gracie isn’t a teacher, and she and Joe met in a pet store, a seemingly incidental detail that takes on poignantly metaphoric resonance as the story unfolds. At one point, Elizabeth also accompanies Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) on a shopping trip. When the girl tries on a sleeveless dress, Gracie tells Mary she’s “brave” for baring her arms and not caring about “unrealistic beauty standards.” Mary looks crushed, Gracie oblivious and Elizabeth a bit stunned but oh-so fascinated.At this stage in her process, Elizabeth has begun to imitate Gracie’s gestures and expressions, a turn that Haynes expresses in the tricky shot that opens the shopping scene. As Mary tries on dresses, the women sit side-by-side facing the camera, two mirrors flanking them like drawn curtains. Because of the angles of the mirror, Elizabeth looks as if she’s seated between Gracie and Gracie’s reflection. It takes a beat to read the image and figure out why there are two Gracies, although as Elizabeth slips into character, suddenly there are three.Moore and Portman’s synced performances give the movie much of its weird comedy. Elizabeth guides you into the story, and you’re tagging along when she pulls up to her Savannah digs and later to Gracie and Joe’s home. Portman gives Elizabeth the studied agreeability of someone who has to work to present a friendly front, an effort that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever interviewed a bored film star. Elizabeth is quick to smile, but Portman shows you the character’s brittle affect, so that you see the flickers of hesitation in her eyes and twitches around her mouth. Mostly, you see that Elizabeth isn’t a very good actress. (Presumably that’s why when she tries out Gracie’s lisping voice, she evokes Madeline Kahn.)Gracie doesn’t need to put up a false front because her existence is nothing but a fully committed, melodramatically rich performance that Moore supplely delivers with alternating eerie calm and impressive histrionic mewling and caterwauling. Gracie has embraced her roles as a loving wife and doting mother, and seems to be living in a profound state of denial about what these roles have cost her husband and children, a lack of understanding (and remorse) that establishes the story’s inaugural moral crisis. It’s not at all clear, at first, if Gracie is lying to herself, blissfully self-unaware or just another garden-variety sociopath playing at the American dream, uncertainty that gives the story a frisson of mystery.Gracie and Elizabeth dominate the first half of “May December.” Then, almost imperceptibly, the focus shifts to Joe, and the story grows ever more serious, heavy and very, very sad. Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power. A stunted man-child with a hulking, ponderous body, Joe too has multiple roles as a father and husband, an object of desire and exoticized other. Yet none fit as persuasively, and he’s most at ease in the scenes of him with the Monarch butterflies he raises in little cages. It’s a sweet pastime and a potentially blunt metaphor, one that Haynes handles with enormous, moving delicacy, never more so than when these beautiful creatures emerge from their chrysalises and Joe tenderly watches them take flight.May DecemberRated R for references to the sexual abuse of minors and some adult nudity. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Sweet East’ Review: All-American Girl

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      Starring Talia Ryder and Simon Rex, this shape-shifting satire about modern American subcultures is a curious, and occasionally delightful, object if you can handle its flippant treatment of taboos.“The Sweet East,” a shape-shifting satire about modern American subcultures, is a curious — occasionally delightful — object. Its doe-eyed leading lady, Lillian (Talia Ryder), is like the reincarnation of her ostensible namesake, the silent film star Lillian Gish. Both are blank canvasses filled out by different kinds of American dreams. Not the gooey, aspirational sort, but the delusional kind that makes you question humanity’s worth even though you can’t look away.Echoing Gish’s most well-known role, as the victimized naïf in D.W. Griffith’s infamous Ku Klux Klan epic “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), this Lillian consorts with white supremacists, too — if only for a spell before she moves on to the next part.Treating taboos with the flippancy of an eye-rolling teenager, “The Sweet East” tracks the high schooler Lillian’s journeys around the northeastern seaboard. The film is directed by the veteran cinematographer Sean Price Williams (“Good Time”), who shot the film as well and employs grainy B-movie aesthetics.Mileage is sure to vary on the film’s picaresque antics. Lillian falls in with what Williams and the screenwriter Nick Pinkerton see as the most mockable crews: brain-fried anarchists in Washington, D.C.; a sexually repressed Muslim brotherhood in rural Vermont; navel-gazing filmmakers (Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris) in the Big Apple. This latter group casts Lillian as the star in their upcoming period movie about the construction of the Erie Canal, which features a meta heartthrob-du-jour played by Jacob Elordi.Pinkerton’s cheeky script flattens when it’s up against the crust-punk radicals and the jihadists; and at its strongest when skewering a neo-Nazi intellectual (Simon Rex) angling to make Lillian his child bride. This weirdly eloquent figure is played marvelously by Rex, who hits the right balance between sincerity and absurdity that other parts of the film sometimes bungle. Maybe it’s low hanging fruit that the white supremacist character is the best comic fodder, but the film’s trolling is stranger and more esoterically inclined than its selection of political punching bags would seem to warrant.The Sweet EastNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Family Switch’ Review: Out of Body Experiences for Everyone

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      Even Pickles the dog gets to trade places in this movie directed by McG, but there are no revelations or bursts of originality here.In a holiday-themed twist on “Freaky Friday,” Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms star as out-of-touch parents who suddenly find themselves occupying the bodies of their teenage children (Emma Myers and Brady Noon), and vice versa, in the Christmas comedy “Family Switch.”Jess and Bill Walker bring the whole over-scheduled family — their daughter, CC, is in the running for the U.S. national soccer team, and Wyatt, their older son, is a science prodigy who’s interviewing for Yale — to the Griffith Observatory to witness a rare planetary alignment.A chance encounter with a fortune teller (Rita Moreno, hamming it up) during the celestial event combines with a cosmic energy conversion so powerful that it zaps the Walkers into a triple body swap: Jess with CC, Bill with Wyatt, and their toddler, Miles, with Pickles, the French bulldog. They break the observatory telescope in the process, and fixing it, which will take a week, is the only way to reverse the spell.On top of CC’s soccer tryouts and Wyatt’s college interview, Jess is prepping for a major presentation on the job at an architecture firm, and Bill is set to perform with his cover band (Rivers Cuomo, Patrick Wilson and Brian Bell cameo as his bandmates) at the school holiday concert. Predictable antics ensue as the Walkers try and fail to excel in each other’s roles, and they soon realize that the telescope isn’t all that needs fixing.Loosely based on the picture book “Bedtime for Mommy” by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, “Family Switch” carries a surprisingly raunchy streak given its source material. But seeing that it’s directed by McG (“Charlie’s Angels,” “The Babysitter”), the gross-out humor shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The real nail in the coffin is the film’s messaging about the power of family, which is about as tacked-on and stilted as they come — hardly a shock in light of the rest of the Netflix holiday movie lineup.Family SwitchRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More