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      ‘April’ Review: A Doctor’s Dilemma

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      In this, her second feature, the Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili takes on the risks faced by an obstetrician who performs kitchen-table abortions.The visually arresting drama “April” is filled with naked and clothed female bodies that are, in turn, possessed by desire, racked by pain, and isolated by convention and otherworldly mystery. It’s a heavy, serious and studiously elusive movie filled with handsome images and troubled by the inexplicable presence of a humanoid creature in weird female form. This entity gives “April” a supernatural sheen, yet the movie is rooted in the material world, in the here and now, in flesh and fluids. Its concern is the haunted faces of women struggling to care for the children they already have and seeking to terminate the pregnancies they don’t want.These faces often turn to Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician who works in a rural hospital in the country of Georgia. Sharp, empathetic, determined and tightly coiled, Nina has the sober confidence of a battle-tested veteran. She has also attracted the kind of resentment that professional women at times endure through no fault of their own. She lives alone and, at first, she seems OK with this even if she doesn’t seem to have friends, only patients and a former lover. Still, loneliness clings to her like a shroud; it’s as palpable as the danger she faces when she drives off to perform an abortion, which she often does in people’s homes.“April” was written and directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, who likes minimal dialogue, long takes, narrative ellipses and really big bangs. There’s one near the start of her feature directing debut, “Beginning” (2020), set largely in the aftermath of a church bombing. In “April,” it’s the death of an infant during childbirth that shakes up this world. The birth scene is genuine — there are two in the movie — and it jolts the story into gear. The hospital begins an investigation, drawing unwanted attention to Nina’s work quietly providing abortions. (The procedure is legal in Georgia, but stigmatized.) She fights back, insisting that she did nothing wrong. “Other than my job,” she says at one point, “I have nothing to lose.”It’s a sad, persuasive line, and a memorably blunt admission. Even so, Nina sounds more matter of fact than anguished or desperate, even if the person she’s talking to is her ex, another doctor, David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who’s been tasked with leading the investigation. What’s most notable about this exchange isn’t what the two characters say and the emotional restraint you hear in their voices. Rather, it’s how Kulumbegashvili stages and shoots the scene, which begins with Nina offscreen and the camera solely trained on David, who’s hunched over on a couch in a cheerless hospital room. Only partway through their conversation does Nina enter the shot, standing still as David rises to embrace her.Here and elsewhere, Kulumbegashvili takes a modestly stylized approach to a seemingly ordinary setup, which nibbles away at the overall realism. Nina and David sound comfortable with each other, but the staging suggests there’s a chasm separating them. When he wraps his arms around her, it takes a few beats for her to fully return his hug. It’s as if she were out of practice, or a performer briefly flubbing her cue. Her physical stiffness is as telling as some of the dialogue, which fills in a bit of their back story. Kulumbegashvili, however, isn’t interested in rekindling their romance. Her focus is on Nina, who — as the investigation develops and other characters enter — comes into view, even as she becomes increasingly enigmatic.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

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      ‘The Accountant 2’ Review: Ben Affleck’s Revenge of the Killer Nerd

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      Affleck returns as a brilliant C.P.A. who moonlights as a mysterious, gun-toting fixer and gets help from his little bro, played by Jon Bernthal.“The Accountant 2” is a blithely nonsensical, enjoyably vulgar follow-up to “The Accountant” (2016) about a numbers whiz played by Ben Affleck, who has impeccable marksmanship and shaky people skills. Like the first movie, the sequel embraces violence without apology, slathers the screen with (fake) blood and unleashes a small army of stunt performers who convincingly play dead. This one has another complicated intrigue and a great deal of plot, though most of the tension comes from watching Affleck struggle to suppress a smile while sharing the screen with an exuberantly showboating Jon Bernthal.The sequel picks up eight years after the first movie introduced Affleck’s Christian Wolff, a brilliant autistic forensic accountant who moonlights as a freelance avenger with help from friends. (The movie’s breezy embrace of cliché includes the stereotype of the autistic savant.) J.K. Simmons shows up as Ray King, the former director of the Treasury Department’s criminal investigations unit. He briefly enters wearing a cap and soon exits without a pulse, though not before setting the story in motion. Cue the gunfire and choreographed chaos, as well as amnesia, plastic surgery, trafficked women, child hostages and a miscellany of villains, ones who are cruel enough to bring out (and amply stoke) the audience’s bloodlust.King’s successor, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), re-enters afterward to help nudge the story forward as does Christian’s younger brother, Braxton (Bernthal). Everything (and everyone) flows together more or less, even when the story strains credulity, as B-movie shoot-em-ups often do. It helps that there’s less back story here than in the first movie, which revisited Christian’s brutal childhood and his Oedipally nurtured violent skill set. That frees up the filmmakers — like the first movie, this was written by Bill Dubuque and directed by Gavin O’Connor — to focus on keeping all the people and parts nicely moving. Among these is Affleck, whose controlled, inward-directed performance holds the center.One irresistible draw of a diversion like this is that while its good guys are often bad, its bad guys are assuredly worse. Both Christian and especially Braxton have obvious moral failings (ha!), but their kill counts are never the problem, which puts them in fine, crowded company. American movies love gunslingers, after all, whether they have Texas or British accents, wear white hats or gray ones like Christian. Among these are the seemingly ordinary men — blue-collar types, next-door dads, computer jockeys — who, when hard push comes to brutal shove comes to catastrophic violence, will take off their glasses à la Clark Kent to transform into near-mystically gifted avengers. They lock and load, restoring order to a broken world.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Death, Taxes and Ben Affleck: ‘The Accountant’ Gets a Sequel

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      In the movie class of 2016, “The Accountant” was a wild-card.It told an original story for adults, breaking from the family-friendly intellectual property derivatives that crowded the top of the box office charts. And though it resembled a durable breed of man-on-a-mission action thrillers, it had an absurdist, gleefully dorky twist — Ben Affleck playing a neurodivergent bookkeeper and consigliere to the criminal underworld.Audiences responded. “The Accountant” outperformed expectations in theaters, earning $155.5 million globally (according to Box Office Mojo), and was the No. 1 most rented movie of 2017 (according to Comscore), ahead of “Moana,” “Wonder Woman” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.”Nine years and a change of studios later, a sequel, “The Accountant 2,” arrives on Friday, with Affleck and much of the original cast (Jon Bernthal, J.K. Simmons, Cynthia Addai-Robinson) returning, along with the director Gavin O’Connor and the screenwriter Bill Dubuque. In two conversations — one at South by Southwest in March, before the film’s premiere there, and another virtually earlier this month — Affleck, O’Connor and Dubuque discussed regaining the rights to the story, the definition of success and a potential idea for a third film.These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Affleck, right, with Jon Bernthal in “The Accountant 2.”Amazon StudiosBill, you wrote the script for the first “Accountant” independently — before an actor or a director was involved. Where did the main character, Christian Wolff, come from?BILL DUBUQUE I know people who are on the spectrum, and I thought something like this might be interesting; I’ve always been interested in how the brain works. I thought we could take this character who has a certain set of skills, a certain set of vulnerabilities, and not make him a victim but put him in a situation that was entertaining and where you felt something for him.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      An Ode to the Blues’ Many Guises, Inspired by ‘Sinners’

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      Listen to an imagined set list for a supernatural juke joint featuring Albert King, Outkast, Cécile McLorin Salvant and more.D’AngeloZackary Canepari for The New York TimesDear listeners,I’m James, a software engineer with The New York Times’s interactive news desk and an occasional contributor to Culture. I cajoled my way into this space this week after being captivated by the musical ideas pulsing through “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending vampire flick that’s also a tone poem about Black love and pain, and the power and cost of Black creativity.In an arresting scene, a transcendent blues musician plays so fiercely, he summons ancestors and progeny to a Mississippi juke joint in 1932. Suddenly and seamlessly, Jim Crow-era sharecroppers, B-boys from the ’90s, Chinese folk dancers, African griots and funk musicians from the ’70s are all together, reveling to the same kinetic sound. It’s a visual expression of Black music’s shared DNA.My girlfriend and I spent all weekend analyzing that scene, pondering the blues’ connections to what came before and since. Here are 11 songs I could imagine on the set list at a supernatural juke joint unbounded by technology, geography or time.If he don’t dig this, he got a hole in his soul,JamesListen along while you read.1. Albert King: “Cold Feet”This infectious stomper from 1967 would set a warm vibe early in the interdimensional party, satisfying fans of the Mississippi-born blues luminary and the ’90s hip-hop heads who’d recognize it as the foundation of Chubb Rock’s “Just the Two of Us.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Ozu Created His Own Cinematic Language

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      The greatest filmmaker of postwar Japan found a new way to show life onscreen.MONO NO AWARE, a phrase that translates to “the pathos of things,” or something like “the beauty of transience,” has been a key aesthetic principle of Japanese art and philosophy for centuries. In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the most famous of which are quiet domestic dramas set in Tokyo after World War II, that feeling is often manifested in what critics have come to call pillow shots: Every so often, the camera cuts away from the main action to a nearby object — a tree stirred by wind, a vase near a moonlit window, a passing train. It isn’t usually the case that a character in the movie is meant to be seeing that object at that moment, as another director might imply. Rather it’s the filmmaker who’s gently guiding our perspective away from the action, reminding us of the material world that persists outside of the story’s concerns. Ozu once spoke in an interview about deliberately leaving “empty spaces” in his movies as a means of revealing “the hidden undercurrents, the ever-changing uncertainties of life.” More

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      in Television

      Monsters Plague Japan. But What Do They Mean?

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      How ancient history and modern calamities have cultivated a national obsession with menacing creatures.HIROSHIMAON A BLUSTERY afternoon last November, I stood on the esplanade of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park listening to the solemn gong of the Peace Bell as English and American tourists rang it again and again. A traditional Japanese bell made of oxidized metal, it has a pendular log that strikes at the atomic symbol engraved on its side as if to banish that evil from the earth. A few feet away, a group of Japanese schoolboys stood laughing and gamboling, hanging on each other as schoolboys do everywhere. More

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      in Television

      When Real Life Calls for a Cheesy Rom-Com Gesture

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      The big boombox moments in Hollywood films are cliché. Yet they can also sustain love in real life.The second time I fell in love, before it began to go well, it went very badly. After only a couple of conversations over coffee, I showed up at my beloved’s apartment and confessed the depth of my feelings — to which she responded, with heartbreaking nonchalance, “Um … what do you expect me to say?” I was so devastated that, in trying to flee, I inadvertently stormed right past her front door and straight into her hallway closet. On my way home, I almost walked into the path of a moving train, then verbally abused the subway conductor for daring to warn me about it. That night I drank an entire bottle of wine, watched the 2005 film adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” for the umpteenth time and cursed my sorry fate.Yes, I know. You don’t have to tell me what I looked like.What did I think I would accomplish, pulling some cheesy rom-com move, as if my life were “Say Anything” or “When Harry Met Sally”? Had Hollywood turned me into a tacky derivative? Relationship advice is awash with warnings to not be duped by films. We poor schlubs out in the world don’t have teams of writers scripting our happy endings, experts caution — and so taking inspiration from rom-coms’ corny gestures just sets ourselves up for disappointment.And it’s true that real life does not tolerate clichés. Falling for someone is a highly individual experience. An unassuming widow’s peak, the sound of their vowels when they’re running late — it’s small, specific details that stoke and justify desire (and that sent me marching to my beloved’s doorstep that night). When we are fervently in love, wrote the novelist Stendhal, “everything is a symbol.” If you have ever disapproved of a friend’s partner, then you were not seeing the same symbols your friend was. But so then, if nothing is more unique than a love affair, how come so many of us watch Nicholas Sparks’s films with the same generic scenes of rain-kissing and love-declaring?It’s because underneath a rom-com’s boilerplate narrative structures, there is extreme passion and ardor and desperation — and all of that is very true to what the actual nonmovie experience of falling in love feels like. Rom-coms resonate with us because we do see ourselves in them: They function as mirrors through which we can pinpoint and understand our own amorphous feelings. And their sweeping gestures also provide encouragement for us to turn our passions into concrete action.I have never seen anyone kiss a lover in the pouring rain — in real life, cold rainstorms are no aphrodisiac — but I have witnessed a grown man get down on bended knee and belt out the worst Nickelback cover. His girlfriend, who hates Nickelback, adored it. I was raised by a man who, after a decade of friendship with a woman, got drunk and flew across the country so he could tell her that he couldn’t wait a moment longer to be together. Years later, my mother’s brother was almost arrested for loudly declaiming his regret outside his wife’s window in the middle of the night. (At least he didn’t use a boombox.)As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann put it, “Showing that one could control one’s passion would be a poor way of showing passion.” I may have made a clown of myself when I showed up out of the blue to declare my love, but nothing else I could have done would have demonstrated the bigness of my feelings more clearly. And I don’t think I would have had the courage to try had I not been bred on a steady diet of finely calibrated melodrama.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pope Francis, Unlikely Movie Star: From ‘Conclave’ to ‘Francesco’

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      In fictional tales and documentaries, directors approached him as a screen character who was both admired and controversial.Watching Edward Berger’s hit Vatican thriller “Conclave” last year, I found it hard not to think of Pope Francis. The film is fictional, based on Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, published three years into Francis’s papacy. But one key character in the film is a Mexican archbishop working in Kabul, a reformer calling on the church to focus on those marginalized and historically excluded by the institution.Plenty separated the “Conclave” character from the sitting pope, who died on Monday, the day after Easter. But such a simple yet eloquent onscreen activist could recall only Francis, the first Latin American cleric to assume the papacy. He drew both admiration and controversy, based largely on his concern for the poor, immigrants and refugees; his calls for environmental stewardship; and his efforts on behalf of gay and lesbian Catholics. That work inflamed more conservative wings of the church while endearing him to many, Catholic or not, who saw a new way forward in his life and teachings.And that also made the pope an unlikely movie star. Francis may have been the most cinematic pope, with fictional and documentary representations of him proliferating during his 12-year papacy. Some of those films were made by and for Catholics, like the 2013 documentary “Francis: The Pope From the New World,” produced by the Knights of Columbus; Beda Docampo Feijóo’s 2015 “Francis: Pray for Me,” a biographical drama about his pre-papal days; and Daniele Luchetti’s 2015 “Chiamatemi Francesco,” or “Call Me Francis,” which concentrated on his work as “the People’s Pope.”But many of these movies weren’t really aimed at an audience of the devout. Instead, they show the source of Francis’s wider appeal. His attention to issues of social and cultural import gave filmmakers a way to approach him as a screen character, not just a religious leader. Here are six such films, which help frame Francis’s legacy and illuminate why he made such an appealing subject.‘Pope Francis: A Man of His Word’ (2018)Buy or rent it on digital platforms.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More