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      ‘The Mother and the Whore’: A Threesome and Then Some

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      Jean Eustache’s digitally restored 1973 film, now at Lincoln Center, is part of a full retrospective of his work.Jean Eustache’s unwieldy first feature “The Mother and the Whore” — a transfixing 215-minute talkathon, as well as a cause célèbre since its world premiere at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival — feels less like a masterpiece than a rogue asteroid careening toward your particular home planet.Shown at last year’s New York Film Festival, the 4K digital restoration is screening at Lincoln Center June 23-July 13 as part of a full Eustache retrospective.Eustache, a onetime critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, considered “The Mother and the Whore” autobiographical. Set in the aftermath of France’s May 1968 civil unrest, it concerns a ménage-à-trois. Alexandre, a voluble slacker played by the embodiment of Parisian youth, Jean-Pierre Léaud, is being kept by the slightly older Marie (Bernadette Lafont, herself a New Wave signifier) while he pursues a young, sexually liberated nurse, Veronika (Eustache’s former lover Françoise Lebrun).Alexandre is a creature of impulse and a monster of insistence. Adopting and discarding attitudes, he is given to absurd, self-hypnotizing rants that fascinate Veronika, charm Marie, and appall the viewer as when he holds forth on the satisfaction of washing dishes while watching Marie perform the chore.A dandy who reads Proust and listens to Édith Piaf, Alexandre is obsessed with the past, mainly the aborted revolution of 1968. He is also delusional. “What novel do you think you’re in?” exclaims a former girlfriend whom he has ambushed to make a manic proposal of marriage.Marie, sufficiently grounded to own a boutique (although she and Alexandre live like students with a mattress on the floor), is indulgent and emotional. Veronika, self-contained and frank about her active sex life, is perhaps as crazy as Alexandre. Certainly, as her final soliloquy reveals, she is the most desperate of the three. A neophyte actor caught between two icons, Lebrun delivers an extraordinary performance.“The Mother and the Whore” is largely conversations, in cafes, parked cars and bed. It is filled with movie references but, as suggested by Alexandre’s ex, feels as dense and psychologically resonant as a novel — maybe one by Dostoyevsky. Viewing despair through the prism of sex, the movie has things in common with “Last Tango in Paris,” including Léaud. It is, however, a more anguished and compassionate film. In not quite the last word, a petulant Marie puts on a scratched LP to serenade us with the jaunty bitterness of Piaf’s self-reflexive “Les Amants de Paris.”In 1974, “The Mother and the Whore” was brutally reviewed by the New York Times critic Nora Sayre, who lambasted the film as a reversion to “the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties.” There’s nothing particularly ’50s here except the black-and-white cinematography, but Sayre’s complaint is telling: “The discoveries of the last decade have been erased. Or else the sixties never happened.” Exactly. The movie is a eulogy.Eustache made several more personal features before killing himself in 1981. The French critic Serge Daney called him “an ethnologist of his own reality,” adding that Eustache gave a face to the “lost children” of May ’68: “Without him, nothing would have remained of them.”The Mother and the WhoreThrough July 13 at Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; filmlinc.org. More

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      Plot Twist at Turner Classic Movies Upsets Film Fans

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      The network’s owner, Warner Bros. Discovery, promised there would be little to no change for viewers despite budget cuts behind the scenes.For many people in Hollywood, including lions like Steven Spielberg, Turner Classic Movies is not a cable channel. It is an extension of their identity.And it took a beating this week.On Tuesday, the network, known as TCM, jettisoned its five most senior executives through a mix of buyouts and pink slips. The departed were Pola Chagnon, the general manager; Charlie Tabesh, the channel’s lead programmer; Genevieve McGillicuddy, who ran the annual TCM film festival; Anne Wilson, a production executive; and Dexter Fedor, a marketer.Warner Bros. Discovery, the network’s owner, promised that viewers would see little to no change on TCM. The channel will remain free of ads. “We remain fully committed to this business, the TCM brand and its purpose to protect and celebrate culture-defining movies,” Kathleen Finch, chairman and chief content officer for the company’s domestic networks group, wrote in a memo that was shared with news outlets.But the channel’s loyalists responded to the cuts with hellfire, interpreting them as a further marginalization of an art form and a personal attack.Our cinemas have been overrun by superheroes. Our film studios have fallen victim to corporate consolidation. FilmStruck, our streaming service for silent-era gems and noir classics, was shut down. And now you are gutting TCM, our last happy place, where Orson Welles is mercifully alive and well and “Key Largo” (1948) still counts as a summer blockbuster?Using an expletive, Ryan Reynolds sounded an alarm on Twitter, telling his 21 million followers that TCM was a fixture in his life and calling the channel “a holy corner of film history — and a living, breathing library for an entire art form.” Mark Harris, a journalist and film historian, called the cuts “a catastrophic talent purge.” Patton Oswalt, an actor and writer, took direct aim at David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, cursing him on Twitter and saying, “You couldn’t just leave this one alone?”Mr. Zaslav routinely describes himself as a colossal fan of classic cinema. He keeps TCM playing in his office, where he proudly works from the same desk used by Jack Warner, one of the studio’s founders. In recent months, Mr. Zaslav, who took over Warner Bros. last year, has been celebrating the studio’s 100th anniversary.Is it just an act?By late Wednesday, three Hollywood titans — Mr. Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson — had issued an unusual joint statement saying they had spoken to Mr. Zaslav and were “heartened and encouraged.”“We are committed to working together to ensure the continuation of this cultural touchstone that we all treasure,” the statement said. “Turner Classic Movies has always been more than just a channel. It is truly a precious resource of cinema, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And while it has never been a financial juggernaut, it has always been a profitable endeavor since its inception.”The directors added, “We have each spent time talking to David, separately and together, and it’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him.”The filmmakers said Mr. Zaslav, in fact, had privately reached out to them earlier in the week to discuss the restructuring of TCM. “We understand the pressures and realities of a corporation as large as WBD, of which TCM is one moving part,” the directors said. “Our primary aim is to ensure that TCM’s programming is untouched and protected.”Michael Ouweleen, the president of Cartoon Network and Discovery Family, will now oversee TCM.Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesIn a business sense, TCM is a financial footnote for Warner Bros. Discovery, an entertainment conglomerate with roughly 37,000 employees worldwide and $34 billion in annual revenue. But like every other media mogul, Mr. Zaslav is wrestling with a no-win situation: Cable television, which has long powered media conglomerates, is in terminal decline, meaning that operational costs must also go down. Budget cuts have affected all of the company’s many divisions.Fewer than 50 million homes will pay for cable or satellite service by 2027, down from 64 million today and 100 million seven years ago, according to a recent PwC report.So the belt tightening at TCM was more about preservation than annihilation, at least in Warner Bros. Discovery’s view. Ben Mankiewicz, Jacqueline Stewart and the other TCM hosts will continue in their roles, according to a spokeswoman. TCM will continue to pay for access to classic films from all studios; there is no plan to restrict the channel to Warner Bros. movies. TCM will also continue to be featured as a “brand hub” on Max, the company’s streaming service.Michael Ouweleen, the president of Cartoon Network, among other channels, will oversee TCM going forward. He is based in Atlanta. TCM was previously part of his portfolio on an interim basis.“Michael shares our passion for classic films and believes strongly in TCM’s essential role in preserving and spotlighting iconic movies for the next generation of cinephiles,” Ms. Finch said in her memo.Mr. Ouweleen might be smart to remember that, for TCM’s devotees, the network’s programming is less entertainment and more “the stuff that dreams are made of.” More

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      ‘The Country Club’ Review: Who’s Your Caddy?

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      The sisters Fiona and Sophia Robert wrote and star in this broad, pastel-colored golf comedy.It’s hard to make a golf comedy without evoking “Caddyshack,” the ribald 1980 classic starring Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, and with its crude humor, farcical innuendo and posh eponymous setting, “The Country Club” certainly warrants the comparison. But the influence the movie more obviously courts is early Wes Anderson, especially his sophomore feature “Rushmore”: The director Fiona Robert (who also co-wrote the film with her sister, Sophia Robert, both of whom star) leans heavily on Anderson’s unmistakable, easily imitated style, using rigidly symmetrical compositions, sudden zooms and a heightened pastel color palette. As if to underscore the similarities, the movie even opens with a handcrafted, pleasantly fastidious title sequence with credits inscribed on tees and golf balls that fairly exudes twee Andersonia.These visual flourishes, while derivative, are charming and well-realized. The writing, however, has none of Anderson’s wit, tending instead toward a kind of broad and fatuous slapstick that’s closer to “2 Broke Girls” than “The Royal Tenenbaums.”This story of a pair of working-class teenage interlopers crashing an upper-crust golf tournament has a predictable sitcom rhythm, and features expository monologues of astonishing clumsiness, such as this dud, from the working-class hero Elsa (Sophia Robert) to her sister, Tina (Fiona Robert): “I guess I’m just upset about dad getting laid off. College is so far out of reach now!” The jokes are scarcely better. There is a long, long, unfunny sequence involving flatulence. According to the credits, those noise effects were provided by the comedian Steve Higgins. They were not worth crediting.The Country ClubNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Here. Is. Better.’ Review: A Glimmer of Hope

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      Four military veterans go through PTSD treatments in this understated documentary.In 2018, Jason Kander, a rising star in politics who was running for mayor of Kansas City, suddenly dropped out of the race, of which he was the front-runner. Kander, a veteran who had spent time as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, announced that he would be seeking treatment for PTSD and depression.He recalls the internal battle that roiled within him for over a decade in “Here. Is. Better.,” a documentary that follows four military veterans who each undergo different forms of PTSD treatment. Kander is the most high-profile subject of the film, and, consequently, the clearest example of one of its primary points: Those suffering from PTSD are often fighting a war that is invisible to both the general public and the sufferers themselves, who regularly struggle to believe they are worthy — or in need of — help.Indeed, even as we see the film’s subjects describing and confronting horrific events, there is something painfully quiet about how the trauma looks from the outside. There are no breakdowns, exceptional stories or intensely dramatic moments (save for one visceral scene at a hockey game that the film does a disservice by overediting). Instead, the documentary, directed by Jack Youngelson, is about the slow, difficult work of reaching out, opening up and eventually finding a glimmer of hope, day by day.In this sense, Youngelson’s film is not formally spectacular and doesn’t necessarily pack the showiest emotional wallop. But those traits likely make it truer to the lives of these veterans, as full of silent courage as they are of tragedy.Here. Is. Better.Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Films’ Review: Small Bites’

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      From animated partygoers to real families embracing a name, this basket of goodies includes seven titles, among them comedy, tragedy and documentary.Every year, features from the Sundance Film Festival can become critical favorites — “Past Lives” is a notable example — but the fest’s shorter works can fade away. The “2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour” brings a seven-film omnibus to cinemas across the country, and Kayla Abuda Galang’s “When You Left Me on That Boulevard” alone is reason enough to see it.This lovely and funny short portrays a Filipino American family’s Thanksgiving get-together through the eyes of Ly, an introverted teenager who’s a daydreamer even before she gets stoned with her cousins. It’s a film that contains both bustling images and delicate vibes, inner-voice stillness and subtle soundscapes, all of which can flourish in a movie theater.Galang seems especially drawn to dialing into private spaces in social situations, for example when Ly talks about her boyfriend as if to herself, until a cut reveals she’s surrounded by family members. Ly can sound endearingly oblivious, but instead of having the actor play that tendency for cheap laughs, the writer-director picks up on the warmth in the room.Galang also looks out for different ways of showing how the family is together, whether it’s karaoke — the short’s title comes from a song Ly’s aunt belts out — or a cool split shot of kids and parents hanging out on either side of a wall. If past Sundance collections are any guide, this short might preview a feature, and Galang’s immersive exploration of inner and outer spaces makes one eager to watch what comes next.Family bonds weather transitions in a number of the shorts. “Parker,” from Catherine Hoffman and Sharon Liese, the sole documentary in this selection, teases out a rich, arduous history of Black experience in a decision by members of a family in Kansas City to adopt the same surname. Interviews with the parents and their children show the love, and the fears and trauma, that can be inscribed in a name, and the peace of mind and unity promised by their choice.Resembling vérité nonfiction, Crystal Kayiza’s “Rest Stop” follows a Ugandan-American mother traveling with her three children to join her estranged partner. Kayiza dwells on scenes that a feature might relegate to a montage, the better to sit with feeling unsettled and tired and scattered, but pushing ahead to another future. Liz Sargent’s “Take Me Home” is also a portrait in becoming, as an overwhelmed, cognitively disabled woman (played by Sargent’s real-life sister, Anna) sends an S.O.S. to her sister after years of relying on their ailing mother.Comedies are well-represented in the collection: “Pro Pool” feels like a trailer for itself as it churns through retail workplace humor, while the stop-motion animation “Inglorious Liaisons” fondly portrays a goofy teen party, wherein people have light switches for faces. But Aemilia Scott’s shrewdly written, well-cast opener to the program, “Help Me Understand,” turns a focus group of women testing detergent scents into a nervy experiment in hung-jury dynamics. Shifting gears from satire to a double-edged dissection of point of view, it’s a snappy way of prepping viewers for the multiplicity of voices to follow.2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film TourNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘God Is a Bullet’ Review: Cult, but Not Classic

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      A kidnapping cult regrets making off with a detective’s daughter in this wearyingly unsavory movie.I didn’t count the number of times a woman’s face is smashed — by a fist, a boot, a brick wall — in “God Is a Bullet,” Nick Cassavetes’s first feature in almost a decade. But the misogyny of the movie’s risibly sadistic villains is only one distasteful thread in this sleazy saga of rescue and revenge.Adapted by Cassavetes from Boston Teran’s 1999 novel of the same name, the plot centers on Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a mild-mannered detective, as he searches for the child-trafficking cult that has murdered his ex-wife and abducted his daughter. Impassive behind a despairing mustache, Bob welcomes the foulmouthed assistance of Case (Maika Monroe), a battle-hardened cult escapee. Case possesses intimate knowledge of the gang’s degenerate leader, Cyrus (a crazy-eyed Karl Glusman), for whom she has sacrificed several teeth and most of her self-respect.The searchers don’t have much of a plan, drifting through the dim rooms and dusty outposts where Cyrus and his acolytes might be found. Jamie Foxx, inexplicably named The Ferryman, is around to provide Bob with tattoos and ammunition, and an almost unrecognizable January Jones appears briefly as a sneering drunk whose pertinence remains vague — at least to anyone as numbed by the film’s viciousness as I was.Coming in at an interminable 155 minutes, “God Is a Bullet” has a punishing implacability. The acting is workmanlike, the settings are often ugly and the special effects — especially a grisly stomach-stapling — can only be described as strenuously specific. For Cassavetes, this may be as far from “The Notebook” as he is ever likely to get.God Is a BulletNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Revoir Paris’ Review: Recovering Fragments of Memory

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      In Alice Winocour’s taut film, a woman survives a terrorist and tries to piece together what happened that day and how it changed her.When Mia, the heroine of the tense French drama “Revoir Paris,” thinks about the night her life changed, her face seems to drain of all feeling, almost as if she were emptying it out. Months earlier, she survived a terrorist attack, but now she can’t remember much of what happened that evening. All she retains are vivid fragments — an image of a birthday cake ablaze with candles, the steady pounding of torrential rain — that she can’t piece together. The past may be a foreign country, but for Mia it’s one that also now lies partly in ruin.“Revoir Paris” is about grief and pain and pushing through to the next day. More centrally, it is about how trauma changes memory, sometimes shattering and distorting it. That makes it about storytelling and the stories that we tell to, and about, ourselves, which means that it’s about identity. The assault shapes Mia’s life and has come to define her: She’s now a survivor. Yet the catastrophe remains out of reach. “Maybe you’re not ready to talk,” a well-meaning friend says, not understanding that without her memories, Mia can’t yet fully tell her story.The movie opens on a day seemingly like any other, although there’s a pronounced elegiac cast to the instrumental music and the piercing violin notes. For Mia — an emotionally vivid Virginie Efira — it begins with morning coffee for her and a bowl of food for her cat. Then she’s off to her day job as a translator, winding through the streets on her Triumph motorcycle. (Yes, she is independent; yes, the make is too on point.) Later, she has dinner with her lover, Vincent (Grégoire Colin), a surgeon who’s soon called back to work. She heads home alone, but when it starts pouring, she stops in another bistro to get out of the rain.What happened next is the question — an empirical fact that the writer-director Alice Winocour skillfully turns into a taut existential mystery, one in which Mia is both the victim and the lead investigator. Part of what gives the mystery its power and feeling is that there’s a good chance you know exactly what took place: On Nov. 13, 2015, Islamic State extremists initiated a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris using guns and explosives. During the assault, 130 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded in locations across the city, including at the Bataclan concert hall. In interviews, Winocour has said that her brother was among the Bataclan concertgoers; he survived.“Revoir Paris” opens the morning of the attack, but soon after the assault ends, the story jumps forward several months. It resumes with Mia in a medical office, a doctor closely examining a jagged scar on her abdomen. She has been away from Paris and staying with her mother, an interlude that Winocour skips entirely. Instead, you follow Mia as she goes about her everyday life while beginning to reconstruct the night. As the past returns — in elliptical bursts and then in lengthier passages — Mia’s splintered memories gradually form a coherent whole, making her the author of a harrowing story within a story.Winocour’s approach is by turns discreet and direct. While Mia putters in her kitchen on the morning of the attack, for instance, she drops a wine glass on her floor, breaking it, an eerie foreshadowing of the shattered glass that will carpet the bistro floor hours later. Winocour largely avoids showing that night’s visceral horrors, abstaining from gruesome spectacle in favor of shocking pinpricks: the sound of a gasping scream, an image of a shoeless foot. Using all the tools at her disposal — narrative compression, sinewy camerawork, sharp editing, an ethereal score, stricken faces — Winocour powerfully conveys the unspeakable.As it develops, “Revoir Paris” becomes perilously overplotted. Mia connects with a group of survivors, including a teenager (Nastya Golubeva), whose parents died in the attack, as well as another unlucky restaurant patron (Benoît Magimel). The three share memories and sometimes more, forming an ad hoc support group as Mia sets out to find another survivor, Assane (Amadou Mbow), a search that takes her down unpersuasive byways. Yet even as Winocour piles on too many complications, she retains an appreciable astringency — call it a sense of emotional realism about what it means to actually survive — that keeps bathos at bay. Together with the superb Efira, she earns your tears honestly.Revoir ParisNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Oscars’ Best Picture Hopefuls Must Spend More Time in Theaters

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      To be eligible for the academy’s top prize, films will need to have an initial theatrical run of a week in one of six U.S. cities, and then expand to other cities across the country.In a move designed to signal Hollywood’s commitment to the moviegoing experience, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said on Wednesday that it would require an expanded theatrical release for films seeking to be eligible for a best picture nomination.The new eligibility rule is sure to affect how Netflix and other streaming services release films they consider to be Oscar worthy. And it could be an impediment to smaller distributors that lack the means to release films in cities across the United States.Oscar-oriented films have struggled mightily at the box office in recent years, making some people wonder if the importance of big screens has been forever altered by the streaming era. In 2022, “CODA” from Apple TV+ was the first film from a streaming service to win the best picture Oscar.To be eligible for a best picture nomination, films are already required to have an initial qualifying run in theaters, defined as a one-week release in one of six U.S. cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco or Miami). Beginning in 2024, those films will also need a theatrical presence for another seven days (either consecutive or nonconsecutive) in 10 of the top 50 U.S. markets, no later than 45 days after its initial release. Two of the 10 markets in the expanded release can be outside the United States if they are among the top 15 international theatrical markets.The move, voted on by the academy’s board of governors at its most recent meeting, is a clear attempt to prevent streaming companies like Netflix, which prefer to release films on their services with as little theatrical presence as possible, from eroding the moviegoing experience.“It is our hope that this expanded theatrical footprint will increase the visibility of films worldwide and encourage audiences to experience our art form in a theatrical setting,” the academy’s chief executive, Bill Kramer, and president, Janet Yang, said in a statement. “Based on many conversations with industry partners, we feel that this evolution benefits film artists and movie lovers alike.”For films released late in the year, the distributors must submit their plans for the expanded release. Those plans must be completed no later than Jan. 24, 2025, for the 2024 films.Netflix said the eligibility requirements would not have a significant effect on its release strategy. It noted that “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which was nominated for best picture this year, was released in 35 theaters in 20 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto. More