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      ‘Rimini’ Review: Just an Austrian Gigolo

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      The director Ulrich Seidl’s unsettling drama tracks the exploitative behaviors of an aging lounge singer, his fans and family members.With his stringy blond locks, his face puffy from the effects of routine boozing, Richie Bravo (Michael Thomas), the lounge-singer protagonist of Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini,” recalls Mickey Rourke’s aging brawler in “The Wrestler,” Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 drama. Richie is also miserable, clutching the memory of his past glory as an Austrian celebrity; now, he’s stuck in the gloomy Italian resort town of Rimini, where he performs power ballads for his geriatric fans, all German tourists, in tacky hotel conference rooms. Broke, he sleeps with some of these same adoring fans for extra dough.Seidl doesn’t have much in common with Aronofsky; “Rimini,” especially next to the hokey sentimentality of “The Wrestler,” is as severe as the titular coastal town’s foggy, frostbitten climate. Richie, for all his debonair charms, is not a “good” person, and Seidl isn’t interested in redeeming him, either.“Rimini” was conceived as part of a two-film project with the second installment, “Sparta,” about Richie’s younger brother, a nonpracticing pedophile who opens a summer camp for young boys in rural Romania. Last fall, a Der Spiegel report accused the director of subjecting nonprofessional child actors in “Sparta” to upsetting situations in his quest for authenticity. Seidl has dismissed these allegations, saying that the media manipulated the facts to create a more scandalous story, and adding that the children’s parents’ gave their consent. Upon publication of the Der Spiegel article, the world premiere of “Sparta” at the Toronto International Film Festival was canceled, though it went on to screen throughout Europe, where it will be theatrically released over the coming months.The news, however, may seem predictable given the filmmaker’s artistic preoccupations. His approach hews close to other European provocateurs like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier — and Seidl’s films, like “Import/Export” (2007) and the “Paradise” trilogy (which concluded in 2013), are tales of cruelty and exploitation, unflinchingly presenting bleak, often perverse scenarios. For Seidl, the modern world is rotten at its core, anchored to a history of violence that perpetuates more violence. When Richie visits his father, who has dementia, the two hum their favorite tunes — the son, his most popular love song; the father, a Nazi jingle.Like Rourke’s Randy, Bravo also reconnects with his estranged daughter, Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher), though she’s not interested in sharing sob stories over dinner. She wants cash, and she doesn’t care about the ethics of swindling her father — just as he doesn’t care about stealing from and blackmailing the elderly women drawn to his heartthrob act, and just as Seidl himself doesn’t care about using others as grist for the mill of his art practice. Relationships are transactional, if not outright phony.“Rimini” is grim, for sure, but there’s also something about its surface pleasures — its chintzy décor — that I find both captivating and disturbing. Seidl punctuates the drama with Richie’s live performances, his hulking body, dressed in dazzling blazers and fur coats, smack in the middle of the screen and framed by rainbow party streamers, pastel walls and fluorescent lights. Richie’s home is essentially a museum stocked with relics from the height of his fame (cardboard cutouts, platinum records, concert ads), a setup that makes for an attractive rental home — yet another way to milk his fans. Seidl’s penchant for flat, symmetrical images makes these settings look like playhouses and Richie look like yesteryear’s novelty figurine.We know there’s great tragedy and ugliness behind the smoke and mirrors, but we watch in amusement nonetheless. Sinisterly, Seidl reminds us how easy it is to turn people into objects for the taking.RiminiNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Moving On’ Review: Cracking Jokes and Settling Scores

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      Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda team up in an awkward comedy about two women contemplating the murder of a predatory man.Let me say right up front that I would happily watch Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda in anything — except for maybe that one about the football player. Their comic partnership, inaugurated back in 1980 with “Nine To Five” and honed during the seasons of “Grace and Frankie,” is one of the blessings of modern pop culture. It is certainly the main pleasure of “Moving On,” an otherwise thin and muddled new film directed by Paul Weitz.Weitz, who directed Tomlin in the sublime “Grandma” and the misguided “Admission” — the high points of his up-and-down filmography are still “About a Boy” and “In Good Company” — has a style that’s by turns genial and prickly. He embeds laughter in the possibility and sometimes the fact of real pain, and extends even his most wayward characters the benefit of the doubt.Tomlin and Fonda hardly need that. They play Evelyn and Claire, two college pals whose paths cross at the funeral of another old friend. Claire (Fonda), devoted to her pet corgi and a bit chillier with her daughter and grandson, travels from Ohio to Southern California with a sinister plan. She is going to murder the bereaved husband, Howard (Malcolm McDowell). Claire announces this to anyone who will listen, including Howard himself and Evelyn (Tomlin), who signs up as an accomplice.Howard seems like a generally unpleasant guy, but the reason for Claire’s grudge is grimly specific. It becomes clear fairly early on that “Moving On” is operating in strange and risky genre territory. If the phrase “rape-revenge comedy” sounds like an oxymoron, this movie won’t convince you otherwise. And even though you can’t help but root for the would-be killers to deliver a much-deserved comeuppance, this vengeance is oversweetened and served lukewarm.Fonda’s wary melancholy effectively communicates the persistence of trauma and Claire’s long-suppressed rage at the man who inflicted it. Tomlin, in the familiar role of bohemian sidekick — Evelyn is a retired cellist — is less flaky than Frankie, and not quite as steely as Elle in “Grandma.” “People think I’m being funny when I’m just talking,” Evelyn observes, which is a pretty good summary of Tomlin’s own comic genius.But Weitz’s script doesn’t give her that much to say, and wavers between silliness and social consciousness without making room for its story. There are reminiscences about the past, but no sense of the weight of lived experience. A few tender encounters — notably Claire’s romantic reconnection with her first husband, Ralph (Richard Roundtree) and Evelyn’s friendship with the gender-nonconforming grandson of a neighbor — gesture toward an emotional complexity that never fully blossoms.Something else is missing here — a farcical energy or satirical audacity that might shock the premise to unsettling life, or else a deeper, darker core of feeling. “Moving On” takes refuge in pleasantness, and in the easy charm of its stars. Who are, as I’ve said, consistently enjoyable to watch. Which might be the problem.Moving OnRated R. “Rape-revenge comedy.” Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Inside’ Review: Tortured Artist, Meet Tortured Man

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      Willem Dafoe stars as an art thief who gets trapped in a penthouse in this drama.The art thief (a brutish Willem Dafoe) trapped in a megamillionaire’s extravagant loft knows the value of the bronze wedge he’s damaging in a desperate attempt to pry open the door. It’s one of the few pieces he intended to steal from the smart home before its security pad failed and the exits locked shut. But Vasilis Katsoupis, the director of the stark survival thriller “Inside,” deliberately withholds that the makeshift crowbar is meant to be the Lynn Chadwick piece “Paper Hat,” last auctioned at 2.5 million pounds. Katsoupis prefers his moral challenge incalculable: Do we want the art to endure or the criminal?Playing fair, the filmmaker also refuses to share details about the burglar. Blessedly, there are no flashbacks to the robber’s mother, no panic about a spouse or cat, and not much voice-over aside from a couple of lines establishing that the man once fancied himself an artist, too. I wouldn’t have known his name was Nemo if not for the end credits — good thing, as I’d have giggled when he made sashimi of the tropical fish.The logic behind Nemo’s captivity doesn’t gel. (Alarm sirens screech with not one visit from the security desk? Who do they summon, Batman?) Katsoupis and the screenwriter Ben Hopkins aren’t concerned with making a credible heist caper. Katsoupis is more of a snotty provocateur with the elegance to posture as deep. He sneers at the rich, stocking the stony apartment with futile luxuries that give it the feel of a pharaoh’s tomb. The fridge contains only caviar, truffle sauce and booze; worse, it blares the “Macarena” to remind users to shut the door. (There are just three musicians on the film’s soundtrack — John Cage, Radiohead, and those forbidden dancers Los Del Rio — the cinematic equivalent of a challenge on “Chopped.”) At the same time, the fritzing control system cuts the water and cranks the heat to 106 degrees. So-called smart tech — the practical opposite of fine art — is the closest thing to a villain. This computer isn’t self-aware like Hal 9000. Still, Stanley Kubrick would say he warned us not to hand our house keys to Siri.The contemporary art curator Leonardo Bigazzi shrewdly selected the work that lines the walls. A photo of a duct-taped man mocks the prisoner’s plight. Overpriced neon tubes are there so we can look forward to seeing them smashed. Our knee-jerk guesstimations of worth are continually pranked. Take when a starving Nemo finds a few oranges. They’re moldy. (Worthless.) Wait, they’re concrete sculptures. (Insultingly worthless!) Nemo hurls the concrete at the windows. (Oh! Maybe they’re useful after all?) A hungry man can’t care that the oranges’ sculptor, Alvaro Urbano, intended to comment on cultural rot during the Franco dictatorship.So it’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence. Plus, he’s the rare movie star with the kind of brutal bone structure that would have inspired the Expressionist painter Egon Schiele — who has several pieces here — to grab his paintbrush. (The unpleasant close-up of Nemo’s bowel movements in the bathtub, however, only works as a nod to Andres Serrano.)The film abandons its tempo somewhere after the eighth sunset, when the days begin to blend together and Katsoupis slathers on unnecessary hallucinations. When boredom sets in, we’re offered the silence to contemplate our own definition of art as Nemo the criminal evolves into Nemo the creator. His towering escape contraptions are tools. His haunting wall doodles are therapy. They’re both awarded as much reverence as everything with a price tag.InsideRated R for nude and crude imagery. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Boston Strangler’ Review: Chasing a Killer (and a Byline)

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      Keira Knightley plays a dogged journalist in this colorless true-crime drama streaming on Hulu.You don’t have to look further than the pedestrian title to guess that Matt Ruskin’s “Boston Strangler” is a spiritless affair. That title is a sigh of resignation, an I-have-nothing moan, a cold shoulder to the movie’s stars. Apparently, it doesn’t even warrant a definite article.Those stars — including Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon and Chris Cooper — probably expected better when they signed on for this trudge through a true-crime tale inspired by the infamous 1960s killings. Knightley plays Loretta McLaughlin, an ambitious lifestyles reporter with a yen for a zestier beat, who connects the dots between the first three murders and shames Boston homicide detectives into (albeit reluctantly) doing their jobs.The role is perfect for Knightley, who has always been able to slot seamlessly into earlier eras. But Ruskin’s wan, emotionless screenplay — shockingly bloodless for a movie about more than a dozen murders — fails to give the character a single believable relationship. Not with her silent children or supportive husband (Morgan Spector), who flicker on the film’s margins, symbols of domesticity denied. Nor with her testy boss (Cooper), who considers the dead women “nobodies” and would like McLaughlin to get back to her toaster reviews. And not with the more savvy journalist (Coon) who becomes McLaughlin’s partner-in-sleuthing.Despite the film’s flaccid gestures toward the sexism of the period — to boost sales, the women’s pictures are added to their bylines — “Boston Strangler” is a dreary, painfully stylized slog. Scared women scurry down cobbled streets; unseen dogs bark in the night. Washed in an unappetizing sludge of grayish green, the movie aims for serious and settles on bilious. The real McLaughlin was a fascinating, pioneering newshound; you’re unlikely to find her here.Boston StranglerRated R for posed corpses and sickly complexions. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Drylongso’ Review: Extraordinary

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      Cauleen Smith’s 1998 movie, set in Oakland in the mid-90s, remains a vivid and prescient feature debut.“Drylongso” is a Gullah-language-derived word rooted in the African American coastal communities of Georgia and South Carolina that, over time, has come to mean “ordinary.” Yet the artist Cauleen Smith’s newly restored and rereleased 1998 feature debut, about a young photographer living with her mother and grandmother in Oakland, Calif., is anything but. Or, rather, the ordinary here has value beyond the same ol’. It’s evocative, tender and rooted — all descriptions of Smith’s film, too.By day, Pica (Toby Smith) studies art. By night, she avoids her mother’s smoky card parties by wheat-pasting activist fliers. A television in the room of her neglected grandmother warns of a serial killer targeting young Black men and women. But Pica is already acutely aware of peril: The headstrong student has been taking Polaroids of young Black men and bringing them to her 35mm-focused photography course. She’s documenting these men because, she tells her professor (played by Salim Akil, who wrote the film alongside Smith), they are in danger of becoming extinct.Smith braids politics, friendship and romance throughout “Drylongso.” Pica befriends a young woman, Tobi (April Barnett), after witnessing her being violently kicked to the curb by a male companion. The next time Tobi and Pica cross paths, Tobi has gone incognito in male garb. A potential suitor, Malik (Will Power), rides his bike, hawks homemade T-shirts and asks Pica repeatedly, “When you gonna take my picture, girl?”Loss will intervene. So will art. It’s not a mystery why this quiet wonder was lost in the Black cinema boom of the 1990s. The movie is rough-hewn as an artistic choice but also out of financial necessity; its D.I.Y. aesthetic mirrors the found scrap Pica uses to make meaningful memorials. But with its themes of Black endangerment (for both males and females) and its nuzzling of many genres (horror, romance, buddy flick), “Drylongso” returns to us utterly, subtly, chidingly prescient.DrylongsoRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ Review: Hit and Run, Sleight of Hand

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      Wen Shipei’s first feature is a twisty and sophisticated debut whose best trick of misdirection is convincing us we’re watching a different kind of movie.If the movies have taught us anything, it’s that the cover-up is worse than the crime. For instance, if you accidentally hit someone with your van, don’t go back to scene, roll the body into a ditch, then drive away, as the protagonist of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” does. Things will not go the way you hoped.We know this, but if the premise of “Lonesome” feels a little familiar, the director Wen Shipei still manages to keep us guessing. Part exploration of the ravages of guilt, part homage to the stylish Hong Kong gangster flicks of the 1990s, “Lonesome” (written by Wen with Noé Dodson, Wang Yinuo and Zhao Binghao) wears its influences on its sleeve but is a stylish and sophisticated debut feature.An opening image of a bull escaping captivity seems at first to indicate that we have entered a world of easy symbolism. There we meet a prisoner named Xueming (Eddie Peng), who narrates a story of when he, a former air-conditioning repairman, committed a hit-and-run in 1997. As fate appears to have it, his victim was married to a customer (Sylvia Chang), who becomes an unlikely friend. And now we seem also to have entered a world of easy coincidence, or at least classical tragedy.Wen has great talent, however, for misdirection — not only with the plot, though he does that, too (not always as successfully; sometimes clever is just confusing). More important, he has fooled us about what kind of movie we’re watching. It is one in which the characters, even the bull, are subject not to the whims of gods and metaphors but to their own compulsions and machinations. Every action has its consequence, every phenomenon its cause.Are You Lonesome Tonight?Not rated. In Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Rodeo’ Review: The Good, the Bad and the Kids on Motorbikes

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      This naturalistic drama from France follows a young woman as she immerses herself in the underground world of urban motorbiking — it’s a seductive thrill-ride that falters as a character study.Julie Ledru plays a young woman immersed in the world of underground urban rodeo in “Rodeo.”Music Box Films“Rodeo” may revolve around a found family of adrenaline junkies and high-velocity heists, but “The Fast and the Furious” it is not. Instead, the debut narrative feature by the director Lola Quivoron has the feel of a docufiction, inspired by the urban rodeos of the French suburbs, a kind of youth subculture prevalent in lower-income communities in which motorbike riders take over streets, race and pull risky stunts.It’s not an uncommon activity in the States, but in France, these rowdy gatherings are especially popular — and furiously loathed. The good and the bad comes through in Quivoron’s naturalistic drama, which follows a disgruntled, semi-homeless young woman, Julia (Julie Ledru), as she immerses herself in the scene and joins a criminal posse led remotely by the incarcerated Domino (Sébastien Schroeder).Filled with rousing rodeo footage and gleeful getaways, the film portrays the anarchic thrill of motorbiking with seductive grit, its smoky blue images, shot by the cinematographer Raphaël Vandenbussche, recalling the atmospheric thrillers of Michael Mann. These visceral moments evoke the sense of empowerment motorbiking creates for otherwise underprivileged — young, primarily Black and brown — people. But the danger is palpable as well.Ledru’s gruff performance gives Julia the devil-may-care swagger of a young Michelle Rodriguez, though an early violent event — a fiery rodeo accident resulting in the death of a crew member — reveals a dormant sensitivity and a longing for camaraderie.“Rodeo” pivots to action-movie territory in the last act when Domino takes Julia — a savvy thief — up on a scheme involving a freight truck loaded with shiny new bikes. But for the most part the scattered script careens around various lackluster intrigues: Julia’s rivalry with one of Domino’s other lackeys, her fraught family life and, most important, the friendship she strikes up with Domino’s wife, Ophélie (Antonia Buresi). The guarded Julia certainly intrigues, but too often the film sinks into the clichés of a rugged character study — no wonder she prefers to accelerate.RodeoNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wildflower’ Review: The Parents Are All Right

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      A snarky teenager navigates her loving but complicated relationship with two intellectually disabled parents in the coming-of-age comedy “Wildflower.”Bea Johnson (Kiernan Shipka), the protagonist of the plucky coming-of-age film “Wildflower,” is a snarky high school senior whose future holds great promise. However, Bea begins the film with a slight problem, one she is quick to brush off. Bea is in a coma.Bea hardly shows any true concern that she’ll eventually wake up. But this flimsy conceit enables the film to jump back in time, to tell the story of how a teenager became so confident in her ability to take care of herself.In voice-over, Bea explains that both of her parents are intellectually disabled. Bea narrates the film in flashback, beginning when her father, Derek (Dash Mihok), and her mother, Sharon (played by the disabled actress Samantha Hyde), married in a whirlwind romance. This left the family matriarchs, Peg (Jean Smart) and Loretta (Jacki Weaver), to worry over the fates of their respective children. Peg wanted the pair to divorce, and Loretta wanted them to be sterilized. In the end, neither happened, and Bea was born.This initial face-off establishes that despite the film’s light, sardonic tone, the discussions that it includes about its disabled characters are blunt and often cruel. And as a child, Bea engages in her own internal debates. She wants to defend her parents against school bullies, but she’s also ashamed to bring a boy home. She resists her extended family’s offers to take her in, but she also expresses resentment toward her parents over the difficulty of moving out to go to college.Shipka ably handles the responsibility of leading the story, but the director Matt Smukler has a harder time balancing the charming and empathetic ensemble performances with the script’s constantly judgmental tone. “Wildflower” is a nervy sit, a movie that eventually makes its way toward acceptance, but only after putting its disabled characters through the trial of dehumanizing questions.WildflowerRated R for language and references to teenage sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More