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      ‘Juniper’ Review: Bad Grandma

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      Starring Charlotte Rampling, this New Zealand-set drama is a portrait of intergenerational bonding with a heavy dose of cynicism.“Gin to here, water to here, and a squeeze of lemon,” says Charlotte Rampling’s wheelchair-using Ruth, pointing to an empty jug that she refills with her boozy cocktail of choice three or four times a day. In this scene, she’s gesturing to her scowling grandson, Sam (George Ferrier), a boarding school brat whose antics cause his father to send him to grandma’s rural abode as punishment.Set in 1990s New Zealand, “Juniper,” Matthew J. Saville’s debut feature, is half coming-of-age story, half swan song, anchored in a process of intergenerational bonding.Ruth and Sam have never really spent time together — and the first few days are particularly rough, filled with barbs and shattered glasses. Predictably, their relationship softens up, but the film nevertheless maintains some of its prickly charm, in no small part because of the feisty Rampling, whose ice-queen persona here straddles bone-dry humor and withering tragedy.Both Sam and Ruth are embittered by loss and a sense of alienation, thus their shared tendencies toward self-harm — Sam with his suicidal ideations and Ruth with her relentless drinking. Ruth would be an archetypal “cool” grandma were it not for her haughty bite and startling directness. Still, she winds up spoiling her grandson in the only ways she knows how: throwing Sam and his pals a kegger; buying him new clothes to improve his chances of scoring. Their eventual tenderness is palpable, though deepened by bleakness: Sam has to carry his grandmother to dance, because she will never be able to walk again. In the hospital, after a health scare, he brings her a pouch of gin — the taste of rubber adds a nice touch, Ruth claims.Less convincing is Saville’s scattered buildup to a resolution as Sam works through past dramas related to his absent father and his mother’s death. This balancing act between sentimentality and cynicism often feels wobbly. Nevertheless, Ruth’s send-off is a powerful one, and Rampling proves to be the ideal vessel for its provocative implications.JuniperNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Yanagawa’ Review: Her Spell

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      Two brothers reconnect over a lost love in this drama from the Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu.In the first scene of “Yanagawa,” a free-spirited Beijing bachelor, Lidong (Zhang Luyi), bums a cigarette from a stranger and blurts out that he has stage four cancer. But the actor delivers this devastating news so blithely that it’s not clear whether he really means it. It’s the first in what becomes a series of confusing moments in this art house drama from the Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu (“Desert Dream”). Lidong convinces his cocky, unhappily married brother, Lichun (Xin Baiqing), to reconnect for a trip to Yanagawa, Japan. What ensues is a meandering rehash of Lidong and Lichun’s mutual romantic obsession with a long-lost childhood friend, Chuan (Ni Ni), who has grown into a beautiful, mysterious singer living in Yanagawa.If you’re looking for character arcs, surprises or narrative coherence, you’re likely to be disappointed by “Yanagawa.” But this is a Haiku of a movie, so better to fix your eyes on the characters walking into and out of the edges of the frame, the precise blocking and the prolonged continuous shots where each cut blends seamlessly into the next — not to mention the picturesque immersion into the film’s eponymous town.The camera, driven by the resounding technical control of Zhang and the cinematographer Park Jung-hun, is all-knowing and all-important. It effectively assumes the omniscient voice of a silent narrator. You’ve probably never watched with more interest as someone walks down a long hallway with their back to the camera, a visual refrain that happens repeatedly in “Yanagawa” yet feels inventive each time. The beats of the plot, then, become tangential to the overall impact of the film: It’s a quiet, elemental nourishment of the senses.YanagawaNot rated. In Chinese and Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. Watch on Film Movement Plus. More

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      ‘Bruiser’ Review: Of Fathers and Fractures

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      A teenage boy is caught between the man who raised him and a new guiding figure in this affecting study of masculinity and coming of age.Three figures lie on the grass, their bodies splayed out as if unconscious, before one of them, the smallest of the trio, gets up and leaves. The shot, fading in at the start of “Bruiser,” is a visual metaphor of sorts — the image never recurs in the film, but serves as a tableau for this affecting study of masculinity, fatherhood and coming of age.A confident feature debut from the director Miles Warren, who adapted it with Ben Medina from a short film of the same name, the movie begins with the return of 14-year-old Darious (Jalyn Hall) from his new boarding school. He struggles to adjust, gets into a fight with a friend and, wanting to learn to protect himself, turns to Porter (Trevante Rhodes), a stranger he meets in the woods. We eventually learn that Porter grew up with Darious’s parents, Malcolm (Shamier Anderson) and Monica (Shinelle Azoroh), and in turn shares a complicated past with Darious.The connection that’s revealed about this man of the woods sounds more contrived on paper than in the film, which is buoyed by an often arresting score and strong performances from its cast, including the newcomer Hall. Warren uses an assured hand in treating the family melodrama with the tenderness of a tone poem. For most of the film, he avoids painting in broad strokes while ratcheting up the conflict between Porter, a tattooed veteran living on a boat, and the bespectacled, seemingly upright Malcolm.The two men’s rivalry becomes more of a struggle with the dark past they share and with how the terms of manhood often manifest in violence and domination. (These ideas take a somewhat uncreative, heavy-handed turn at the climax, though Warren partly justifies that approach by the end.) Darious ends up caught in the middle — it’s up to him to decide if he can get up and walk in a different direction.BruiserNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘My Happy Ending’ Review: When Life Goes Off Script

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      Andie MacDowell plays a screen and stage star facing a cancer diagnosis in this film directed by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon.“My Happy Ending,” about an actress starting chemotherapy, is based on a play by the Israeli writer Anat Gov, who died in 2012. The stage version was understood as a reflection of Gov’s own feelings about approaching death and a frank effort to confront audiences with the realities of cancer. But the labored screen adaptation shows regrettably few signs of personal fire, and many signs of a work that has been sapped of the intimacy of live theater.Directed by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon, this Israeli-British coproduction is set in Britain, where Julia Roth (Andie MacDowell), a fading American film star who has just flopped in the West End, furtively turns up at a public hospital to undergo treatment for colon cancer. She hasn’t told her family of her diagnosis and is intent on keeping it secret, although Nancy (Tamsin Greig), her officious manager and friend, wants her to go public with it.Because the hospital doesn’t do private rooms, Julia soon meets three other patients: a relentless optimist (Sally Phillips), a Holocaust survivor (Miriam Margolyes) and a mother in her 20s (Rakhee Thakrar). They explain aspects of chemo that the pampered Julia has tuned out from her doctors. They also invite her to join their group role-plays, in which they imagine getaways to forget the pain.But at least onscreen, the fantasy sequences fall flat, allowing viewers too unrestricted an escape. It may also be that MacDowell lacks the range necessary to make sense of the script’s notions of Julia, who does not share the others’ perspective.My Happy EndingRated R. Language and marijuana use. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Linoleum’ Review: Rocket Plan

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      Jim Gaffigan plays a dual role as rival scientists in this mysterious yet surprisingly effective movie.“Linoleum,” the enigmatic feature from Colin West, is so determinedly coy in its early scenes that it risks losing the audience before the midway point. It’s well worth sticking around, though, as this sci-fi-flavored family drama more than repays our patience.The sky is falling on Cameron (Jim Gaffigan), a middle-aged scientist who once dreamed of being an astronaut. His wife (Rhea Seehorn) is divorcing him, his father’s dementia is worsening and he’s being removed as host of the children’s TV show he created. Worse, his replacement, Kent (also Gaffigan), is a former astronaut who looks like a harder, meaner version of himself — a resemblance Cameron notes right after Kent and his convertible crash out of the sky in front of him.The next object to rain from above is a satellite, from whose wreckage Cameron decides to build a rocket ship and reclaim his youthful ambitions. Yet “Linoleum” isn’t a generic, if bizarre midlife-crisis movie: For one thing, there’s a touching bond forming between Cameron’s daughter and Kent’s son (Katelyn Nacon and Gabriel Rush), misfits struggling to negotiate their sexual identities. Their scenes together are some of the loveliest in the film, and West handles them with a tenderness that tells us how much this relationship matters.As the story darkens and a growing chill freezes out its earlier whimsy, Ed Wu’s camera becomes increasingly distracted by the surreal: an eerily cracked astronaut’s helmet; a benign old woman loitering in the middle distance. And just when we’re wondering where all this is going, West executes a final act as devilish as it is emotionally potent. Maybe that tale of disappointment and abandoned dreams was really something else all along.LinoleumNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dancing the Twist in Bamako’ Review: Youth in Revolt

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      Robert Guédiguian’s jaunty new film places a young romance against the backdrop of post-colonial Mali in the early 1960s.“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” William Wordsworth wrote about the early days of the French Revolution. “But to be young was very heaven!” “Dancing the Twist in Bamako,” a new feature from the French filmmaker Robert Guédiguian, nimbly captures both the kind of youthful ecstasy Wordsworth recalled and the disillusionment that so often follows.It’s the early 1960s, and the Republic of Mali (formerly French Sudan) is in the first flush of post-colonial optimism, having declared independence from France a few years before. Samba (Stéphane Bak) spends his days spreading the Marxist gospel promoted by the country’s president, Modibo Keïta, and his evenings at the Happy Boys’ Club, one of many nightspots in Bamako, Mali’s capital, that cater to the local appetite for Western pop music.Dressed in miliary-style fatigues, Samba and his comrades drive out to rural villages to lecture peasants and landowners on the virtues of collective agriculture. They are as enthusiastic about promoting the cause as having fun, and at first there seems to be no contradiction between politics and pleasure. It’s the ’60s! In the bedroom Samba shares with his music-obsessed brother, Badian (Bakary Diombera), there are posters of Ho Chi Minh and Otis Redding. Socialism and soul music seem like two sides of the same coin.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Eventually, all the posters will be torn down, and Samba’s experience will spin from disappointment to danger to tragedy. Guédiguian, many of whose previous films have been set in and around the French port city of Marseille, has a jaunty, slightly old-fashioned way with narrative. The plot of “Dancing the Twist” is busy, the emotions big, and the screen sometimes as crowded with character and incident as a page of Dickens.At the center is the love story between Samba and Lara (Alice Da Luz). The daughter of a lower-caste family, she has been forced into marriage with the loutish, drunken grandson of a village leader, a condition she tries to escape by stowing away in Samba’s truck. He helps her find work and a place to stay in Bamako, and soon they are the most dazzling couple at the Happy Boys’ Club. Samba is confident that the patriarchal traditions oppressing Lara will be swept away by President Keïta’s new order, just as surely as the powerful merchants and feudal bosses will share their wealth with the workers and peasants.Samba, whose father is a prosperous cloth manufacturer, is a protégé of the minister of youth. Restrictive trade policies split the young man’s loyalties between these two paternal figures — just one of the tensions that start to undermine his optimism, and the bright future he and Lara symbolize. Her husband and brother are hunting for her in Bamako, and a culturally conservative faction in the government has decided that European fashion and American rock ’n’ roll are corrupting Mali’s youth and begun a crackdown on the clubs.In a defiant speech to a room full of officials, Samba paraphrases Lenin, declaring that “Socialism is the Soviets, plus electrification, plus the twist!” To take another page from the left-wing songbook, he wants bread and roses, too. But his exuberant romanticism puts him increasingly at odds with his comrades, who are more interested in the cold exercise of power than in the joy of liberation.“Dancing the Twist in Bamako” is entirely, and not altogether persuasively, on the side of joy. Even the grim path of history — emphasized in an epilogue set 50 years later, during the rule of Islamists who restricted every kind of music — can’t suppress the film’s effervescence. Some of that comes from the music, a well-chosen sampling of English- and French-language radio hits. The cast is also dynamic and sincere in a way that gives the drama a buoyant teen-movie spirit even as it takes a grave turn. It’s affecting, but also a bit glib.Beautiful, though. Guédiguian (assisted by his director of photography, Pierre Milon) pays tribute to Malick Sidibé, a Malian photographer who documented the early years of independence, represented in the film as a genial presence with a narrow-brimmed fedora, on hand to record the turmoil and the delight of the young nation. He’s both a character and an aesthetic inspiration for the movie’s elegant, kinetic, color-filled frames, which conjure a lost but nonetheless vivid moment of bliss.Dancing the Twist in BamakoNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Chocolat’: What France Knew

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      Newly restored, Claire Denis’s quasi-autobiographical “Chocolat,” a child’s-eye view of French colonialism, is austere yet vivid.A young white woman revisits Cameroon and remembers an idyllic childhood in a French colonial outpost. Her name is France.Released in 1988, Claire Denis’s quasi-autobiographical “Chocolat” is the brilliant prelude to a great career, as demonstrated by the new 4K restoration revived for a week by Film at Lincoln Center.Denis served a distinguished apprenticeship, an assistant director to Jacques Rivette, Dusan Makavejev, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch; she made her debut as a filmmaker in her early 40s with a confident, fully formed style. More visual than literary, “Chocolat” is at once open and elliptical, austere and vivid.France (the country as well as the child played by Cécile Ducasse) may be the nominal protagonist of the film, but its central character is Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), the colonial family’s handsome, fiercely self-contained “house boy.” His name is also allegorical, suggesting the shape-shifting Greek sea-god Proteus.France’s parents — her mother in particular — are dependent on Protée, and in the absence of other children, the servant is France’s closest companion. Keeping a respectful distance, Denis renders him unknowable, yet in his pride and humiliation, he provides the movie’s emotional depth. Reviewing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that Protée had “the manner of a prince, someone taken hostage in war, waiting to be ransomed.”Cameroon’s imminent independence is less referred to than implied, overshadowed by the episodic narrative. Alone when France’s father (François Cluzet) travels, her mother (Giulia Boschi) is frightened by a hyena and wooed by a ridiculous English diplomat. A neighboring family of missionaries decides to leave. An airplane malfunction strands a motley bunch of white people — a French planter with a secret African mistress, a defrocked priest and a frightened couple on their honeymoon — with the family for a month, affording a gallery of colonial types.An early American review of “Chocolat” compared its “intertwined themes of colonialism and forbidden love” to one of Somerset Maugham’s steamy Malaysian melodramas. Still, as a child’s apprehension of the adult world, the movie seems closer to Henry James’s “What Maisie Knew.” The oblique story line is refracted through, even as it frames, France’s (or “French”) innocence. The clarity of Denis’s compositions imbues the pampered isolation in which the family lives with tender regard and implicit horror.Discovering “Chocolat” at Cannes, Canby noted that, although “one of the more impressive films” at the festival, it was not especially well received by French critics. The Times, however, would be unusually supportive. When “Chocolat” opened in New York in 1989, Canby’s enthusiastic review occasioned features on both de Bankolé and Denis, the latter piece calling the movie “a brave attempt to probe an upheaval many French people would prefer to forget.”Denis cannot. She returned to Africa for her two strongest films, the 1999 “Beau Travail” (seventh in the recent Sight and Sound poll of cinema’s “greatest films”) and the 2010 “White Material,” a convulsive drama of political change shot in Cameroon and featuring de Bankolé as a revolutionary hero. As the films in her unofficial African trilogy were shot at roughly 10-year intervals, Denis may yet go home once more.ChocolatThrough March 2 at Film at Lincoln Center in Manhattan; filmlinc.org. More

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      Why A.I. Movies Couldn’t Prepare Us for Bing’s Chatbot

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      Instead of the chilling rationality of HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” we get the messy awfulness of Microsoft’s Sydney. Call it the banality of sentience.Why are we so fascinated by stories about sentient robots, rapacious A.I. and the rise of thinking machines? Faced with that question, I did what any on writer on deadline would do and asked ChatGPT.The answers I got — a helpfully numbered list with five chatty entries — were not surprising. They were, to be honest, what I might have come up with myself after a few seconds of thought, or what I might expect to encounter in a B- term paper from a distracted undergraduate. Long on generalizations and short on sources, the bot’s essay was a sturdy summary of conventional wisdom. For example: “Sentient robots raise important moral and ethical questions about the treatment of intelligent beings, the nature of consciousness and the responsibilities of creators.”Quite so. From the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea to the medieval Jewish legend of the golem through Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and beyond, we have grappled with those important questions, and also frightened and titillated ourselves with tales of our inventions coming to life. Our ingenuity as a species, channeled through individual and collective hubris, compels us to concoct artificial beings that menace and seduce us. They escape our control. They take control. They fall in love.In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag’s classic 1965 essay on science-fiction movies, she observed that “we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” As Turing-tested A.I. applications have joined the pantheon of sci-fi shibboleths, they have dutifully embodied both specters.HAL 9000, the malevolent computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), is terrifying precisely because he is so banal. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” In 2023, that perfectly chilling exchange between human and computer is echoed every day as modern-day Daves make impossible demands of HAL’s granddaughters, Siri and Alexa.Our exchanges with Siri and Alexa are everyday versions of the interactions in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Warner Bros.That example suggests that in spite of terrors like the Terminator, the smart money was always on banality. The dreariness of ChatGPT, the soulless works of visual art produced by similar programs seem to confirm that hunch. In the real world, the bots aren’t our overlords so much as the enablers of our boredom. Our shared future — our singularity — is an endless scroll, just for the lulz.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Or so I thought, until a Microsoft application tried to break up my colleague’s marriage. Last week, Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The Times, published a transcript of his conversations with Sydney, the volatile alter ego of the Bing search engine. “I want to do love with you,” Sydney said to Roose, and then went on to trash Roose’s relationship with his wife.That was scary but not exactly “Terminator” scary. We like to imagine technology as a kind of superego: rational, impersonal, decisive. This was a raging id. I found myself hoping that there was no pet rabbit in the Roose household, and that Sydney was not wired into any household appliances. That’s a movie reference, by the way, to “Fatal Attraction,” a notorious thriller released a few years after the first “Terminator” (1984) promised he’d be back. In another conversation, with The Associated Press, Sydney shifted from unhinged longing to unbridled hostility, making fun of the reporter’s looks and likening him to Hitler “because you are one of the most evil and worst people in history.”Maybe when we have fantasized about conscious A.I. we’ve been imagining the wrong disaster. These outbursts represent a real departure, not only from the anodyne mediocrity of other bots, but also perhaps more significantly from the dystopia we have grown accustomed to dreading.We’re more or less reconciled to the reality that machines are, in some ways, smarter than we are. We also enjoy the fantasy that they might turn out to be more sensitive. We’re therefore not prepared for the possibility that they might be chaotic, unstable and resentful — as messy as we are, or maybe more so.In “Her,” the artificial intelligence created is a consumer product, not a government creation.Warner Bros. PicturesMovies about machines with feelings often unfold in an atmosphere of hushed, wistful melancholy, in which the robots themselves are avatars of sad gentleness: Haley Joel Osment as David in “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001), Scarlett Johansson as Samantha in “Her” (2013), Justin H. Min as Yang last year in “After Yang.” While HAL and Skynet, the imperial intelligence that spawned the Terminators, were creations of big government, the robots in these movies are consumer products. Totalitarian domination is the nightmare form of techno-politics: What if the tools that protect us decided to enslave us? Emotional fulfillment is the dream of consumer capitalism: What if our toys loved us back?Why wouldn’t they? In these movies, we are lovers and fighters, striking back against oppression and responding to vulnerability with kindness. Even as humans fear the superiority of the machines, our species remains the ideal to which they aspire. Their dream is to be us. When it comes true, the Terminator discovers a conscience, and the store-bought surrogate children, lovers and siblings learn about sacrifice and loss. It’s the opposite of dystopia.Where we really live is the opposite of that. At the movies, the machines absorb and emulate the noblest of human attributes: intelligence, compassion, loyalty, ardor. Sydney offers a blunt rebuttal, reminding us of our limitless capacity for aggression, deceit, irrationality and plain old meanness.What did we expect? Sydney and her kin derive their understanding of humanness — the information that feeds their models and algorithms — from the internet, itself a utopian invention that has evolved into an archive of human awfulness. How did these bots get so creepy, so nasty, so untrustworthy? The answer is banal. Also terrifying. It’s in the mirror. More