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Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More
The selections at this year’s New York International Children’s Film Festival blend fantastical elements with serious real-world themes.The characters in the offerings at the 2023 New York International Children’s Film Festival often resolve crises in unexpected ways: by tossing magical seeds. Or slamming enchanted doors. Or, in what may be the most startling example, following a giant porcupine as it lumbers through the streets of Rotterdam.These fantastical elements, however, appear alongside realities that more commercial movies for young people usually avoid. This year’s festival, which begins on Friday evening and continues for three weekends — two in Manhattan and Brooklyn theaters, and one at the Sag Harbor Cinema on Long Island — explores subjects like the civil war in Syria, accelerating threats of natural disaster, the plight of unauthorized immigrants and, in one short documentary, the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on a family with members in both New York and Odesa. Now in its 26th year, the festival seeks not just to entertain young audiences but also to expand their worldviews.“There’s a concerted effort to talk about human rights and focus on global citizenry,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. But, she added, “I think that playfulness is really rolling out in all kinds of interesting ways throughout our slate.”That menu, comprising 16 features and nearly 60 short films, which will be offered entirely in person for the first time since 2020, begins with Friday’s world premiere of “Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia.” (This title and many others will be shown more than once.) An animated film from France and Luxembourg, it follows Ernest, a gruff but good-hearted bear, and Celestine, a vivacious mouse, as they journey to Ernest’s homeland to have his cherished violin, a “Stradibearius,” repaired. Once there, they’re shocked to learn that the country has prohibited almost all music-making.“Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia,” which will make its world premiere at the festival, follows a bear and a mouse on a wild journey that touches on themes of autocracy and personal autonomy.GKIDS/StudioCanalThe filmmakers, Julien Chheng and Jean-Christophe Roger (Roger will visit the festival for an opening-night Q. and A.), have filled the movie with wild chases, narrow escapes and a full-fledged musical resistance. But it also touches on autocracy and personal autonomy — relevant themes in a world where dissenters are sometimes imprisoned and certain children’s books are being banned.“Kids are able to enter these films at the level that they are comfortable or ready for,” said Nina Guralnick, the executive director of the festival, which offers titles for viewers as young as 3 and has a jury that judges a broad swath of the short films. (The prizewinners then become eligible for Academy Award consideration.) “But that’s also what makes those films last,” she said, “because they will come back and think about them as their thinking becomes more sophisticated.”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.Marya Zarif, a Syrian-born filmmaker who lives in Montreal, said in a video interview that she intended “Dounia & the Princess of Aleppo,” the Canadian and French animated feature that she directed with André Kadi, to be a festival film to which young viewers can repeatedly return for new insights.Dounia, its vibrant 6-year-old heroine, sees the war steadily encroaching on her joyful life in Syria. But she has powerful protection: nigella seeds, a Middle Eastern spice. In the movie, they have mystical properties that Dounia discovers after she and her grandparents become refugees on a dangerous and sometimes heartbreaking odyssey.“I needed a magic that was rooted in Dounia’s culture,” said Zarif, who will appear via video link for a post-screening Q. and A. on Sunday. “And I needed something very small but that had big effects, like Dounia herself.”The festival also has fare for viewers well into their teens. “Suzume,” an anime feature by Makoto Shinkai that is already a blockbuster in Japan, will receive its North American premiere at the festival on Sunday.The title character, an orphaned high school student who lives with her aunt, encounters Souta, a youth who is “a closer” — one who has the task of shutting ordinary-looking doors that, when left open, unleash terrors like earthquakes and tsunamis. When a spell transforms Souta into a walking, talking chair, Suzume shoulders his world-saving burden.Such stories of female empowerment are a favorite with the festival, which annually features the short-film program “Girls’ POV.” Its offerings this year include a story that illustrates the frustrations of obtaining menstrual products and a documentary about an American all-girl tackle football league.Girls also take charge in the Dutch live-action feature “Okthanksbye,” whose two main characters are deaf 13-year-olds. When the beloved Parisian grandmother of one of the teenagers is hospitalized, they leave their Netherlands boarding school and head to France. Portrayed by Mae van de Loo and Douae Zine El Abidine — young, deaf first-time actresses — the girls embark on an adventure that includes traveling with a female punk band.The film’s director, Nicole van Kilsdonk, who wrote the script with Lilian Sijbesma, said the movie wasn’t meant to be about disability, even though the girls’ situations — one has a cochlear implant; one doesn’t — play a role. Van Kilsdonk, who on Saturday will attend the first of two open-captioned screenings and take part in a sign-language-interpreted discussion, said this coming-of-age story held a universal message: “You can do more than you think.”Douae Zine El Abidine, left, and Mae van de Loo are first-time actresses, both deaf, who play deaf teenagers in the Dutch coming-of-age feature “Okthanksbye.”Labyrint FilmFar more perilous border crossings lie at the heart of the features about immigration. “Home Is Somewhere Else,” a Mexican documentary, chronicles, in their own words, the experiences of young people with different legal statuses. Framed by the spoken-word poetry of José Eduardo Aguilar, who was himself deported from the United States, the film eschews live action in favor of vivid, varied animation.“That also was a way to protect our protagonists’ identity,” said Jorge Villalobos, who wrote and directed the film with Carlos Hagerman. (Hagerman will participate in a Q. and A. after the film’s screening on March 11.) But the men, who dealt with families on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border, also found that animation gave them freedom to employ visual metaphors and depict the world through their subjects’ eyes.“Usually, documentaries are kind of talking about how the system doesn’t work,” Hagerman said. “And we are more into experiencing how does it feel to live in these situations.”Similar struggles infuse “Totem,” Sander Burger’s fictional live-action feature from Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which focuses on Ama (Amani-Jean Philippe), an 11-year-old whose Senegalese family lives in Rotterdam without documentation. Regarding herself as thoroughly Dutch, Ama ends up on the run and searching for her father after the authorities detain her other relatives. This high-spirited heroine gets aid from her spirit animal, a massive porcupine.The strong language in both immigration-related features hasn’t deterred the festival’s organizers, who provide parental advisories online. And families who may be reluctant to take children into theaters during a virus-filled winter can look forward to the festival’s Kid Flicks National Touring Program, which, in the summer, will begin sharing selections from some of its short-film packages — including Celebrating Black Stories and the Latin-themed ¡Hola Cine! — with museums, libraries and cinemas. (The festival also offers film-based curriculums for schools.)“We think we’ve doubled the number of programs that we send out,” Guralnick said. “And I feel like we just keep adding partners.” All share a goal, she added: “growing that next generation of filmgoers.”The New York International Children’s Film FestivalMarch 3-19; 212-349-0330; nyicff.org. More
Lily McInerny stars as a 17-year-old girl who is groomed by a predator in Jamie Dack’s feature debut.It starts with a wink at a diner. When the 17-year-old, Lea (Lily McInerny), the heroine of “Palm Trees and Power Lines” sees it — or maybe just the man delivering it — her world falls off its axis. The wink flusters Lea; it also apparently primes her. So when the guy later rolls up next to her while she’s walking home, his mouth and engine both running, she responds to his attention, somehow oblivious to the Klaxon horns of warning shrieking in the viewer’s head.Directed by Jamie Dack, who shares screenplay credit with Audrey Findlay, “Palm Trees” tracks the bleak, depressing story of Lea, who falls for the wrong guy only to tumble headlong into the abyss. Set in an especially cheerless pocket of Southern California, where high-voltage lines loom over the sparsely treed landscape, it opens in the summer. Lea is on a break and conspicuously bored. Under the inattentive watch of her single mom (Gretchen Mol, doing what she can), Lea drifts through the days and nights, sunbathing in her yard and hanging out with friends. She gets high, hooks up and so it sluggishly goes.Everything shifts when the diner guy rolls into her life. He calls himself Tom (Jonathan Tucker), although once he gets talking it’s hard to believe anything that he says. Lea, though, is nothing if not credulous, and after jokingly ordering him not to murder her, she climbs in his truck next to him. She awkwardly lights a cigarette, he asks for a drag, the camera framing their hands hovering near each other. Lea and Tom chat, and her wariness soon eases, his flirting and her interest warming the cab. They keep chatting, she asks his age — he’s 34 — and by the time that he drops her off, Lea is a goner and the story is on its way.Ambitious, torpid, wildly overlong and frustratingly underdeveloped, “Palm Trees” follows Lea as she falls for Tom, who turns out to be as awful — and as much a near-parody of villainy — as his clichéd smooth talk. He’s less overtly sleazy and certainly less well-written than the pimp played by Harvey Keitel in “Taxi Driver,” but Tom’s moves and words come right from the same predator playbook. Unfortunately, and curiously for a 21st-century sentient teenager with a phone in her back pocket, Lea seems not to have watched a single movie, television show, newscast, Instagram story or viral TikTok about human trafficking.It would be easier to believe Lea’s sorry tale, her naïveté and spiraling trajectory, if she had more of a discernible personality. McInerny gives the character a convincing physical diffidence, a droopy reserve that, by turns, registers as shyness, apathy and self-protectiveness, and which can make this slight, already young-looking performer look even younger than her character’s age. But Lea’s personality is as lacking in expressive detail as her bland house and cramped world, and she rarely comes persuasively alive and then not for long, which might be interesting if it seemed intentional. Instead, too often, she is a narratively convenient blank.That’s a problem for a movie about sexual agency and sexual exploitation. Dack rightly doesn’t pass judgment on Lea, and she remains on the character’s side throughout. But because she never gets in the teen’s head and even seems oddly incurious about the girl’s inner life, she fails to adequately engage with questions of sexual consent, free will and whether Lea’s choices (or those of any underage child) are truly her own. Dack takes obvious care to make sure that the filmmaking and camerawork don’t further exploit the character. Yet it’s a bummer that the ethical and political thoughtfulness that she extends during Lea’s most harrowingly vulnerable moments doesn’t extend to the rest of the movie.Palm Trees and Power LinesRated R. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More
In this three-person chamber drama, an ex-convict, a politician and a white-collar defense engage in tense conversations while pursuing their individual goals.“What We Do Next” is a three-person chamber drama that takes the scheming and blackmailing of political thrillers like “House of Cards” and shapes them into something like a morality play.In seven acts, the film tracks the relationship between Elsa (Michelle Veintimilla), an ex-convict; Sandy (Karen Pittman), a New York City politician; and Paul (Corey Stoll), a white-collar defense attorney. Years ago, when Sandy was running for office, she gave Elsa some cash to presumably flee her family home, where her father was sexually abusing her. Instead, Elsa bought a gun and shot him dead.Her lengthy prison sentence is an injustice in and of itself, the film makes clear. Like many women, Elsa is the victim of a criminal justice system that too often fails to take into account the context of abuse and survival in which such crimes take root. After being released, Elsa is left with a criminal record that has largely condemned her to low-paying work.Elsa refuses to settle for this, challenging the authenticity of Sandy’s progressive platform in the process. She threatens to publicly reveal Sandy’s connection to the killing in exchange for a decent job, while Paul, desperate to rebrand himself and transition to anti-corruption law, inserts himself into the women’s negotiations for the sake of good public relations.These talks unfold in various small and nondescript locations — the film was shot during quarantine — but the drama’s stripped-down, dialogue-heavy approach isn’t entirely an extension of the minimalism that defined many sets at the height of the pandemic. The writer and director Stephen Belber is best known as a playwright, which explains many of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. Elegantly composed if ultimately visually bland for the big screen, “What We Do Next” is essentially a series of debates powered by the performers and Belber’s intelligent script, an intricately drawn microcosm of the country’s dynamics of power. The result doesn’t make the best use of the medium’s powers, but the chatty ride does make for good food for thought.What We Do NextNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More
This German drama follows a young Jewish man in early 1940s Berlin who survives by falsifying passports and concealing his identity in public.Before the opening credits in “The Forger,” a brief flash-forward scene shows a young man scampering into a lost and found office. Barging toward the desk, he is promptly reprimanded and ordered to wait his turn. This bathetic prelude is perhaps meant to communicate the man’s impudence, but it also readies the audience for a film of modest ambitions. Set in Berlin in 1942-43, the German period drama is less interested in wartime crises than the daily imbroglios of a life of hiding in plain sight.The film, directed by Maggie Peren, follows the Jewish 21-year-old Cioma Schönhaus (Louis Hofmann), a documents forger sustaining himself on ration coupons, chutzpah and sheer daring alongside his friend, Det (Jonathan Berlin). For a span, the pair reside in Cioma’s family home — their relatives have already been deported — and find that they can enjoy extravagant outings to restaurants and dance clubs by posing as naval officers.The screenplay, which Peren adapted from Schönhaus’s 2008 memoir, unspools with a certain complacency, and often seems to lack an emotional engine. Fleeting moments of suspense or melancholy are undermined by Cioma’s unremitting insouciance — no matter the situation, he wears a smirk — and a series of underwritten relationships muck up the narrative rather than enrich it. Peren is clever to favor mischief against a backdrop of gloom, but in doing so she draws a frustrating distance between her subject and the audience.The ForgerNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More
In this warm dramedy, a family works together to create a stable routine after their college-age daughter is diagnosed with bipolar disorder.An emerging performer and filmmaker, Alex Heller wrote, directed and stars in “The Year Between” as Clemence Miller, a college sophomore whose erratic behavior gets her booted from school. As a dropout, Clemence returns to her family home in suburban Illinois, under the care of her exasperated but loving parents, Sherri and Don (played endearingly by J. Smith-Cameron and Steve Buscemi.)Sherri drags her daughter to psychiatric consultations, and there, Clemence is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. From this moment of clarity, the film develops into a semi-autobiographical and engaging view of what it’s like for a bellicose youth to adjust to a new mental health diagnosis.Clemence begins new medication, fine-tuning her dosage through trial and error. Her new routine means abstaining from drugs and alcohol, as well as learning new exercise and mindfulness practices. Clemence also has to adapt to moving back in with her family, and she wrestles with the financial reality of working rather than attending university. With so much unappealing change on her plate, Clemence isn’t interested in being a model patient. Her adjustment period includes an impromptu head-shaving, sibling feuds and a fling with an introverted drug dealer.Yet the film is sympathetic to Clemence’s two-steps-forward, one-step-back approach to stability. Heller uses color and production design to establish a warm tone around her occasionally manic protagonist. She creates frames packed with texture, incorporating plush and unpretentious furniture into rooms already cluttered with knickknacks and discarded dishes. Her film’s palette is saturated, lending a glow to characters’ faces even in moments of dysfunction.This lived-in quality to the filmmaking supports equally relaxed performances from both veteran and emerging actors, making for an even-keeled and easy viewing experience.The Year BetweenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More
Mia Wasikowska stars in this mournful, stodgy drama about the emotional cost of protecting the planet from its most rapacious predator: the land developer.Consider the western blue groper the St. Bernard of Australia’s southern coast, a heavy, friendly fish game to frolic with swimmers if fed the right treats. “Blueback” gets its title from the pet name a young diver gives her aquatic playmate. Directed by Robert Connolly, it’s a mournful, stodgy, girl-meets-fish drama about the emotional cost of protecting the planet from its most rapacious predator: the land developer.The screenplay, which Connolly adapted from Tim Winton’s 1997 children’s novel, unspools in flashback. Abby (Mia Wasikowska) is a marine biology professor paddling frantically to prevent the collapse of a coral reef when she learns that her mother, Dora (Radha Mitchell), is dying. Returning home, Abby recalls a childhood steeped in environmental activism. She chooses to fight with science; her mother fearlessly screams at greedy fishermen and chains herself to a construction truck. (Abby’s father, a pearl diver, was eaten by a tiger shark.)Mitchell’s earthy, mercurial performance — plus a supporting bit from Eric Bana as a bonfire-dancing bohemian — loosen up memories that feel too tightly welded together. You can feel barnacles on the dialogue, like when a corporate bully (Erik Thomson) growls, “You and your mom really think you can stop this, don’t you?”While Nigel Westlake’s violin flurries froth up suspense whenever possible, the film has more impact simply letting the women pause to soak in the beauty of the ocean. The one exception is a wrenching moment when the teen version of Abby (Ilsa Fogg), in desperation, punches her beloved Blueback to scare him away from spear hunters. We’ve seen variations on that musty but effective “shoo, boy!” scene, starring everything from dogs and wolves to a giant ant and Sasquatch. Your eyes get just as wet with a fish.BluebackRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More
Guy Ritchie’s latest action-comedy puts Jason Statham and Aubrey Plaza in the middle of a rote heist story.The running joke of Jason Statham’s remarkably sturdy stardom — his bankability as an action lead has been running for over two decades — is that he always plays the same character: a stoic, unbreakable enforcer who offers the occasional gravel-toned wisecrack. The director Guy Ritchie’s own trademark, the stylized British crime comedy, has found its most frequent muse in this archetype, which Ritchie has helped shape in Statham ever since they both broke out with “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (1999).They’ve paired up time and time again, but in “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” it seems as if Ritchie, and in turn Statham, has rested too casually into the routine. The distinguishing quality of Statham’s character in this one? Orson Fortune is the best mission man out there, but he grates his employers with bougie requests: for the best wines, and for “rehabilitation vacations” to assuage his neuroticism. It’s an odd character trait thrown on top of Statham’s typically hardened exterior, and, despite the best efforts of a handful of weak jokes, feels thrown in as an afterthought.Much of the movie operates this way, as a perfunctory heist film just going through the motions. Ritchie seems impatient to get things over with, jumping straight into the mission: A mysterious briefcase has been stolen, and the British government hires a private contractor (Cary Elwes) and his team (Statham, Aubrey Plaza and company) to retrieve it. Soon enough, we’re introduced to the twist: To court the billionaire arms dealer involved in the theft (played by Hugh Grant), Orson decides to kidnap the world’s biggest movie star, Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett), whom he plans to use as bait.The silly premise is one that a better Ritchie film could, with some charm, style and wit, have turned into a workable romp. But everything here is stuck on autopilot. Statham is underutilized, and the movie doesn’t convincingly establish him as the gritty badass it wants him to be. That is fine enough for a film that intends to rely on the breezy touch of a crime-crew comedy, but the ensemble is similarly turned into background noise. It’s not so much that the cast members lack chemistry, but rather that the film doesn’t bother to establish any legible dynamic between their characters, leaving the halfhearted banter without a place to land. Hartnett doesn’t quite have the star power to really make the meta-humor of his character work, rendering his arc a pointless narrative gimmick.Plaza, though, is the most woefully wasted piece of it all. On paper, there’s real potential between her and Statham — Plaza’s unfazed snark meeting the unamused and immovable object that is Statham — and we see it in pockets. But she’s mostly left as a side player in a film that doesn’t know how to capitalize on their chemistry or to just hand the reins to Plaza to shoot more guns and make more jokes. We’re left instead with brief moments of her devilish charm and fleeting, thrilling seconds of her shooting out a car window in slow motion with Hartnett cowering in the driver’s seat.Operation Fortune: Ruse de GuerreRated R for language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More
