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      ‘Utama’ Review: This Bitter Earth

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      In Bolivia’s official submission to the next Oscars, an old Quechua couple struggle to find water to sustain them, their crops and llamas.The Bolivian movie “Utama” pulls you in with an uneasy mix of beauty and dread. A fictional tale that draws from real life, it takes place in the Andean plateau — the Altiplano — an arid, mountainous strip with altitudes nearing 14,000 feet above sea level that runs through western Bolivia. There, on hard, cracked land in a tiny, adobe home, a wizened Quechua couple of indeterminate age with no electricity and few outside contacts, yet graced with unflagging fortitude, wait for the rain that will sustain them, their meager crops and small herd of llamas.Stooped with age, Virginio and Sisa — José Calcina and Luisa Quispe, both nonprofessional actors — scarcely speak, the texture and arc of their lives instead conveyed through quotidian rituals, small gestures and stoic expressions. They watch their animals, they watch the world, they watch each other. They also struggle, their agonies weighing most visibly on Virginio. Every morning, and with greater difficulty, he guides the llamas, their ears festooned with pink tassels, across the parched land in search of grass. The arduousness of his days makes for restless nights and a wheezing that Sisa somehow doesn’t notice.The Bolivian writer-director Alejandro Loayza Grisi has a background in still photography, and it shows. He has a feel for the drama of color, form, scale and light, as well as a sensitive collaborator in his cinematographer, Bárbara Alvarez (her credits include “The Headless Woman”). With a lucid eye and a steady camera, he captures the region’s brutal beauty, using stark contrasts — like birds-eye views of isolated houses and people — to accentuate its extremes. At other times, he zeros in on similarities, like those between the weathered faces and the desiccated terrain, suggesting ideas that the characters don’t voice.As the days tick by quietly and more and more disastrously, Virginio’s health and the area’s declining water sources begin to blur, rendering a near-totemic character increasingly symbolic. At one point, Virginio and Sisa’s far more loquacious grandson, Clever (Santos Choque), shows up, and the family’s history begins to emerge. Clever and his father want the couple to move to a city, an idea that Virginio rejects. He has strong, apparently traditional opinions, including about the gendered division of labor. It’s Sisa’s job to collect water, he insists, even when she’s forced to walk a long distance to fill their buckets at a shrinking river.Virginio is clinging to a life that’s disappearing as rapidly as the area’s water. That’s painful, no question, but the complexities of the world that he and Sisa inhabit are as frustratingly elusive as their inner lives. That’s too bad, although this lack of specifics also helps explain why “Utama” has traveled widely on the international festival circuit. (It’s Bolivia’s Oscar entry.) The Altiplano has long endured periods of extended drought that global warming has worsened, leading to Bolivia’s second largest lake drying up and rural migration. Yet while climate change shadows every anxious discussion here, it also remains at a safe remove, a vague threat embedded in an aesthetically soothing package and gently salted with tears.UtamaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      John David Washington Gets an Education in ‘The Piano Lesson’

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      The actor adds to his body of knowledge with a starry production of the August Wilson play and a once-in-a-lifetime moment with Robert De Niro on “Amsterdam.”You cannot show up more prepared than John David Washington, cannot outmaneuver him and cannot get ahead of him. If you think you have arrived on time for your lunch appointment with him, you will find he has already been waiting for you — he has, in fact, been sitting quietly at a table at Bubby’s for 15 minutes, in his perennially prompt, unapologetically eager manner. And now he is not just ready to eat; he is practically vibrating in his chair so he can tear through a bowl of matzo ball soup and get back to the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where he has been performing in “The Piano Lesson.”Washington is by no means a novice actor. At 38, he has already starred in films like Spike Lee’s true-crime drama “BlacKkKlansman” and Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending, time-twisting adventure “Tenet.”But he is a newcomer to the Broadway stage, and in “The Piano Lesson,” he is making his debut with a demanding and poignant August Wilson play, in a high-profile production featuring the husband-and-wife team of Samuel L. Jackson (who co-stars in it) and LaTanya Richardson Jackson (who directed it).Despite his lack of theater experience, Washington has drawn raves for his performance. In her review, the New York Times critic Maya Phillips wrote, “Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in.”To navigate a text and a discipline that are unfamiliar to him, Washington is approaching the task like a humble rookie, ready to receive the education that it might provide — along with any bumps or bruises that might come with it.Asked why he wanted to perform in “The Piano Lesson,” Washington said: “I did it for selfish reasons. This was like going back to school. This is a master class. I want to learn. I want to get beat up.”He added, “If I can survive, I’m going to be such a better actor than I was before I started this.”Washington with Samuel L. Jackson onstage. Jackson, a longtime family friend, said that when the young man decided to act, “we all told him, ‘You can’t just step up in there and think it’s going to happen.’”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn a Tuesday in October before the play had opened, Washington was bracing himself for the rehearsal later that afternoon. “We’re going in for notes and preparing to get slaughtered,” he said.If his language is full of vivid, brutal metaphors, it might be because Washington is a former football player — a relentless running back for the Morehouse College Maroon Tigers and later for the St. Louis Rams, as well as teams in the now-defunct N.F.L. Europe and U.F.L.He is also, of course, a son of Denzel Washington, the decorated actor and filmmaker. John David, who lives in New York, has spent a lifetime observing his father’s performances, whether as a child seeing him in “Richard III” at Shakespeare in the Park or as a grown man watching him in the Broadway production of “Fences,” the Wilson play that his father later starred in and directed for the screen.When Denzel Washington learned that John David was getting ready for the eight-shows-a-week rigor of Broadway, he heartily encouraged the proposition. “He said, ‘It’s a full-contact sport, John David,’” the younger Washington recalled.But when John David decided that he wanted to pursue acting, after a torn Achilles’ tendon halted his sports career, it was impressed upon him that he’d achieve success only through hard work and not by trading on his last name.Jackson, a longtime friend of the Washington family, said that he was one of several people who talked to the young man about the challenging path that awaited him. “We all told him, you can’t just step up in there and think it’s going to happen,” Jackson recalled. “You’ve got to go to class, you’ve got to put in the work. Being the dedicated athlete that he was, he attacked it in the same way that he attacked that, and he got all he could out of it.”Washington made his breakthrough on the HBO comedy series “Ballers” (2015-19), playing a hotheaded N.F.L. star. Another crucial opportunity came when Lee chose him to star as the police detective Ron Stallworth in “BlacKkKlansman,” released in 2018.As Washington saw it, Lee took a significant chance in elevating him from supporting roles to a lead player: “Spike was like, ‘You’re not a running back — you’re a quarterback. You need to call the offense and run the plays,’” Washington said.In 2020, he starred in “Tenet,” a complex thriller about characters who can move forward and backward in time. Despite Nolan’s pedigree, the film’s opening was repeatedly delayed by the pandemic and it was ultimately released at a time when audiences were hardly ready to return to theaters en masse.Washington’s father gave him advice about acting: “He said, ‘It’s a full-contact sport, John David.’” Tess Ayano for The New York TimesTwo years later, Washington has tried to remain sanguine about his “Tenet” experience. “I believe in God — I’m a heavy believer, so it was the way it was supposed to be,” he said. “But it really hurt that we couldn’t give it its proper rollout and world tour.”Even so, Washington said he was grateful for the trust Nolan had placed in him and for the chance to help execute Nolan’s intricate vision. “As taxing as it was, it damn near broke me, but I’d do it again and again,” Washington said.He was given another prominent big-screen position this fall when he starred alongside Christian Bale and Margot Robbie in “Amsterdam,” the antic period caper from the filmmaker David O. Russell.Bale found Washington soft-spoken and studious during rehearsals, but said his co-star suddenly came alive when they filmed a sequence in which their characters fled a murder scene.“I kept laughing because he was clearly enjoying showing me that no matter how fast I ran, he could always run faster,” Bale said. “I kept zigging and zagging, running circles up and down the street, and he wouldn’t ever let me get in front of him.”Bale added, “He’s quietly competitive, but I don’t think he likes that to be seen much.”“Amsterdam” was a critical and commercial flop, none of which mattered to Washington, who came away with one of his most treasured memories as an actor.“There was a take I did that was very emotional,” he said, “and afterwards, Robert De Niro came over and hugged me and kissed me on the cheek and he said, ‘Good job, son.’ I will never forget that. I can die now.”“The Piano Lesson,” for which Wilson won the second of his two Pulitzer Prizes, is part of the playwright’s Pittsburgh Cycle. There, in 1936, the domestic life of Berniece (Danielle Brooks) and her uncle Doaker (Jackson) is interrupted by the return of Berniece’s talkative and charismatic brother, Boy Willie (Washington), who has recently left prison.While Berniece treasures the family’s piano, which carries a tragic history and is decorated with carvings of relatives who had been enslaved, Boy Willie has other plans for it, believing he can buy his way to legitimacy with the money earned from selling it.Washington said that to him the play conveyed “the overwhelming feeling of American society’s proprietary entitlement over its history.” With a chuckle, he added that it told a relatable story about “every family gathering, how there’s always that one cousin or family who shows up and it’s like, oh, here we go.”Washington said that he started learning his lines for “The Piano Lesson” when he was in Indonesia earlier this year, filming “True Love,” a science fiction film written and directed by Gareth Edwards (“Godzilla,” “Rogue One”).In rehearsals this fall, Washington said that LaTanya Richardson Jackson advocated the utmost fidelity to Wilson’s text. “She always talks about how we’re here to amplify his words,” Washington said. “Don’t put too much sauce on there. Let the words charge all of your decision.”With Christian Bale and Margot Robbie in “Amsterdam.” Bale said Washington is “quietly competitive, but I don’t think he likes that to be seen much.”20th Century StudiosHe has endured a certain amount of affectionate hazing from his more seasoned co-stars. Washington recounted the time when Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts called him out for eating banana chips in rehearsal: “Sam was like,” — he uttered a Jackson-esque word that cannot be printed here — “Boy Willie don’t eat no banana chips. That’s the young generation. He eats pork rinds.”Washington said he had the quickness to retort, “No, see, Boy Willie’s ahead of his time.”The play holds a special value for Jackson, who played Boy Willie in its original 1987 production at Yale Repertory Theater. He said, however, that he did not feel particularly territorial about seeing the role passed onto Washington.“You can’t possess things that way,” he said. “And LaTanya told me not to talk to him about Boy Willie anyway — she didn’t want me putting my ideas in his head.”In their work on the play, Jackson said he had already seen Washington grow as an actor. “John David’s really quite introverted,” he explained. “The only time he puts himself out there is when he has an opportunity to inhabit another character and be someone that’s not him.”What “The Piano Lesson” has given Washington, Jackson said, is a confidence that he can take into future film or TV projects — the self-assurance of knowing “when you’re on a soundstage or on a set, and nobody’s laughing or applauding for you, how you feel about what you just did. You don’t have to go to the monitor to prove to yourself that you did it. You’ll know, OK, that felt right.”These are big-picture, existential questions that Washington may contemplate after “The Piano Lesson” ends. For now, he is content to grapple with the day-to-day demands of putting on the play and the pleasures of losing himself in a character who feels diametrically opposed to who he really is.As he recalled, “There’s a line where Sam says to me, ‘Will you just be quiet?’ There was a night I almost cracked up the way he said it, because I felt like he really meant it.”Washington seemed genuinely delighted by the notion that he could be so talkative it would annoy someone else. “I must have really been rolling that night,” he said. “I don’t do that in my real life.” More

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      ‘Soft & Quiet’ Review: Far-Right Ladies Night

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      This distressingly immersive horror film by Beth de Araújo traces a group of white supremacist women in real time.Unlike the majority of recent horror films that engage with race relations in the United States and the country’s legacy of white nationalism (like “Get Out” or this year’s “Nanny”), “Soft & Quiet,” written and directed by Beth de Araújo, takes the racist’s perspective.The movie’s title refers to an approach that one of its characters, Emily (Stefanie Estes), sees as the most effective for spreading the gospel of white supremacy. Emily is a clean-cut kindergarten teacher and the leader of an alliance of far-right women. De Araújo and the cinematographer Greta Zozula’s roving hand-held camera trails the group of seemingly innocuous women in what seems to be real time.After a vaguely unsettling opening scene in which Emily quietly pits a student against a Latina custodian, the film escalates with stomach-dropping abruptness when the foil is lifted off a pie Emily has baked, revealing a swastika carved into the dough. It’s just a joke, she claims, though the cheery group’s resemblance to the P.T.A. or a book club for suburban mothers makes their hate-mongering rhetoric especially chilling.More disturbing yet is how fluidly their ideas materialize into something real and physical when four of its members — emboldened by each other, with extra encouragement from a brutish newcomer, Leslie (Olivia Luccardi), a younger woman recently released from prison — impulsively descend upon a mixed race Asian American woman’s home to vandalize it and steal her possessions. Their crimes end up exceeding even their own expectations.The film is a palpable joyride steered by the kinds of women who, de Araújo seems to think, could easily get away with it. In this sense, it attempts to be both a political cautionary tale and a horror film committed to shock-and-awe thrill seeking. The brutal possibilities of the white supremacist mind-set are nothing to shy away from. Still, the film’s admittedly jarring cruelty does little beyond press down on old bruises, turning the realities of racialized violence into an immersive spectacle with the kind of real-world sadistic allure one might find in a serial-killer movie.Soft & QuietRated R for torture, sexual assault and vile language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Something in the Dirt’ Review: The Truth Is Over There, by the Sofa

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      Two likable losers fall into conspiratorial rabbit holes while filming the strange goings-on in their apartment building.“Something in the Dirt” is one of those weird little surprises sometimes found skulking in the crannies of mainstream film festivals, slippery and screwy and impossible to categorize. An ambitious potluck of buddy comedy, paranormal puzzle and whatdunnit mystery, this fifth feature from the filmmaking team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead cheerfully substitutes audacity for discipline.A doomy vibe descends immediately as Levi (Benson), a feckless bartender with a sketchy past, moves into a decaying apartment in the Hollywood Hills. Low-flying aircraft rumble overhead and a forest fire belches smoke on the horizon. Inside, there’s a creaking door that won’t close, a dripping ceiling (shout-out to Yah’el Dooley’s excellent sound design) and arcane equations scribbled on a closet wall. Levi’s mood lifts, though, when he meets his new neighbor, John (Moorhead), a recently divorced former math teacher. The two form an instant connection, despite John’s apocalyptic religious views and his apparently blood-spattered shirt.Written by Benson and shot by Moorhead, “Something in the Dirt” is a surreal satire of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking, suggesting both as logical responses to an increasingly scary world. When the friends, hoping for fame and fortune, decide to document what they believe to be supernatural phenomena — a levitating quartz ashtray, a plant that spontaneously grows strange fruit — their obsession with re-enactments digs slyly at the distortions of nonfiction filmmaking. Rambling conversations on aliens and math theorems, time travel and TED talks, contribute to an atmosphere in which everything feels unstable, not least the men’s sanity.Overlong and overwritten, “Dirt” nevertheless unfolds with an enjoyably comic quirkiness, a tale of two doofuses who sought meaning in symbols and found comfort in friendship.Something in the DirtRated R for a little violence and a lot of crazy talk. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Next Exit’ Review: End of the Road

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      Two strangers reflect on their lives as they embark on a cross-country drive to join a study involving life after death.In Mali Elfman’s debut feature “Next Exit,” Rose and Teddy (Katie Parker and Rahul Kohli) are two strangers with something in common: They’d both rather be dead.They embark on a cross-country drive to join an experiment run by a controversial scientist who claims there is life after death. But rather than a spiritual meditation on the great beyond, or a dystopian fable, Elfman’s road movie fits the largely conventional mold of stories about people taking stock before ending their lives.The film begins with the scientist (Karen Gillan) presenting evidence of the afterlife — a slightly janky recording of a boy playing cards with his father’s ghost. Her study involves the assisted suicide of its participants, who can now look forward to an afterlife. (The arrangement sounds more macabre than the film fully acknowledges.) Rose is eager to ditch what she regards as an ill-spent life, and she ends up sharing a rental car with Teddy, who is also deeply dissatisfied but tries to be an upbeat companion.On Rose and Teddy’s drive to San Francisco they have instructive encounters with a priest, a regretful cop, a hippie-dippy hitchhiker, and estranged family members. The reluctant pair keeps recalibrating in response, and trade prickly banter. Their trek sometimes taps the tragicomic feel of a soul-bearing late-night conversation in a bar.But the actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes. When the subject is the explicit consideration of a life’s worth, it’s a tricky road to take and not get lost along the way.Next ExitNot rated. 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Review: In ‘You Resemble Me,’ a Maladjusted Girl Is Interrupted

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      Dina Amer’s film uses empathetic, if simplistic, fictions to try to make sense of the complicated real life of a young Moroccan-French woman drawn to ISIS.In “You Resemble Me,” the journalist-turned-filmmaker Dina Amer uses fiction to try and make sense of a complicated life: that of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a Moroccan-French woman who died at 26 during a police raid on the hide-out of the mastermind of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Initially described in some news headlines as “Europe’s first female suicide bomber,” Boulahcen was found to have been killed in the crossfire, raising new questions about the extent of her involvement with the terrorists.Amer rounds out details drawn from interviews with Boulahcen’s family and friends with her own psychological coloring, striving to give shape to the inner life of a maladjusted immigrant. A whirling camera captures the tenderness and the tragedies of Hasna and her sister Mariam’s childhood, including parental abuse and their separation by the foster care system. The daily degradations of Hasna’s young adulthood as a drug peddler unfold in grimy scenes of Paris nightlife, while her eventual communion with a radicalized cousin is conveyed in hushed close-ups, underlining the powerful promise of acceptance that may have led her to ISIS.But for all its empathetic detail, “You Resemble Me” contrives a rather simplistic cause-and-effect tale, grasping too desperately at elusive answers. Hasna’s ability to adapt to — or dissociate from — harsh circumstances is literalized through the deepfake technology used to morph the face of Mouna Soualem, who plays the adult Hasna, into those of other actors (Sabrina Ouazani, Amer). These interruptions, glitchy rather than compelling, shortchange the spiky rawness of Soualem’s performance. The film needs more facts and fewer flourishes, but its closing turn to documentary footage, comprising brief snippets of interviews with Hasna’s family, is too little, too late.You Resemble MeNot rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Nocebo’ Review: A Troubled Home and a Sick Mother

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      A new horror starring Eva Green has a point to make about economic exploitation but lacks a sense of surprise.Child care is treacherous work in horror movies. Babysitters are invariably stalked, like in “Halloween,” and in “The Omen, looking after Damien leads his nanny to hang herself. This trope is toyed with in “Nocebo,” a new prestige horror about a stressed-out, affluent couple, Christine (Eva Green) and Felix (Mark Strong). They take on help for their young daughter (Billie Gadsdon), who, in the first sign something is terribly awry, attends a school where the uniform includes a beret.The new nanny (Chai Fonacier), who is Filipino, enters a troubled home and immediately starts handling the family’s problems and concerns, from making dinner to treating the mysterious sickness afflicting Christine using folk healing learned in her homeland. After a telephone call delivering bad news, Christine, a children’s fashion designer, starts feeling extremely off (symptoms include perspiration and seeing scary dogs). Her husband is skeptical.This movie has plenty going for it: excellent actors (Fonacier has a knack for coiled tension), stylish camerawork by the director Lorcan Finnegan and a point to make about economic exploitation. What’s missing is any sense of surprise. The plot unfolds as straightforwardly as a perfectly fine essay for an academic journal. Every twist is telegraphed. And the scenes are so overt and schematic that they prevent the actors from adding much mess or weirdness. The closest we get is Strong’s ability to imbue his flustered dad with an absurd amount of gravitas. Even in a movie haunted by death, you need more signs of life.NoceboNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Enola Holmes 2’ Review: A Clever Force of Nature

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      Millie Bobby Brown delivers an understated, playful performance in this young-adult mystery sequel.Enola Holmes is back, and she’s ready for both her first official case as a detective and, work schedule permitting, some romance. Millie Bobby Brown delivers an understated, playful performance in the follow up to the Netflix young-adult mystery “Enola Holmes.” This time around, the director Harry Bradbeer and the screenwriter Jack Thorne forgo prolonged dialogue when Enola breaks the fourth wall, making more room for Brown’s intense looks and physical gestures to resonate.Working in the shadow of her famous brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill), Enola realizes that independent, professional women are treated more like suspects than like trusted investigators in Victorian England. So it makes sense that her first case comes from a fellow young woman, Bessie (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss), who needs to track down a missing co-worker at a matchstick factory where women workers are mysteriously dying of typhus. (This plot point was inspired by the women who orchestrated the 1888 Match Girls Strike in London.)Sherlock himself is working on a case of stolen government funds, and the siblings eventually discover their cases are in fact linked. As Enola finds she can hold her own, both alongside and without her brother, a sheltered girl gives way to a young woman who embraces the literal and figurative fighter in her, finding solidarity with working-class women in the fight for women’s rights in the process. As Edith, a suffragist leader and jiu-jitsu master played by a steadying Susan Wokoma, proclaims in the film: “You can’t control Enola. She’s a force of nature.”Speaking of the movie’s well-choreographed fight scenes, when Enola’s mother, Eudoria (a delightful Helena Bonham Carter), and Edith band together to beat the heck out of grown-men assailants, one can’t help but cheer on this Y.A. feminist tale as a welcome addition to the Sherlock Holmes universe.Enola Holmes 2Rated PG-13 for moderate violence. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More