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      ‘Please Baby Please’ Review: Hyper-Masculinity, on Its Head

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      This 1950s satire from Amanda Kramer broadens the scope of the queer leather canon.A gang of greasers roams the smoggy streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They’re decked out motorcycle caps straight out of “The Wild Ones” and “Jailhouse Rock‌”-like striped ‌T-shirts, and they pause their prowling for a dance before violently bludgeoning two passers-by. In the satire “Please Baby Please,” these hoodlums are known as the Young Gents, and their hyper-stylized assault is witnessed by a beatnik couple, Arthur (Harry Melling) and Suze (Andrea Riseborough). The duo is transfixed.This chance first meeting with the Young Gents spells trouble for the married pair — trouble with a capital T that rhymes with G and that stands for gender. From this encounter, the film spins out into a romp through the muddle of 1950s masculinity. Arthur has spent his life resisting what he sees as the prison of his own manhood, and he finds himself drawn to the gang’s pouting pretty-boy leader (Karl Glusman). Suze is unleashed as a blossoming leather daddy in a beehive, taking further inspiration from a provocative neighbor, Maureen (Demi Moore). As Arthur and Suze navigate the physical threats to their safety imposed by their introduction to the Young Gents, they question their relationship and the roles that they play as husband and wife.The director Amanda Kramer takes aesthetic and erotic cues from the traditions passed down by artists like Kenneth Anger and Tom of Finland. The film’s ironic tone largely defangs the transgressive films it parodies, but Kramer does broaden the scope of the queer leather canon. She includes women among those searchers who might find their sense of identity through a performance of hyper-masculinity. Riseborough offers a dynamite performance as Suze, leaning into a thick New York accent as she slouches and slinks through her character’s awakening.Please Baby PleaseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Chance Encounter’ Review: Bland Days In Taormina

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      Andrea von Kampen, a singer-songwriter who has a way with the acoustic guitar, is the most engaging part of this tentative romantic drama.Can a motion picture be shockingly inoffensive? The question sauntered into my mind about a third of the way through “A Chance Encounter.” (A bad sign, as the movie is only about 90 minutes.)The movie’s components are not unfamiliar. A young man, Hal (Paul T.O. Petersen, who also wrote the script with the film’s director Alexander Jeffery), still not close to being settled in life, travels to the Sicilian seaside town of Taormina to honor his mother’s memory (his inheritance is footing the bill) and to find inspiration for his poetry.On a terrace with a killer view, he meets Josie, an American singer with a recent hit single, strumming and singing away.Josie is played by the real-life singer Andrea von Kampen, who’s the most engaging part of the picture. She’s a fine singer and, at times, her guitar work is reminiscent of the cult hero Nick Drake. But that’s the far end of whatever idiosyncrasy this movie has. After Hal and Josie’s meet-cute, they see sights blandly, philosophize blandly, blandly tiptoe around the notion of romance, and criticize each other — yes, blandly, but with an occasional touch of “salty” language. Josie is frustrated with Hal because she considers him a rare talent and thinks he won’t properly commit to the poetic vocation.“And perhaps the sun blows kisses to the moon as it departs/they work two separate shifts with one beating heart” is a representative couplet from Hal’s verse. As too often happens in movies that depict literary aspirants, the writing raises the dreaded question, “Wait, is this actually supposed to be good?” One supposes it is supposed to be. And one just has to sit with that, as “A Chance Encounter” ambles to its inevitable conclusion.A Chance EncounterNot rated. 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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      ‘Holy Spider’ Review: Brutality Tale

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      Like many a serial-killer drama, this movie about a real-life Iranian murderer who targeted prostitutes is a grisly thriller parading as a morality tale.Like many a serial-killer drama, “Holy Spider” is a grisly-gruesome thriller parading as a moral tale. Directed by the Denmark-based Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi, the movie tells the story of Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani), a construction worker and war veteran in Mashhad, Iran, who strangled 16 prostitutes to death in 2000 and 2001. His case led to a media frenzy when his purported quest to “cleanse” his hometown — a spiritual hub for Shiite Muslims — generated public support from hard-line Iranians.The irony at the heart of “Holy Spider” is fascinating and timely: How does a holy city not just foster but actively embolden prostitution, a drug trade and reckless slaughter? The film’s genre-movie stylings, however, flatten these sociopolitical questions into psychosexual spectacles. Abbasi seems enamored by the contradictions of Hanaei, who was at once an upstanding Muslim, a family man, a pervert and a ruthless killer. But anyone who reads the news, anywhere in the world, will respond to these rote hypocrisies of misogyny with little other than jadedness.And for all the time the movie devotes to Hanaei’s life, we learn little about the lives of Mashhad’s prostitutes, who only appear briefly before their gratuitously detailed killings. Instead, Abbasi makes the fictionalized character of Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) — a Tehrani journalist whose own experience with sexual harassment drives her crusade to catch the killer — the film’s sole representative of women’s concerns, burdened with an implausible cat-and-mouse arc. In reality, Hanaei was arrested after one woman fought him back and escaped, and reported him to the police, in spite of the risks involved. Her story of courage feels far worthier of a movie than Abbasi’s grim vision of murder and mania.Holy SpiderNot rated. In Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Novelist’s Film’ Review: Real Talk

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      In Hong Sang-soo’s latest study in small moments and chance encounters, a visit to an old friend prompts a writer in crisis to try something new.Amid the wonderfully diverse and daring output of the South Korean film industry in recent decades, the director Hong Sang-soo has been quietly, prolifically making features of the utmost insight and sensitivity — nearly 30 since 1996 — that have nothing to do with the genre-play, melodrama or over-the-top violence associated with some of his better known compatriots.His most recent picture, “The Novelist’s Film,” is no exception, a Chekhovian study in small moments and chance encounters, which is to say it is a study of human beings as they really live: ambiguously and without exposition, spontaneously and without tidy motives or resolution.Much of what typifies Hong’s work will feel familiar in “The Novelist’s Film”: the budget (low); the dialogue (natural); the characters (creative types in crisis); the camera (mostly a fixed, single shot per scene). The story is likewise reliably spare: On a visit to an old friend (Seo Young-hwa) outside Seoul, the novelist Junhee (Lee Hye-young) has a run-in with a movie director who once jilted her professionally (Kwon Hae-hyo) and a famous actress, Kilsoo (Hong’s longtime collaborator Kim Min-hee), who has stepped away from acting indefinitely.Junhee has been struggling creatively herself, and she is prompted to pursue her own experimental short film, in which she urges Kilsoo to participate. Her request, like many of her conversations, is awkwardly frank. Meaning teems in the uncomfortable silences and deflections; each platitude contains multitudes. Is Kilsoo interested or playing nice?Hong works fast, rarely preparing scripts more than a day in advance, which may help explain how his films can be so talky without feeling scripted — a minor miracle each time he does it, which is about once a year. Long may he run-and-gun.The Novelist’s FilmNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. More

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      ‘Wendell and Wild’ Review: Not Wild Enough

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      This devilish stop-motion horror comedy from Henry Selick and Jordan Peele can’t quite breathe life into its narrative.Why not try to resurrect the dead? Collect some demons in glass jars? Or summon a pair of demon brothers from among the “souls of the danged”? These seem like the ingredients for a wicked fun time.But the devilish new stop-motion horror comedy from Netflix, “Wendell & Wild,” can’t get these pieces to double, double, toil or trouble into a cohesive dish of entertainment.In the film, directed by Henry Selick, and written by Selick and Jordan Peele, a demon named Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and his brother, Wild (Peele), aim to hitch a ride up to the land of the living with the help of Kat (Lyric Ross), a teenage girl with a traumatic back story and a boombox called the Cyclops. Wendell and Wild hope to find a way to build an amusement park in the underworld that would put Six Flags to shame. However, Kat has her own plan for the demon siblings, and the repercussions soon spread to affect the whole town.From juicy grubs to booger sculptures to sticky gelatinous goo, “Wendell & Wild” exhibits the same charming, if grotesque, ghoulishness and delectable phantasmagoria of Selick’s other Halloween classics, like “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993), “James and the Giant Peach” (1996) and “Coraline” (2009).Key and Peele’s usually unstoppable humor and Selick’s signature combination of morbid terror and fanciful play, along with the film’s wonderfully diverse characters (including an Indigenous woman and a transgender boy of color) and its surprising sociopolitical messaging, seem like they’ll combine to make “Wendell & Wild” a new Halloween fave.But the story lines feel far-flung and disconnected, and the limits and rules of this world’s magical logic are at turns underdeveloped and inconsistent. Though the movie has a delightfully raucous rock ’n’ roll sensibility, the dialogue lacks the wit and punch to match.Every new character and narrative detail in the film — a mysterious janitor, a demonic teddy bear and a carnival of imps and fiends — is an unintentional red herring, not a purposeful misdirection but a residual of all the interesting places this film could have gone but never ventured.It’s especially disappointing given the ways “Wendell & Wild” does succeed — the imaginative visuals and playful character designs, of course, and an interesting protagonist in Kat, a Black punk girl with eyebrow piercings, green hair (about 160 hand-curled strands of wool, according to the press notes, to replicate her natural hair) and no-nonsense platform boots. And then there’s the headbanging array of tunes from Death, TV on the Radio and X-Ray Spex.You’d think demons would have the most fun. And yet, despite the countless courses “Wendell & Wild” could have taken, the route it does choose is, unfortunately, a dead end.Wendell & WildRated PG-13 for demons, zombies and things that go bump in the night. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Lair’ Review: Going Underground

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      A band of grunts takes on mysterious underground monsters in this goofy horror movie.Suctioning brains and snacking on innards, the monsters in “The Lair” appear motivated solely by hunger, any higher purpose remaining stubbornly veiled. Though I suppose when you’ve spent more than three decades entombed in an abandoned Soviet bunker, a good meal would be something of a priority.Lively, noisy, dark and daft, this gloopy creature feature from the British director Neil Marshall plays like a loose, if vastly inferior callback to his two best films, “Dog Soldiers” (2002) and “The Descent” (2006). The year is 2017, and Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk), a resolute Royal Air Force pilot, is shot down in a remote region of Afghanistan. Fleeing insurgents, she takes refuge in said bunker, only to face a toothy blob that has eaten one of her pursuers and ripped the face off another. Venturing deeper, she discovers pods containing more beasties in a liquid suspension. Has she found a nursery, or a laboratory?Answers will arrive, but good luck catching them in the ensuing melee when Kate is rescued by a raggedy band of misfit soldiers that excels mainly at delivering B-movie dialogue like “Kill anything that shrieks!” Aside from Hadi Khanjanpour, as a coolheaded Afghan prisoner, the acting is pretty awful, though the script is so clunky and the characters so clichéd it’s tough to blame the performers.If all you’re after, though, is the slap of tentacles and the spaghetti-spill of intestines — and a reminder of the alien autopsy from “The Thing” (1982) — then you won’t care that the action itself is so messy and underlighted it’s a wonder the squad kills anything except the film crew. As for the brain-sucking, by the time the credits roll you’ll probably have a fair idea what that feels like.The LairNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 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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      ‘The Runner’ Is a Gem of the Iranian New Wave

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      Amir Naderi’s scrappy, intimate film, which follows an 11-year-old garbage scavenger in Iran, is getting a second viewing at Film Forum in Manhattan.“The Runner,” Amir Naderi’s stylized memoir of his boyhood in Iran, is a notable feat — a movie at once objective and subjective and single-minded throughout. Shooting from the viewpoint of an illiterate street kid, Naderi employs a mature artist’s disciplined technique to celebrate a child’s new-minted vision of his hardscrabble world.Long unseen, “The Runner” opens on Friday for a two-week run at Film Forum in Manhattan, where it had its U.S. theatrical premiere in 1991. Crisply restored with improved subtitles, it is no less timeless and elemental.Limned against the sky, then seen collecting scrap metal amid a horde of destitute scavengers, the 11-year-old Amiro (Madjid Niroumand) goes on to fish beer bottles out of the harbor, sell ice water in the marketplace and work as a shoeshine boy in a dockside cafe. Life involves coping with bullies and handling deadbeat customers and their false accusations. Looking beyond his surroundings, Amiro uses his earnings to buy old magazines with pictures of airplanes and his spare time to race with a gang of kids — he is the smallest and most indefatigable of the group.The movie’s self-possessed young star, whom Naderi spotted modeling in a sports magazine, inspired comparisons to the neorealist child actors of “Shoeshine” and “The Bicycle Thief.” Naderi’s technique is equally noteworthy. “The Runner” is admirably lean and remarkably well-constructed. The sound design is deliberate. The camera placement, often at Amiro’s height, is precise. The editing is inventive. Shot during the Iraq-Iran war, it was impossible to film in Naderi’s hometown, the southern port Abadan; instead “The Runner” seamlessly cobbles together locations from nearly a dozen cities. (Naderi has cited Orson Welles’s geographic patchwork “Othello” as a precedent.)Now 76, Naderi is a pioneer of the Iranian new wave, having completed a half-dozen features before the 1979 Islamic revolution. “The Runner” was produced by the same progressive entity, Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, that funded Abbas Kiarostami’s early films. Completed in 1984, it was the first Iranian production to attract international attention, shown the following year at the Venice Film Festival. (Leaving Iran in the 1990s, Naderi lived in New York for a decade before moving on to Japan and, more recently, Italy; Niroumand, whose escape from Iran at age 16 is the subject of a recent documentary short, “A Boy’s Own Story,” grew up to be a college administrator in Costa Mesa, Calif.)Reviewing “The Runner” when it opened here in 1991, the New York Times critic Stephen Holden praised the film for using Amiro’s eyes to find “beauty and wonder as well as squalor in Abadan’s grimy sunsets, polluted harbor waters and dusty railroad depots.” In effect, the movie naturalizes the urban environment. The light is often dazzling; the array of bottles floating in the harbor is bewitching. While acknowledging that every object in Amiro’s world has its price, “The Runner” has a subtle fairy-tale quality. Amiro lives alone on a deserted tanker. Politics and religion are absent — as are women (perhaps a post-revolution expedience). A commitment to individual freedom seems absolute.Paradoxical to the end, “The Runner” concludes with a near-silent tumult of fire and ice, and a sense of triumph founded on the realization that the adult Amiro made this movie.The RunnerThrough Nov. 10 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      ‘New York, New York,’ a Film-Inspired Homage, Plans Broadway Bow

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      The new musical, based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese film, features songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb and is directed by Susan Stroman.“New York, New York,” a new musical inspired by the 1977 Martin Scorsese film of the same name, will open on Broadway next spring.The musical, set in the years just after World War II, is nominally about the lives of a diverse array of New Yorkers, including a musician who falls in love with a singer, as in the film. But, also like the movie, it is a tribute to New York City as a city of seekers and strivers.The musical will feature songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb, a songwriting pair best known for “Chicago” and “Cabaret.” The two wrote songs for the film, which was also a musical, including, most famously, the title song, which enjoyed renewed popularity in the city at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.The stage adaptation will include nine existing songs and 13 new ones. Ebb died in 2004; Kander, who is 95, has been actively working on the show, and the composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Hamilton”) co-wrote two songs with him and will be credited for contributing additional lyrics to the show.“The hero or heroine of the piece is New York City itself,” Kander said in an interview. “In the years of 1946 and 1947, the city was flooded with new young people, many of whom had been in the Service — I was one of them — looking to have a life you couldn’t have where you came from.”Kander said the show will track five story lines, but also will feature “a kaleidoscopic set of interludes where we see other characters.”The show features a book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington, and will be directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. The cast has not yet been announced.The musical is scheduled to begin performances on March 24 and to open on April 26 at the St. James Theater. The lead producers are Sonia Friedman and Tom Kirdahy; the show will be capitalized for $25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The show will be large — Stroman said she expects an onstage cast of 27 and an orchestra of 19. Stroman and Kander began talking about the show before the pandemic, but now see it a tribute to the city’s resilience. “We knew the city would at some point come back, and that fueled us to write about it even more,” Stroman said. More