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      Kevin Spacey Is Cleared of Anthony Rapp’s Battery Claim

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      A jury found Mr. Spacey not liable in a civil trial. Mr. Rapp, an original cast member in “Rent,” had filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Spacey of making a sexual advance when Mr. Rapp was 14.A federal jury in Manhattan found Kevin Spacey not liable for battery on Thursday after the actor Anthony Rapp filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Spacey of climbing on top of him and making a sexual advance in 1986, when Mr. Rapp was 14.Mr. Rapp’s claim was one of the most prominent in the early days of the #MeToo movement, as accusers started to come forward with allegations against high-profile men in the entertainment, political and business worlds. Mr. Spacey, a star of the political drama “House of Cards” and a lauded actor who had hosted the Tony Awards months earlier, quickly experienced career blowback.The disclosure by Mr. Rapp, which BuzzFeed News published in October 2017, was followed by more than a dozen other sexual misconduct accusations against Mr. Spacey. He has pleaded not guilty to sexual assault charges in Britain, and outside the courthouse on Thursday, one of his lawyers, Jennifer L. Keller, said he would be proven innocent in all cases.The civil trial to consider Mr. Rapp’s claim of battery hinged on his account of a night in 1986, when, he said, he attended a party at Mr. Spacey’s New York apartment during a Broadway season in which both of them were acting in plays. Mr. Spacey, who was 26 at the time, denied that such an encounter ever occurred.After less than an hour and a half of deliberation, an 11-person jury in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan decided in favor of Mr. Spacey, whose lawyers had hammered Mr. Rapp with questions that challenged his memory of events said to have occurred more than 36 years ago.Following the verdict, Mr. Spacey stood up with tears in his eyes and hugged his lawyers. He was silent during his exit from the courthouse, but Ms. Keller told reporters, “We’re just grateful that the jury saw the truth.”Anthony Rapp sued Mr. Spacey, accusing him of making a sexual advance when Mr. Rapp was 14.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersMr. Rapp was straight-faced in response to the decision. In a statement later posted to his Twitter account, Mr. Rapp said he was “deeply grateful” for the opportunity to have his case heard before a jury.“Bringing this lawsuit was always about shining a light,” the statement said, “as part of the larger movement to stand up against all forms of sexual violence.”Mr. Rapp, an actor on “Star Trek: Discovery” and who is best known for his originating role in the musical “Rent,” was able to bring his claim under a New York State law, the Child Victims Act. The law included a temporary “look-back” window during which old claims that had already passed the statute of limitations could be revived.The jury determined that there was not enough evidence to prove that Mr. Spacey had touched one of Mr. Rapp’s “sexual or intimate” parts, meaning the claim could not be revived under the law. Mr. Rapp testified that when Mr. Spacey picked him up, one of his hands “grazed” his buttocks.Mr. Rapp’s lawyers presented testimony from three men who said he had told them in the mid-1990s or earlier about an encounter with Mr. Spacey. The defense focused on inconsistencies and picked at vagueness in his account, highlighting that Mr. Rapp, 50, presented no third-party corroboration of the gathering on the night that he said the encounter had occurred. Midway through the trial, the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, dismissed a claim against Mr. Spacey, 63, of intentional infliction of emotional distress.“There is no evidence that this happened and plenty of evidence that it didn’t,” Ms. Keller said in closing arguments.Both actors took the stand to testify, presenting disparate accounts about what happened in the spring of 1986, when Mr. Rapp was a teenage actor in the play “Precious Sons” and Mr. Spacey was in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”Mr. Rapp testified that he had withdrawn to the bedroom to watch late-night TV during Mr. Spacey’s party because he did not know any other guests. Once the party wound down, Mr. Rapp testified, Mr. Spacey approached him, picked him up, laid him on the bed and climbed on top of him, pressing his groin into Mr. Rapp’s hip.“I knew something was really wrong now,” Mr. Rapp said, recalling feeling frozen in place.He testified that he was able to wriggle out from under Mr. Spacey, who appeared intoxicated, and escape to the nearby bathroom. Mr. Rapp recalled that before he exited the apartment, Mr. Spacey said, “Are you sure you want to leave?”The defense contended that Mr. Rapp had fabricated the claim to get attention for himself and his career, which he denied.“Does it look like he is enjoying the attention of this?” a lawyer for Mr. Rapp, Richard M. Steigman, said in closing arguments. “He is doing this to hold Kevin Spacey accountable.”Despite issuing an apology shortly after Mr. Rapp made public his allegation, Mr. Spacey testified that the encounter never happened, that he had never been alone with Mr. Rapp and that he had not had a party at his apartment in the time frame Mr. Rapp described.Peter Gallagher and Mr. Spacey in the Broadway show “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1986.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMr. Spacey said he did recall that Mr. Rapp had attended with a friend a performance of “Long Day’s Journey,” and that afterward, Mr. Spacey had invited them to dinner, then to a nightclub and then back to his apartment.Mr. Spacey said he had flirted with Mr. Rapp’s friend, John Barrowman, who was 19 at the time. Back at Mr. Spacey’s apartment, he said, he pushed Mr. Barrowman gently back onto the bed when Mr. Rapp left for the bathroom. Feeling that Mr. Rapp was too young to see them in a romantic situation, Mr. Spacey said, the two men sat up when Mr. Rapp returned.“I had no interest in Mr. Rapp joining us,” Mr. Spacey testified.Mr. Rapp testified that on the night they all went to the nightclub — which he described as his second time meeting Mr. Spacey — they did not go back to the apartment. In a videotaped deposition, Mr. Barrowman, an actor known for his role in the TV show “Doctor Who,” recalled the series of events that night as Mr. Spacey had.Mr. Rapp called the alleged encounter with Mr. Spacey the most traumatic event of his life. Mr. Rapp testified about moments when he later saw Mr. Spacey onscreen — in films like “American Beauty” and “Working Girl” — and felt startled, sometimes feeling as if “poked with a cattle prod.”Mr. Spacey’s lawyers suggested throughout the trial that Mr. Rapp was motivated to fabricate the accusation because he was envious of Mr. Spacey’s career or frustrated that Mr. Spacey was not public about his relationships with men.Mr. Rapp denied those motivations, asserting that he had come forward to seek belated justice for himself. But during a lengthy and tense cross-examination, he acknowledged that he might have been mistaken about a couple details, including that the alleged encounter had occurred in a separate bedroom in Mr. Spacey’s apartment.Mr. Spacey’s lawyers also questioned Mr. Rapp on similarities between his account and moments of staging in “Precious Sons.” In the play, the character of Mr. Rapp’s father, who was played by Ed Harris, had picked up the character of Mr. Rapp in the same manner that he described Mr. Spacey picking him up — like a groom carrying a bride. Mr. Harris also climbed on Mr. Rapp twice during the play.Mr. Rapp dismissed the idea that there was any connection, saying the staging had been done “with care and consent.”Mr. Rapp’s lawyers pointed to Mr. Spacey’s initial response to Mr. Rapp’s accusation, in which he did not categorically deny the encounter, as supporting evidence for their client. In a statement Mr. Spacey posted after the BuzzFeed article, he said he had no memory of the encounter, adding, “But if I did behave then as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.”In his testimony, Mr. Spacey said he regretted making that apology, attributing the decision to advisers who feared that people would call Mr. Spacey a “victim blamer” if he denied the allegation outright.“I’ve learned a lesson,” Mr. Spacey testified, “which is, never apologize for something you didn’t do.”One additional accuser, Andy Holtzman, testified during the trial that Mr. Spacey had groped him in an office in 1981, when Mr. Holtzman was 27 and Mr. Spacey was several years younger. Mr. Spacey denied doing so. No other accusations were discussed in front of the jury, and Judge Kaplan instructed the jury to disregard two instances when Mr. Rapp had alluded to other allegations against Mr. Spacey during his testimony.As a result of the sexual misconduct allegations against him, Mr. Spacey — who has won two Oscars and a Tony — lost major roles, with an arbitrator ordering him to pay $31 million to the “House of Cards” studio for breach of contract.But the jury’s verdict on Thursday adds to the list of legal victories for Mr. Spacey. Prosecutors dropped a sexual assault charge in Massachusetts, and an anonymous accuser who had originally sued alongside Mr. Rapp decided not to continue his claim when Judge Kaplan ruled that the plaintiff would need to identify himself publicly.“What’s next,” Ms. Keller said outside the courthouse on Thursday, “is that Kevin Spacey is going to be proven innocent of anything he’s been accused of.” More

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      ‘Face’ Review: Close Encounters

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      Commissioned by the Louvre, the film brings together two of cinema’s unforgettable faces, Lee Kang-sheng and Jean-Pierre Léaud.There are some filmmakers whose cinema can be distilled into a single face. François Truffaut is one of them: Jean-Pierre Léaud’s roguish mien became, through Truffaut’s films, synonymous with the spirit of the French New Wave. The Malaysian Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, a devotee of Truffaut, is another. His films double as a record of the face of his muse, Lee Kang-sheng, captured closely in all its gradations over time.Commissioned by the Louvre Museum, Tsai’s 2009 film, “Face,” brings Lee and Léaud’s great visages together. Lee plays a director, Kang, who is in Paris to film a movie in the Louvre about the biblical story of Salome. Léaud plays an aging actor named Antoine — like his character in Truffaut’s films — while Fanny Ardant (Truffaut’s partner until his death in 1984) appears as a vexed producer.Time is the narrative principle in “Face.” Scenes of extended duration invite us to explore details within the frame, as one might with a painting, while the impending death of Kang’s ailing mother (Lu Yi-ching) casts a shadow of mortality over the film — particularly over Léaud and Lee, who appear at times like past and future reflections of one another.The film unfolds as a series of tableaux whose preciousness is tempered by hints of perversity: lust, incest, slapstick and, above all, the strange labor of filmmaking. At one point, we see Laetitia Casta, who plays Salome, in extreme close-up as Kang’s crew debates how to make her look colder. His assistants wipe her cheeks and rub ice on them while she remains uncomfortably silent. Her face is both a decorative mask and a fragile container of roiling emotion, encapsulating the wry duality of Tsai’s cinema.FaceNot rated. In French, Mandarin and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Voodoo Macbeth’ Review: A Tiresome Curse

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      A historical look back at Orson Welles’s production of “Macbeth” with an all-Black cast in Harlem in the 1930s.When the theatrical production featuring the first all-Black cast of “Macbeth” opened in Harlem on April 14, 1936, it was quite the event. According to an article on the Library of Congress website, “At 6:30 p.m., 10,000 people stood as close as they could come to the Lafayette Theater on Seventh Avenue near 131st Street, jamming the avenue for 10 blocks and halting northbound traffic for more than an hour.”The film “Voodoo Macbeth” tells the story of how this groundbreaking production came to be, from the perspective of a then 20-year old “genius” Orson Welles (Jewell Wilson Bridges), who adapted and directed the play, switching out Shakespeare’s Scotland for Haiti.From its opening scene, a P.O.V. shot of the theater producer John Houseman watching the Broadway actress Rose McClendon rehearse — to its final scene, Welles taking a victory walk into the night in a cloud of cigarette smoke, “Voodoo Macbeth” proves itself to be a textbook white savior film and not much else. Welles and Houseman (Daniel Kuhlman) are the heroic subjects and McClendon (Inger Tudor) and the other Black cast members are stilted objects forever in need of their saving.Interestingly, the film’s writing and directing credits belong to 18 people, eight screenwriters and 10 directors, all of whom are either current graduate students or recent alumni of the University of Southern California. And with this many cooks in the kitchen, the film’s flatness is hardly surprising. But the movie’s repetition of mirror shots are an appealing, if not derivative, visual through-line in the film.With such a gross misinterpretation of the source material (why invent Welles onstage in blackface?) it’s fitting that the most engaging part of “Voodoo Macbeth” turns out to be the archival footage of the real-life production that plays alongside the credits.Voodoo MacbethNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Animal Lovers, Rejoice: The NY Cat and Dog Film Festivals Return

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      The programs feature many surprises, including a cat that plays Wordle and a lone man’s odyssey to feed Turkish strays.Tracie Hotchner still doesn’t offer tissues.During her early years as the director and founder of two animal film festivals, audience members would occasionally confront her and say, “‘Why don’t you give Kleenex?’” Hotchner recalled. While her programs have never included “Old Yeller”-style tear-jerkers, she acknowledges that her first festivals were too long and emotional. Even a steady string of uplifting tales could cause sentimental overload.But when Hotchner’s seventh annual NY Dog Film Festival and fifth annual NY Cat Film Festival arrive on Sunday at the Village East by Angelika Theater in Manhattan — before a monthslong tour of the United States and Canada — they will be as sleek and compact as a prizewinning Abyssinian or a champion greyhound. Featuring international short films, each festival now runs under two hours and intersperses serious works with the purely comic. (The 16-film cat festival screens at 11 a.m., the 17-film dog festival at 2 p.m.)This year, moviegoers can witness the challenging lives of feral cats in Malta and abandoned dogs in Mexico. Yet they can also see a feline parody of “America’s Got Talent,” fancifully animated dog and cat crime capers and a documentary about golden retrievers that served as the legitimately elected mayors of Idyllwild, Calif.With each festival, “I’ve tried to make it more balanced and something that is a magic carpet ride,” said Hotchner, an author and radio host in Bennington, Vt., whose Radio Pet Lady Network features online talk shows. During a telephone interview, she added, “There’s lots of short films, but you don’t have several in a row that slam you emotionally.”The programs have transformed in other ways, too. The 2022 editions are the most global, including films from Chile, France, Ireland, China, India, Israel and Sweden. Hotchner is also extending the projects’ reach: A film distributor is booking both festivals in other cities well into 2023. And for the first time, she is hosting a 20-minute question-and-answer session with a few filmmakers after each festival’s Manhattan screening.“I’ve never had a theater that would let me do that before,” Hotchner said. “It costs them money.” She explained that the Village East was donating the time, a gesture that is very much in the spirit of her feel-good, do-good mission: Ten percent of the $20 ticket price for each festival goes to a local animal charity in every city hosting the programs. On Sunday, the beneficiary is NYC Second Chance Rescue, whose co-founder, Lisa Blanco, will help greet audiences.But what may distinguish this year’s festivals most is the element of surprise. “Many of the films were not like anything I’d seen before,” Hotchner said.Consider “Kopecki” (“The Dog God”), Hayrettin Alan’s 11-minute documentary about a lone man feeding homeless dogs near Van, Turkey. Lacking narration or dialogue, the film simply follows this self-appointed savior, as packs of startlingly beautiful dogs greet him with unanticipated affection.Clockwise from top left: Scenes from “Jade & Trubs,” “Kopecki,” “Duet” and “Please Rescue Me.”Clockwise from top left: Mutual Rescue; Hayrettin Alan; Yadid Hirschtritt Licht; Kim BestHotchner also found a live-action fictional work among her entries — these are rare, as they tend to have high budgets. This selection, “Adam,” by Hope Elizabeth Martinez, focuses on a teenage girl whose sole companion is an ailing 14-year-old dog.Among the animated submissions, Hotchner discovered an unusual variety of styles and unexpectedly serious themes. In Yadid Hirschtritt Licht’s lyrical “Duet,” for example, a cat’s loving legacy continues after its original owner dies.But the humorous films offer surprises, too. Ever see a cat play Wordle? Kim Best, a filmmaker in Durham, N.C., created “Cat of Letters” with her own pet, Nube. (Pronounced NOO-bay, the word is Spanish for “cloud.”) Although a cat lover, Best admits that her stars don’t take direction.“They’re very insubordinate and churlish,” she said in a phone interview.Nube was churlish enough to reject the fingerlike extensions Best tried to attach to his claws, so she used a stuffed animal’s paw affixed to a stylus to portray the cat tapping letters on an iPad. (It’s convincing.) But she also gave herself a challenge: Nube, whose thoughts are conveyed via subtitles, chooses only cat- or dog-related words for his opening Wordle efforts, so Best had to use those to solve the puzzles in real time. There was “no cheating,” she said.A director who has contributed to every NY Cat Film Festival so far, Best also has a documentary spotlighting a more typical feline talent: getting stuck in trees. “Please Rescue Me” follows Patrick Brandt, a kindly North Carolina biochemist and arborist who has volunteered his skills and equipment to extract some 250 trapped cats — and one pet coatimundi.As he says in the film, “I’m not so much rescuing the cat as I’m rescuing the person.”Animals, of course, frequently save the people who save them. Mutual Rescue, a global nonprofit initiative that creates documentaries about these relationships to encourage pet adoption, delivered “Kimo & Jazz.” This film concerns a young gay man from a conservative religious background who finally felt able to come out to his parents after adopting a shelter dog. The pet, Jazz, then helped sustain him as his father was dying.Another Mutual Rescue documentary, “Jade & Trubs,” chronicles how Double Trouble — a toothless, sickly and thoroughly unsociable feline shelter resident — uncharacteristically responded to Jade, a little girl with autism visiting the organization. Jade had sensitivities that turned every bedtime into long bouts of tears and screams. But once the family adopted the animal, nicknamed Trubs, both child and cat blossomed in unexpected ways.Perhaps the most surprising interplay of rescuer and rescued, however, takes place in “Underdogs,” an independent project by Alex Astrella. His documentary unfolds at the California Men’s Colony, a prison in San Luis Obispo where the inmates train service dogs for veterans and emergency workers with post-traumatic stress disorder. The prisoners’ dark histories — several on camera are convicted murderers — contrast starkly with their tender devotion to the dogs and their purpose.“I took a life,” one says. “Now I want to save a life.”Astrella said in a phone interview that he intended to illustrate the program’s effects on the men and “the change it’ll hopefully enact on their lives going forward.” The film, he added, is a testament to the “spiritual power that dogs have on humans.”Such connections are the thread that runs through the festivals. As Hotchner said, their mission is “to celebrate that human-animal bond, however and wherever it occurs.”So prepare to celebrate. And maybe pack a few tissues.NY Cat Film Festival and NY Dog Film FestivalOct. 23; the Village East by Angelika Theater, Manhattan; catfilmfestival.com, dogfilmfestival.com. More

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      ‘My Policeman’ Review: Two Love Affairs, Equally Tragic

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      A schoolteacher, her police officer husband and his lover deny each other romantic satisfaction in this dismal melodrama.The melodrama “My Policeman” tells a decades-long story of a schoolteacher, a museum curator and the man they both love. The film is based on a novel of the same name, which took narrative inspiration from the relationship between the novelist E.M. Forster, his lover, who was a police officer, and his lover’s wife. Unfortunately, the historical record is more imaginative than the fictional story represented onscreen.The film tells the story of a schoolteacher, Marion, her law enforcement husband, Tom, and his great love, Patrick. The trio start the movie in 1999 as retirees. Patrick (Rupert Everett) has suffered a stroke, and Marion (Gina McKee) welcomes him to convalesce in her home with Tom (Linus Roache). This reunion sparks Marion’s memory, and when she finds Patrick’s journals, she falls into reminiscence.In flashbacks to their youth in 1957, Marion (played as a young woman by Emma Corrin) recalls Tom’s timid attempts at courtship. Tom (Harry Styles) introduced her to Patrick (David Dawson) under the pretext of impressing her with a trip to the museum. Patrick became a third wheel in their life as a couple, joining them for dates and trips out of town. Patrick’s diaries fill in the gaps of Marion’s memory, recounting a passionate affair with Tom that continued even after Tom and Marion married.The director Michael Grandage smartly uses sets and costumes to emphasize the class differences between the characters. But Grandage struggles with animating such a dismal treatment of gay history. These are characters who are frustrated in love, prevented by law and by their own emotional repression from asking for what they want in their relationships. The stately treatment of their plight leads to a film that buckles under the weight of purgatorial disappointment.My PolicemanRated R for sexual content and nudity. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Matriarch’ Review: Maternal Instincts

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      Jemima Rooper plays a troubled woman reconciling with her mother in this murky horror film set in Britain.“Matriarch” opens by watching a nude figure descend into a pond of black muck, but the slog that follows in this derivative, tar-flow-paced thriller from Britain is strictly for the viewer.After a title card, the movie introduces its protagonist, Laura (Jemima Rooper), who works in advertising. The director, Ben Steiner, spends nearly a quarter of the running time cataloging ways she is troubled. Laura struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, with apparent bulimia and with staying out of others’ parenting. She chastises a stranger for not feeding a baby quickly enough and tells off her concerned boss (Franc Ashman) by invoking the boss’s dead daughter.All of these issues seem to stem from Laura’s relationship with the woman who raised her, Celia (Kate Dickie), who abruptly calls after two decades of estrangement. Celia says she sensed that Laura must be in pain — a mother knows. She invites Laura to return home for what promises to be a barbed reconciliation.But when Laura arrives, something is off. Celia has aged so little that Laura suspects she’s had plastic surgery. Most others in the village, except a former girlfriend of Laura’s (Sarah Paul), appear not to have grown old either, and they might be sharing some sort of secret. (A sensible visitor’s “Wicker Man” meter would be going wild.) In a departure from Laura’s perspective, Steiner shows Celia repeatedly trying to lace Laura’s food with crushed pills. Laura and Celia both suffer from black-mud nosebleeds.But none of how “Matriarch” resolves is particularly scary or surprising. The finale — filled with dark, barely legible imagery — is a letdown both visually and dramatically.MatriarchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Aftersun’ Review: A Father and Time

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      A daughter’s memory of a vacation in Turkey is at the heart of Charlotte Wells’s astonishing and devastating debut feature.The relationship between a parent and a child is wired for heartbreak — a primal attachment headed for an inevitable double grief. Kids grow up and flee the nest. Parents die. It’s the natural order of things, calamitous even when no untimely tragedies intervene to amplify the pain.Such a tragedy does shadow “Aftersun,” the tender and devastating first feature from the 35-year-old Scottish director Charlotte Wells, but the power of the film comes from its embrace of the basic and universal fact of loss. It’s about a mostly happy experience — a father-daughter vacation in a resort town on the Turkish coast, with snorkeling excursions, hotel buffets and lazy hours by the pool — that ends in tears. Your tears.Eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), are mostly too caught up in the delights and frustrations of the present to express much sorrow or anxiety, but they also seem aware that time is moving quickly. Sophie, on the edge of adolescence, is both hanging onto childhood and rushing toward maturity. Her eyes are always moving, scanning her surroundings for clues and portents.A young man himself — he’s about to turn 31 and is mistaken by a fellow tourist for Sophie’s older brother — Calum carries some weariness in his lithe frame. His boyish features are creased with worry. We don’t learn much about his history — Wells is not the kind of director to spoil delicate scenes with expository dialogue — but we’re aware that he and Sophie’s mother aren’t together. We can also infer some hard knocks and bad decisions in his past.Maybe in his future as well. One thing we do know about Calum — though it’s hard to say exactly how we come by this knowledge — is that he dies sometime after the vacation. From the very first scenes, the presence of camcorders and the absence of smartphones places the trip in the past. A grown-up Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who at 31 has a partner and a baby, is remembering those sun-dappled mornings and karaoke nights (she sang “Losing My Religion”) of 20 years before.It isn’t quite right to say that “Aftersun” takes place mostly in flashbacks. It also feels wrong to describe the adult Sophie’s harrowing visions of her father dancing in a strobe-lit nightclub — scenes that occasionally interrupt the Turkish idyll — as dreams. Wells is working in a more intuitive and oblique psychological register, the flow of her images attuned to the fluidity of Sophie’s consciousness, her narrative instincts following the logic of emotion rather than the mechanics of plot. The boundaries between memory and experience aren’t so much blurred as rendered moot. And by the end of the movie you understand why: because that’s how mourning works.“Aftersun” is as clear and literal as can be, following Sophie and Calum through ordinary tourist activities without much dramatic embellishment. There are moments that carry a hint of danger or unprocessed bad feeling — a misunderstanding about a lost diving mask, for example. Sophie sometimes tags along with a group of British teenagers, eavesdropping on their naughty banter and observing their horseplay with an eagerness that might make a watchful parent anxious. (She also flirts with a boy her own age, a fellow devotee of motorcycle-racing arcade games.) You might raise an eyebrow when Calum orders a third beer at dinner and wonder if he’s really mature enough to take care of his daughter on his own.Late in the film, Calum’s fecklessness and Sophie’s curiosity open the door to some scary possibilities. But “Aftersun” isn’t a child-in-peril melodrama, or a punitive fable of parental irresponsibility. Its structure emerges through a pattern of perceptions and moods. Sometimes Sophie and Calum quarrel, get on each other’s nerves or fail to connect. Sometimes they’re bored, sometimes silly, and sometimes they relax into an easy, almost wordless intimacy.Capturing the thick, complex reality of their bond — registering its quick, microscopic fluctuations and tracking its slow tectonic shifts — is Wells’s great achievement. And Mescal and Corio’s as well. They are so natural, so light and grave and particular, that they don’t seem to be acting at all.It’s hard to find a critical language to account for the delicacy and intimacy of this movie. This is partly because Wells, with the unaffected precision of a lyric poet, is very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling. She and the director of photography, Gregory Oke, favor compositions that evoke the jerky anti-symmetry of amateur video. (Wells also incorporates camcorder footage shot from Sophie and Calum’s perspective.) This isn’t to say that there’s anything haphazard about the images, which weave a fabric as fine and coherent as the carpet Calum impulsively buys, even though he most likely can’t afford it.The rug is purchased at one of the rare moments when Sophie and Calum aren’t together, which is to say a moment that falls outside her memory even as it is part of her own story. Or rather, a piece of the story she and her father wrote together, which she has lived to tell.AftersunRated R. Some bad words and tough situations, but nothing a sensitive adolescent couldn’t handle. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Raymond & Ray’ Review: Oh, Brother

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      Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke struggle to dig themselves out of this dreary drama about damaged siblings reckoning with their father’s death.A movie that spends much of its time at a funeral home, a morgue and a grave site is unlikely to be a bundle of fun, but “Raymond & Ray” is a humdinger of hopelessness. Only the efforts of Ewan McGregor and, especially, Ethan Hawke, as the estranged half brothers of the title, save this doleful drama from sinking entirely into bathos.En route to bury the father they both loathed, the siblings strain to reconnect. Raymond (McGregor) is a sad-sack businessman on the precipice of his third divorce; Ray (Hawke) is a recovering addict and reclusive trumpet player. Both are deeply damaged, scrubbed of self-confidence and shying from emotional connection. Imagine their shock when conversations with their father’s circle of friends reveal a man they barely recognize from the womanizing abuser who raised them.These bones of a nuanced, even moving story are soon boiled into a watery stock of familial surprises and tragicomic setups. Some of these feel wearyingly forced, like the father leaving behind a spirited ex-lover (Maribel Verdú) and a wry nurse (Sophie Okonedo), each of whom connects with one of the brothers. Along with Vondie Curtis Hall, as the father’s snazzy pastor, Verdú and Okonedo bring warmth and life to the movie, yet their characters are little more than convenient romantic props and vectors of healing and wisdom — narrative devices to nudge the brothers forward.Written and directed by Rodrigo García, “Raymond & Ray” is a funeral-as-exorcism movie, as inert as the image of the detested parent, sprawled naked in his coffin — a man so carelessly cruel he gave both brothers the same name.Raymond & RayRated R for one nude woman and two broken men. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More