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      ‘Piggy’ Review: A Bullied Teenager Gets an Unexpected Assist

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      As violent as it is thoughtful, this Spanish movie dissects the webs of shame and secrecy that bullying breeds.The teenager Sara (Laura Galán) is comfortable with sharp knives and death: She helps out in her father’s butcher shop, after all, and they often hunt together. As we watch a trio of mean girls mercilessly mock Sara because she’s overweight, it’s natural to expect a brutal payback — that the poster for this Spanish movie depicts the lead drenched in blood might be another clue. But while “Piggy” does take a gory turn, it’s also a left one: The director Carlota Pereda carefully sets up our expectations only to subvert them.Right after her tormentors steal her clothes while she’s enjoying a solo swim at the local outdoor pool, Sara watches them being abducted by a mysterious stranger (Richard Holmes). That man, hulking and grunting, is an agent of chaos, his motives unknown and his actions seemingly arbitrary. He is simultaneously terrifying and fascinating to Sara, who has plenty of reasons to at least fantasize about violent retribution. But she is not the victim-turned-avenging angel so often found in horror movies or thrillers, and instead emerges as a complicated protagonist who makes mistakes and is not always easy to like. So is her well-intentioned mother (Carmen Machi), who thinks Sara must diet to avoid taunts.Pereda, who also wrote the script, is not afraid of psychological and moral ambiguity: It’s obvious that she is on Sara’s side — the bullying scenes are much harder to watch than the bloody ones — but she also knows that shame, guilt and secrecy fester into messy situations and messy people.PiggyNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Visitor’ Review: Let the Wrong One In

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      A young husband discovers that a series of old paintings holds a sinister secret in this derivative creeper.Where would supernatural thrillers be without the small town? Only there can inbred eccentricities bloom and the weird goings-on in Mabel’s back yard remain unremarked upon. The setting is such a cliché that any time we see a big-city transplant grow increasingly aware that his straw-sucking neighbors are acting a bit funny, we’re just waiting for the bonfire in the woods and the upside-down cross.In that sense at least, Justin P. Lange’s “The Visitor” does not disappoint, and genre fans will have no trouble singing along with the movie’s narrative beats. Robert and Maia (Finn Jones and Jessica McNamee) have arrived from London to settle in Maia’s childhood home in a fictitious American town. Maia’s father has died, further straining a marriage that’s already wobbly from an earlier tragedy. So Robert, at least, is in no mood for a visit to the local pub, where everyone from the forbidding pastor to the too-friendly barmaid is looking at him askance. There’s also the small matter of the oil painting in the attic, a man who’s the spitting image of Robert though, disappointingly, is not called Dorian Gray. He’s called “The Visitor.”Filmed in and around New Orleans, “The Visitor” isn’t a terrible movie, just a tired one. Stuffed with bugs, frogs, snakes and silly costumes, it trundles along smoothly enough as Robert learns that his likeness has popped up in multiple paintings, once in a Confederate uniform. Maia, though, seems oblivious to the weirdness, basking in her new pregnancy and the attentions of the townsfolk, who are giving off distinct “Rosemary’s Baby” vibes. Yet Robert, ignoring the sudden deaths and obligatory warnings to leave town, is determined to figure things out. The audience, unfortunately, already has.The VisitorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Hinterland’ Review: Murderers Among Us

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      Stefan Ruzowitzky’s film sets a serial-killer mystery in Vienna after the ravages of World War I and employs some dazzling blue-screen backdrops.The backdrops are the star attraction in “Hinterland,” a post-World War I serial-killer mystery directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky. Stretched across panoramic wide-screen, the eye-popping film portrays 1920 Vienna as a pullulating Old World metropolis, its buildings reeling at canted angles, its streets hosting grotesque violence.Perg (Murathan Muslu) is a returning P.O.W. who yearns for the wife he left behind and gets drawn into investigating some baroque murders. This chiseled ex-cop feels forgotten, as we are repeatedly reminded; everyone around him is scrambling to survive or in thrall to an “ism” (communism, anarchism, opportunism). Ruzowitzky, who directed the Academy Award-winning World War II drama “The Counterfeiters,” has a taste for the dark bargains of war and its aftermath, though here he mostly musters a neo-noir mood of regret.Perg figures out that the killings have something to do with grisly decisions made by soldiers during the war. The screenplay for “Hinterland” then clicks a little too abruptly into its grooves to sit with all the story’s implications, as we follow the cat-and-mouse machinations of the investigation and Perg’s missed-connection romance with a forensics doctor, Theresa (Liv Lisa Fries, a “Babylon” star).But the hypervivid visuals remain a feat, shot almost exclusively on blue screens (with much credit due to the digital art director, Oleg Prodeus). Expressionist painters like Ludwig Meidner spring to mind, as does Lars Von Trier’s post-World War II journey into the abyss, “Europa,” with its own looming back-projections and moral swamps. If only the story of “Hinterland” felt as engrossing and alive as its setting.HinterlandNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Review: In ‘To Leslie,’ an Unflinching Working-Class Elegy

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      The small-budget indie is a complex portrait of the ways that trauma and addiction haunt an alcoholic mother, and her family, in the South.In gritty detail, “To Leslie” traces the fall of a one-time lottery winner who, years later, has lost everything she holds dear. The British actress Andrea Riseborough (“Nancy”) gives a deft performance as Leslie, an alcoholic mother in West Texas barreling toward rock bottom in this deceptively simple yet heart-wrenching character study.Allison Janney, Marc Maron, Owen Teague and Andre Royo fill out the solid ensemble cast in this small-budget indie, which accomplishes what its bigger-budget peer “Hillbilly Elegy” wanted to, but couldn’t pull off: a complex portrait of the ways in which trauma and addiction haunt a working-class white family in the South.The director, Michael Morris, knows from the start what movie he’s making: one that robs us of our easy assumptions about who Leslie is. She’s unbearably flawed, and the screenwriter Ryan Binaco explains why without forcing long beats of exposition upon the viewer. And he does so while still leaving room for surprise. Leslie doesn’t tank her sobriety when we think she will, yet her recovery is free of narrative subterfuge.The cinematography by Larkin Seiple (“Everything Everywhere All At Once”) is a real feat of visual character development: The camera movement is both protective of Leslie and unflinching in its raw portrayal of her vulnerability. Some of the most affecting shots take place at the bar, like one close-up where Leslie spars with the guy who wants to bed her — “Tell me I’m good.” It’s shot with a depth of field that keeps Leslie’s face in focus, while the rest of the frame is blurred.“To Leslie” probably could have left 15 more minutes on the cutting room floor. But its intermittent lags don’t diminish the overall satisfaction one feels in the film’s final act, when Leslie’s rocky road settles into something believably triumphant.To LeslieRated R for explicit language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Mr. Harrigan’s Phone’ Review: Are You Still There?

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      In this thriller based on a Stephen King story, a lonely student and a lonelier old man make a connection that persists, even after death.With its curmudgeonly swipes at digital technology, there’s something mildly “get off my lawn!” about “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone.” Based on a Stephen King story, the John Lee Hancock movie tells the story of a teenager who appears to receive calls and texts from his mysterious former employer, Mr. Harrigan, who has recently died.Donald Sutherland portrays the reclusive billionaire who hires Craig (Jaeden Martell) to come to his mansion on the outskirts of their Maine town and read to him after school. Craig’s father (Joe Tippett), although not a fan of Harrigan, trusts his son’s moral compass. Whether it will maintain its true north is one of the movie’s intriguing tensions.There’s a bittersweetness to Craig and Harrigan’s friendship and good chemistry between the leads. It’s as if Mr. Potter from “It’s a Wonderful Life” found some nice local kid who had no idea about his mentor’s Bedford Falls history. The analog world, with its hard-bound literature and daily papers, is fundamental in this parable about the lure of digital technology.When Craig enters high school, he becomes the target of a bully, makes friends and finds a champion. The actor Kirby Howell-Baptiste provides a beam of light and the voice of caution as Craig’s science teacher, Ms. Hart. At the same time, the iPhone is making its debut as a must-have status object. With an unexpected windfall, Craig buys one for his old friend.When Harrigan suddenly dies, Craig is shaken. What happens next makes the movie less a chiller than a diverting drama about technology with things that go bump in the night, along with some nicely apt ethical quandaries for Craig — and for us.Mr. Harrigan’s PhoneRated PG-13 for thematic material, some strong language, violence and brief drug exchanges. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Hellraiser’ Review: Hurt Me, Please

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      A mystical puzzle box unleashes indescribable agony and knockout special effects in this reimagined horror movie.With its potent blend of sadomasochism, blasphemy and body horror, Clive Barker’s “Hellraiser” (1987) was a genuinely disturbing dip into deviance that multiple sequels failed to replicate. Taking another shot, the suits behind this reimagined “Hellraiser” smartly handed directing duties to David Bruckner, whose résumé might be brief, but whose gift for injecting dread — even into otherwise inert projects — is apparent.Here, Bruckner reveals a new talent: holding his own against practical effects (by a team led by Josh and Sierra Russell) so spectacular that the movie’s lack of a theatrical release is almost criminal. A visual and ideological upgrade on the original, “Hellraiser” centers on Riley (Odessa A’zion), a frazzled addict in her 20s who gains possession of a mysterious puzzle box belonging to Voight (Goran Visnjic), a degenerate millionaire. Configured correctly, the box opens a portal to another dimension, releasing ghoulish creatures called Cenobites who delight in taking the human desire for extreme sensation to its logical conclusion.More intricate and more numerous than their forbears, the Cenobites threaten to steal the show. In particular, Jamie Clayton’s performance as their leader (a role memorably originated by Doug Bradley) has a menacing eroticism that underscores the movie’s thematic focus. Less notable are Riley’s sidekicks, a ho-hum bunch that quickly squanders our patience. And a slack, overlong middle section inside Voight’s mansion — itself an intricately designed puzzle — cries out for a more ruthless editor.As an ambitious allegory for the chaos and torment of addiction, “Hellraiser” works mainly because of A’zion, who gives her scattered character a deeply human desperation. For Riley, demons from hell are hardly scarier than the ones she fights every day.HellraiserRated R for sex, substances and sickening stuff with needles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Kitten Natividad, Movie Star in Russ Meyer’s Bawdy World, Dies at 74

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      She was top-billed in his final feature, “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.” She was also his paramour and, he said, his favorite leading lady.Kitten Natividad, who brought audacity and ample physical attributes to some of the final films of Russ Meyer, whose over-the-top sexploitation movies acquired a certain cachet in some quarters and influenced John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and other directors, died on Sept. 24 in Los Angeles. She was 74.Eva Natividad Garcia, her sister, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.Ms. Natividad had little film experience and was working as a go-go dancer and stripper when, in the mid-1970s, she met Mr. Meyer, who was by then near the end of his notorious filmmaking career.In the 1960s Mr. Meyer, who died in 2004, became known for outlandish films like “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and “Vixen,” most of which featured absurd plots and insatiable naked women with large breasts.According to Jimmy McDonough’s “Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film” (2005), Mr. Meyer was already editing his 1976 feature, “Up!,” when he decided to add a part for a dancer who had been suggested to him by an actress from one of his earlier films. He asked Roger Ebert, the film critic, who was one of the writers of “Up!,” to throw together some dialogue for a character he named the Greek Chorus.“It doesn’t matter what she says,” Mr. Ebert recalled Mr. Meyer saying. “She just has to say something. And it should sound kinda poetic.”The newcomer was Ms. Natividad, and what Mr. Ebert wrote for her paraphrased the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle.“Armed with Ebert’s lofty gobbledygook,” Mr. McDonough wrote, “Meyer took the New Girl out in the woods, stripped her down, and made her recite all this complex, arcane narration while she hung from trees and hid in bushes.”Mr. Meyer also fell for Ms. Natividad, who was married at the time, and they began a relationship that lasted for the rest of the 1970s. And he made her the star of his next movie, which would be his final feature film: “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979).The movie is often described as Mr. Meyer’s riff on “Our Town” — for instance, it employed an onscreen narrator named “The Man From Small Town U.S.A.” Ms. Natividad plays a woman whose husband’s preoccupation with anal sex leaves her sexually frustrated.Ms. Natividad had little film experience when she met Mr. Meyer. It didn’t matter.via Siouxzan PerryCritics didn’t have much good to say about the movie, which Mr. Meyer wrote with Mr. Ebert.Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Ebert’s television partner on the film review show then known as “Sneak Previews,” wrote that Mr. Meyer’s “Vixen,” released in 1968, had been “an enjoyable nudie film because it featured the first joyfully aggressive woman we’d seen in a skin flick.” But he added, “Meyer hasn’t grown up in 10 years; if anything, he’s deteriorated.”“Beneath the Valley” would be Meyer’s last hurrah, but it held a special place in his heart. In a 1999 interview with Pop Cult magazine, he called Ms. Natividad his favorite leading lady.“She could just go and go and go,” he said. “It was just marvelous. You really had to measure up to this girl, or you caught hell.”Mr. McDonough said that Mr. Meyer had “met his match in Kitten Natividad.”“Meyer’s productions were mercenary boot camps, with the woman inevitably in an adversarial role,” Mr. McDonough said by email. “And in 1979’s ‘Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,’ Meyer puts Kitten through the usual insane challenges, perching her buck naked atop mountains, in rivers at the bottom of canyons, and shot from below a metal bed frame (sans mattress) while she bounced vigorously atop metal bedsprings.“She blew through Meyer’s challenges like a marathon runner, always a wide, gung-ho smile across her face, and try as he might, Meyer could not vanquish her. That movie is a dazzling, obsessive tribute to Natividad.”Ms. Natividad in 2011. In her later years, she had small parts in mainstream movies like “Airplane!”Brian Cahn/Zuma Press, via AlamyFrancisca Isabel Natividad (she later used the first name Francesca) was born on Feb. 13, 1948, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua to Juan and Delia Davalos Natividad. In 2018, when she received the Legend of the Year award from the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, she told an audience that when she was growing up along the U.S. border, she would gather other children and make clandestine trips to a disreputable stretch of road where they would peek in on strip shows.“When I looked in there and I saw these beautiful women with the big breasts, the red lipstick, the big hairdos,” she said, “I wanted to grow up to be just like them.”Her mother later moved the family to the United States, and at 14 Ms. Natividad worked as a house cleaner for the actress Stella Stevens, getting a taste of the Hollywood crowd.She got a job as a key punch operator, but when she learned that a neighbor who worked as a stripper was making twice as much as she was, she changed careers, taking her first job as a go-go dancer in 1969 and soon moving to stripping. When an agency urged her to adopt a stage name, she chose “Kitten,” she said, because she was considered the shyest among the dancers she worked with.In 1973 she won the Miss Nude Universe title in San Bernardino, Calif.She was dancing at the Classic Cat, a club in Hollywood, when a fellow dancer, Shari Eubank, who had starred in the 1975 Meyer film “Supervixens,” suggested she introduce herself to the director. She is said to have done so by poking him in the back with her bare breasts.That got her into “Up!,” which she once described this way: “I’ll skip over the plot, which had something to do with Hitler’s daughter and sadomasochism. The film starts with me perched in a tree, nude.”Mr. Meyer paid for her to have breast augmentation, replacing an earlier enhancement. He also paid for a voice coach to help her lose her Mexican accent. (Her dialogue in “Up!” was dubbed.)When she and Mr. Meyer were together, he would revel in the attention her body and her bubbly personality brought. In 2004 Ms. Natividad joined three other Meyer favorites in a round-table discussion for The New York Times; one of them, Erica Gavin, the star of “Vixen,” recalled the couple’s entrance at her birthday party.“Kitten walked in first,” she said. “Russ loved to walk behind Kitten, because then he could see all the reactions after she passed people. She was wearing a nude-colored chiffon sheer outfit with no underwear at all.”After Mr. Meyer’s career died out, Ms. Natividad appeared in numerous other movies, including some hard-core pornography, and had small parts in “Airplane!” (1980), “My Tutor” (1983) and a few other mainstream films. She had a double mastectomy in 1999 as part of treatment for breast cancer.In the 2004 round table, Ms. Natividad reflected on her career.“I’m proud to be a Russ Meyer girl,” she said. “There are lots of beautiful women with great bodies and even bigger boobs than ours, but they didn’t get to be Russ Meyer girls. We are very, very special.”Ms. Natividad was married and divorced three times. In addition to her sister and her mother, she is survived by six half siblings, Teresa Natividad, Amelia Natividad, Diana Ramirez, Victor Ramirez, John Natividad and Estella Ramirez.Mr. McDonough, in his email, said he first saw Ms. Natividad at Show World in Manhattan, where her act consisted of splashing around naked in a baby pool while the song “Rubber Ducky” blared from the loudspeaker. Then, for a few dollars more, she’d pose for Polaroids.“Somehow Kitten made it all seem innocent,” he said. “She possessed a ferociously positive spirit, and that light always blasted through, no matter how tawdry the circumstances.” More

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      After Decades of Hints, Scooby-Doo’s Velma Is Depicted as a Lesbian

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      The character has long been seen as a lesbian icon. Some fans were thrilled that her sexuality was at last officially acknowledged.A new movie has put to rest decades of fan speculation and suggestions from previous stewards of the “Scooby-Doo” franchise by confirming that Velma Dinkley, the cerebral mystery solver with the ever-present orange turtleneck, is canonically a lesbian.To many fans who had long presumed as much and treated her as a lesbian icon, it was not a shocking revelation. But her appearance in “Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!,” which was released on Tuesday on several digital services, was the first time the long-running franchise openly acknowledged her sexuality, thrilling some fans who were disappointed that it took so long.“Scooby-Doo,” created by Hanna-Barbera Productions, first appeared as a Saturday morning cartoon in 1969, and has been frequently reinvented in TV shows, films and comics. It generally follows a group of teenage sleuths, consisting of Velma, Daphne Blake, Fred Jones and Norville “Shaggy” Rogers, along with their mischievous Great Dane, Scooby-Doo.Previous “Scooby-Doo” writers and producers have said that Velma was a lesbian, but said pushback by studios would not allow them to depict her as one on screen. The new movie, which was directed by Audie Harrison, leaves no doubt as to her sexuality.In one scene of the newest iteration, a blushing Velma, voiced by Kate Micucci, is smitten at the sight of a new character, Coco Diablo, who mirrored Velma’s fashion sense with her own turtleneck and oversize glasses. In a later scene, she denies Coco is her type before admitting: “I’m crushing big time, Daphne. What do I do? What do I say?”It was the kind of overt reference to her sexuality that had failed to make it into final cuts before.Responding to a fan on Twitter, James Gunn, who wrote the screenplay for “Scooby-Doo,” a 2002 live-action film, wrote in 2020 that “Velma was explicitly gay in my initial script.”“But the studio just kept watering it down & watering it down, becoming ambiguous (the version shot), then nothing (the released version) & finally having a boyfriend (the sequel),” he wrote in the tweet, which was reported widely at the time and has since been deleted.That same year, Tony Cervone, the co-creator of “Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated,” a 2010 series on Cartoon Network, posted an image on Instagram of Velma standing in front of a Pride flag.“We made our intentions as clear as we could ten years ago,” Mr. Cervone wrote. “Most of our fans got it. To those that didn’t, I suggest you look closer.”In response to a fan, he said specifically that “Velma in Mystery Incorporated is not bi. She’s gay,” according to a screenshot saved by Out Magazine.While most of the gang has had many romantic interests, notably between Fred and Daphne, Velma “has never really had a main love interest,” said Matthew Lippe, a 22-year-old marketing student who runs the Scooby Doo History account on Twitter.She had occasional flirtations and brief relationships, notably with Johnny Bravo in a ’90s cartoon crossover, but her romantic feelings were rarely as central to the story as other characters, Mr. Lippe said. When she dated Shaggy in “Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated,” he said, “it’s something that doesn’t feel natural for both of them.”More recently, the shows and movies have increasingly hinted at her interest in women, so “it’s not something that’s coming out of the blue,” he said. He said Velma is a fan favorite because she speaks to a common struggle: She’s the smart, awkward one who often leads the gang in the right direction but doesn’t get as much credit as the others.“A lot of young women, and a lot of people in general, could just look to her as a great example and role model to look up toward,” he said.Another change to Velma’s character is coming soon. In 2021, HBO Max ordered a spinoff adult animation series called “Velma.” Mindy Kaling will voice the character, who will be South Asian in the show.“Nobody ever complained about a talking dog solving mysteries,” Ms. Kaling told a crowd in May at a Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront presentation, which offered a first look at the show, expected later this year. “So I don’t think they’ll be upset over a brown Velma.”Warner Bros., which owns the “Scooby-Doo” franchise, declined to comment.The rise of lesbian characters on television was a slow process, marked often by gimmicks and blatant plays for ratings. It often came in the form of “lesbian kiss episodes,” written largely to titillate rather than to explore genuine relationships.In recent decades, lesbian relationships on television have become more complex, even if the tropes aren’t entirely gone. More