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      Beyond ‘Shaft’: 5 Blaxploitation Movies You Should Know

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      A Film Forum series pays tribute to the 1970s genre that birthed “Superfly” and “Foxy Brown,” but also features lesser-known films that show the genre’s range.John Shaft emerges from a New York City subway to the rat-tat-tatting of the film’s empowering theme song. A drug dealer named Super Fly leaps over a fence in his brown leisure suit. A cool Foxy Brown pulls a gun from her luminous Afro.The heroes of blaxploitation, a genre that dominated the 1970s, radically altered the representation of Black Americans in cinema away from the roles of domestics, comic relief, and buttoned-down freedom fighters. In this genre, Black people wore fashion that was as colorful as their personalities, had Afros as large as their ambitions, and grasped sexual, political and economic freedom. These heroes were not chanting “we shall overcome.” The system would have to overcome them.The genre’s treasures can be witnessed at Film Forum in Manhattan, where, over the course of a week, 16 movies will screen as part of a series called Blaxploitation, Baby! While the program features plenty of well-known titles, it also includes under-the-radar gems that add greater context, depth and variety to the genre. Below is a selection of some of the rarer highlights in the series, and, for those unable to attend, information on where to stream them.‘Sheba, Baby’ (1975)Stream it on Tubi.Of Pam Grier’s butt-kicking heroines (Foxy Brown, Coffy, Friday Foster), Sheba Shayne, a private investigator returning to her hometown to defend her father against a gentrifying syndicate, might be her most commanding. Her fashion is fly: blue denim ensembles and trim white suits topped by a white fedora. She is also respected. While Sheba is certainly the center of every man’s attention, Grier is not just playing a dangerous sexpot, as in previous roles. This is a professional, diligent woman adept both in the boardroom and against an enforcer like Pilot (D’Urville Martin) or his conniving boss, a white man named Shark (Dick Merrifield). “Sheba, Baby” demonstrates that Grier could vary her persona, tinkering with it to fit the political requirements of the film.‘Slaughter’ (1972)Stream it on Pluto TV.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Union’ Review: Old Flames and Spy Games

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      When a mission goes pear-shaped, a covert operative (Halle Berry) turns to a secret weapon: her high school boyfriend (Mark Wahlberg).The “Mission: Impossible” series went missing in action this summer, but that’s no reason to settle for Netflix’s “The Union,” a depressing illustration of the wisdom that sometimes you shouldn’t buy — or stream — generic. The movie combines a catalog of elements from the Tom Cruise franchise (supersecret agents, exotic locales, stunts) with a high-concept twist so silly it might as well have been selected by A.I.: What if — hear this out — the lead operatives happened to be former high school sweethearts?“The Union,” directed by Julian Farino, kicks off in Trieste, Italy, with a blatant retread of the first “M:I” installment: The agents are on a mission to retrieve a traitor with a stolen hard drive. Suddenly, violence breaks out, and almost the whole team is killed. A survivor from the group, Roxanne (Halle Berry), pitches her boss, Tom (J.K. Simmons), on who to turn to for help: “If he’s anything like that guy I remember,” she says, “he’s exactly who we need.”“He” is her onetime boyfriend, Mike (Mark Wahlberg), now a construction worker in New Jersey who is hooking up with their seventh-grade English teacher (Dana Delany). Roxanne hasn’t seen him in 25 years when she approaches him in a bar. His credentials are that he is, in Roxanne’s words, “a nobody”: Because of the nature of the pilfered intelligence on the drive, she and Tom need someone who has left virtually no civic footprint.Besides, their spy outfit, the Union — so covert that half the intelligence community doesn’t know it exists and the other half regrets finding out, Roxanne says, as if reciting a tagline — prefers blue-collar guys to Ivy League suits. They are, in theory, way more fun than the C.I.A. (Stephen Campbell Moore appears as a stiff from Langley.) Mike used to be a star athlete and is accustomed to spending all day on a sky-high beam. With that background, shouldn’t a three-and-half-minute training montage suffice?The other Union members are defined largely by their specialties — physical force (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), psychology (Alice Lee), computing (Jackie Earle Haley) — and the movie makes a few feeble feints at fish-out-of-water humor. (Mike may never have left the tristate area before, but does he really not know what side of the road the British drive on?)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gena Rowlands Shows Her True Power in ‘A Woman Under the Influence’

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      In “A Woman Under the Influence,” her gloriously, terrifyingly imperfect Mabel was emblematic of the actress’s work, especially with John Cassavetes.Midway through “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) — one of a number of astonishing films starring Gena Rowlands, who died Wednesday, and directed by her husband John Cassavetes — the distance between you and what’s onscreen abruptly vanishes. It’s the kind of moment that true movie believers know and yearn for, that transporting instance when your world seems to melt away and you’re one with the film. It can be revelatory; at times, as with Rowlands’s performance here, it can also be excruciatingly, viscerally painful.Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky (Peter Falk), loves her deeply but doesn’t understand her. They’re home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who’ve fled. Now, as this husband and wife look at each other across their dining-room table, they struggle to push past the rancor and hurt. But Mabel is struggling harder because her purchase on everyday life has begun to badly slip, bewildering them both. Her love for Nicky and their children feels boundless, and it radiates off her like a fever, but Mabel is headed for a breakdown.Working with Cassavetes, Rowlands was helping find a new way to make American cinema.Faces InternationalAs the two begin working it out, Cassavetes cuts between them, framing each in isolating close-up. At first, Nicky looks at her with a faint, inscrutable smile that Mabel doesn’t return. Instead, she stares at him and holds up a thumb, as if she were getting ready to hitch a ride out, then she begins a strange pantomime. She screws her face into a scowl, waves her arms, mimes some words. Rowland had an incredibly expressive, near-elastic face and equally extraordinary control of it, and the quicksilver shifts she uses here are unexpected and destabilizing; you want to keep watching Mabel but aren’t sure you can.Within seconds, Nicky and Mabel are talking again and revisiting or, really, relitigating what just happened. “Wacko!” he yells. “I like your friends,” she answers, her voice rising. As Mabel keeps talking, Rowlands widens her eyes but she also shifts the character’s focus inward. Suddenly, Mabel isn’t looking at Nicky and she isn’t exactly talking to him, either. Instead, as Mabel animatedly continues, her gestures and expressions growing more exaggerated, she no longer seems present. She’s somewhere else and then just as abruptly she returns to the here and now, and everything shifts again. Mabel looks at Nicky, her face open and soft. “Tell me what you want me to — how you want me to be,” she says. “I can be that. I can be anything.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      New Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in August: ‘Emily in Paris,’ ‘Kaos’ and More

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      This month sees the return of “Emily in Paris” and a superhero ensemble, along with a heartbreaking documentary about the daughters of imprisoned men.Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of the most promising new titles in August. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ Season 1Stream it hereThe charming young actress Emma Myers (seen recently as an irrepressibly cheerful werewolf on “Wednesday”) gets a starring role in this adaptation of the best-selling young adult novel by Holly Jackson. Myers plays Pip, a sweet but somewhat naïve British schoolgirl, who for a class project decides to reinvestigate the death of a popular teen and her boyfriend — a crime that her small town’s local police force classified as a murder-suicide. To get closer to the truth, Pip relentlessly pesters her peers and tries to cozy up to her worldlier, more party-minded classmates. “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” is a mystery series with a somewhat unusual hero: an awkward amateur detective who is learning as much about herself and her neighbors as she is about the crime.‘The Umbrella Academy’ Season 4Stream it hereThe fourth and final season of this surreal superhero series brings back the world-saving, reality-bending Hargreeves family for one more adventure, set in another of their many timelines. This time, the siblings find themselves stuck in a world where none of them have superpowers, and where some new enemies intend to take advantage of their sudden weakness. Based on a comic book franchise created and written by Gerard Way (the lead singer for the rock band My Chemical Romance), “The Umbrella Academy” retains the wildness of its source material, converting Way’s love of science-fiction and teen angst into a visually imaginative, absurdly funny and frequently unpredictable show about a fractious family whose members have to learn over and over that they are stronger together.‘Daughters’Stream it hereFor over a decade, Angela Patton has helped lead a program called Girls for a Change, which offers resources and guidance to young women whose lives have been affected by poverty, crime and incarcerated parents. Patton is also the co-director (with Natalie Rae) of the documentary “Daughters,” which takes an intimate look at one remarkable G.F.A.C. program, which gives imprisoned men an opportunity to attend a dance with their daughters. The film spends time with the children and their fathers, both in the weeks leading up to the dance and in the weeks after. “Daughters” blends hope and heartbreak into a story about how broken families can stay broken for generation after generation until someone makes an effort to fix them.‘Emily in Paris’ Season 4, Part 1Stream it hereSeason 3 of this breezy romantic-comedy series ended with the American influencer Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) suddenly single after a breakup with her boyfriend Alfie (Lucien Laviscount), prompted by her feelings for the seemingly unavailable Gabriel (Lucas Bravo). Season 4 will be released in two parts (the second comes on Sept. 12) and will see Emily contemplating new romantic opportunities while still dealing with her attraction to both of the men in her life. As always, this new set of “Emily in Paris” episodes will emphasize the glamorous locations and fashions of Europe, as the heroine shares her travails and her travels on social media — often to the consternation of her friends, colleagues and potential lovers.‘Kaos’ Season 1Starts streaming: Aug. 29The fantastical comedy “Kaos” imagines a world where the gods and heroes of Greek myths are still around in our modern times, meddling in mortals’ lives and receiving their tribute. Jeff Goldblum plays Zeus, whose immense power and popularity doesn’t keep him from feeling anxious about his legacy and future. Aurora Perrineau plays Eurydice, who receives a dire prophecy that shakes up her relationship with her pop star husband, Orpheus (Killian Scott). An eclectic cast — including Janet McTeer as Hera, Cliff Curtis as Poseidon, David Thewlis as Hades and Stephen Dillane as Prometheus — fills out the creator Charlie Covell’s satirical epic, which deals with the perils of fame and fortune and the dangers of divine caprice.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Red Island’ Review: Madagascar Is Shifting Beneath Their Feet

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      Robin Campillo relies on the power of suggestion to sketch life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through a young white boy’s eyes.The striking rusty color that gives Madagascar the nickname the “great red island” comes from the rich iron content in its soil. The drama “Red Island” — about a white French boy from a military family living there in the early 1970s — suggests that a fair amount of blood has seeped into the earth, too. The boy is just 10 but he grasps more than other kids might because his experiences are filtered through the life of the French filmmaker Robin Campillo.The boy, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle, sweet and saucer-eyed), lives in a pleasant, airy house with plenty of room and a red-dirt backyard. There, tucked in a corner, he shuts himself up in a large wooden crate reading comics featuring Fantômette, a plucky female superhero whose adventures routinely come to life in his imagination. When he isn’t immersed in his comics, Thomas bikes around, gets into harmless trouble and observes his modest world, especially its people. He’s particularly attentive to his loving homemaker mother, Colette (a very good Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and his father, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez), an army officer.A drama about a child, his family, a social set, their adopted home and the larger world, “Red Island” is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult. As befits his autobiographical subject, he fills in the details of Thomas’s worldview, a limited vantage that’s manifested by the crate he hides in. Those limits are also evident in the awkwardness with which Campillo tries to do justice to history and to Madagascar, which solidified its independence from France a decade before the story opens. There’s a dreamy innocence about Thomas that never meshes with the movie’s very adult, historical backdrop.“Red Island” is a coming-of-age story in which not all that much happens to the protagonist even as everything around him changes. You can sense that Thomas’s home life will soon take a turn by the naturalistic conversations that he overhears as well as some of the fraught scenes he witnesses. Campillo, who directed the very fine drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” about young AIDS activists in the early 1990s, has a talent for catching the charged energy and the friction that a room of people can produce when they’re thrown together in close quarters. Here, when some drunken officers and their wives dance in the family’s home, bodies pressing in toward one another, the circuitry of desiring and resentful looks is electric.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Good Half’ Review: Only Half Good

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      Nick Jonas and Brittany Snow play siblings coordinating funeral logistics for their mom in this drama, a cross between “Terms of Endearment” and a Hallmark movie.“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” Joan Didion once wrote. In “The Good Half,” that place is Cleveland, where 20-somethings with names like Renn, Leigh and Zoey frequent karaoke bars and banter about movies.Renn (Nick Jonas) is a struggling writer in Hollywood flying back for his mom’s funeral. He is prone to avoidant behavior, the screenplay, written by Brett Ryland, shows and tells us, and his homecoming is a big deal. On the plane, he meets Zoey (Alexandra Shipp), a ray of sunshine who likes ’90s action movies and quotes “Scarface.”In his fourth narrative feature, the director Robert Schwartzman (brother to Jason) takes us deep into young adult land. Over several days, Renn and his sister Leigh (Brittany Snow) coordinate post-loss logistics while rolling their eyes at Rick (David Arquette), their bellicose step-father. Breaking up the sibling repartee are periodic flashbacks to happier times with Mom (Elisabeth Shue).When, and to which female listener, Renn will confront his demons is the question that drives “The Good Half,” which feels caught between “Terms of Endearment” and a Hallmark movie. Wry gags, like a hoarder priest, butt up against heartfelt exchanges. Snow, as the daughter who always played second fiddle, brings real feeling to her role — suggesting that she may in fact be the good half of this insipid drama.The Good HalfNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe’ Review: Humongously Bad

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      A mix of too much lousy animation and too little wave-riding footage.Jeff Spicoli, the surfing-obsessed truant portrayed memorably by Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982), may have been an airhead, but he had a vocabulary. Things he enjoyed were “gnarly” or “humongous.”Today’s real-life surf luminaries don’t speak so colorfully. In “The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe,” a spectacularly inane comedy, the Association of Surfing Professionals champion Mick Fanning enthuses to an amnesiac colleague: “We used to travel the entire world together having adventures in the ocean and stuff.” Fanning’s voice does the enthusing, we should specify. For most of the picture he is portrayed by an animated doll.In Fanning’s defense, the script is by one of the co-directors, Nick Pollett, whose partner is Vaughn Blakley. The two have a background in surf documentary, but most of this movie is not that. Rather, the dolls — with minimally articulated limbs — are made to embody Fanning and a few other real-life surf stars.These figures (the animation makes the puppetry of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “Team America: World Police” look like “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) enact an asinine story of how a vaccine eradicated all memory of surfing, and a mission to bring the activity back. The line “Ten years ago a sport existed, it was called surfing, and you dominated it” — emphasized with an expletive — is repeated more times than anyone would be amused to hear it.With each new surfer discovered — at a reunion whose purpose is, in fact, to make the title film — we see a couple of minutes of actual surf footage. The climax of the movie features the dolls, many of them with faces smeared with brown goo, fighting each other with sex toys. After this, it looks as if a longer segment of surfing is in store. One’s relief then is palpable. But brief. The doll nonsense soon resumes, and then, mercifully, come the end credits.The Greatest Surf Movie in the UniverseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More