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      Venice: A Creepy ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Reunion in ‘Bones and All’

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      In this cannibal romance, the director Luca Guadagnino reunites Timothée Chalamet with Michael Stuhlbarg under very different circumstances.VENICE — There is a message that social scientists and environmental watchdogs have been trying to convey in this newspaper for a while. But maybe you haven’t really been listening. Maybe it will take a different messenger to catch your attention.“I think societal collapse is in the air,” Timothée Chalamet said on Friday at the Venice Film Festival.Though you might expect Chalamet to issue a doomy quote like that while promoting “Dune,” in which his character presides over the destruction of an empire, the 26-year-old actor tossed it out during a news conference for “Bones and All,” a new film that reunites him with Luca Guadagnino, the director of Chalamet’s breakout vehicle “Call Me by Your Name.”But then again, discussing “Bones and All” can put a person in a more contemplative frame of mind: Though it’s a romance — Chalamet plays one of two drifters, traveling together across the Midwest in search of belonging — the movie is stark, lonely and more than a bit gory because our two lovers happen to be cannibals.(Maybe now you understand why this meaty film is coming out Thanksgiving week.)Adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis, “Bones and All” tracks Maren (“Waves” star Taylor Russell), an 18-year-old who has just transferred to a new high school where she tentatively befriends a classmate and then, somewhat less tentatively, bites down hard on the girl’s finger. Maren’s dad (André Holland) has been dreading this sort of thing, as she’s shown an inclination toward consuming human flesh ever since she was a child. So when her father speeds her out of town and abandons her in the middle of nowhere, Maren must finally seek guidance from her own kind.Fortunately, she can smell fellow cannibals, including Chalamet’s Lee, who she forges a tender romance with, and Mark Rylance, who plays a veteran cannibal with unnerving Harry Dean Stanton energy. There’s even a scene where Maren and Lee run into a cannibal drifter played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who was so sweet in “Call Me by Your Name” and here is something else entirely.“It was a delight, the idea that we could kind of summon Michael to be the perverted father after having been the loving father in ‘Call Me by Your Name,’” Guadagnino said at the news conference. But if people on social media are tempted to draw a link from “Bones and All” to another “Call Me by Your Name” actor — Armie Hammer, whose career fell apart when the star’s cannibalistic fantasies came to light and sexual assault allegations followed — Guadagnino would rather you didn’t.“The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is nonexistent, and it should be met with a shrug,” Guadagnino told Deadline last week. “I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”Social media was a hot topic at the film’s news conference: Though the film is set in the 1980s, one journalist felt that the outcast characters in “Bones and All” suffer society’s judgment in a way that could be likened to a modern-day pile-on.“To be young now, or to be young whenever — I can only speak for my generation — is to be intensely judged,” Chalamet said. “It was a relief to play characters that are wrestling with an internal dilemma absent the ability to go on Reddit or Twitter, Instagram or TikTok and figure out where they fit in.”Added his co-star Russell, “The hope is really that you can find your own compass within all of [social media], and that seems like a difficult task now.”Chalamet concurred. “I think it’s tough to be alive now,” he said before issuing his prediction of societal collapse. What made him so certain? “It smells like it,” he said, as Lee or Maren might.But Chalamet wasn’t totally without hope. He said “Bones and All” portrayed that disenfranchisement and tribelessness in a way that could prove helpful now.“Without being pretentious, that’s why hopefully these movies matter,” Chalamet said. “The role of the artist is to shine a light on what’s going on.” More

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      Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich: A Marriage Built on Monsters

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      In 20 years and several “Resident Evil” films, the couple has found their love language in action — and a lot of blood and dust.The filmmaker Paul W. S. Anderson has directed Milla Jovovich in no less than four films in the apocalyptic “Resident Evil” franchise, and written two more she starred in. That’s in addition to directing her in “Monster Hunter” (2020) and a 2011 version of “The Three Musketeers.”But what might sound like a series of genre nightmares is in fact a dream arrangement: Anderson and Jovovich are married, with three children. A shared love of visual storytelling — often in the form of Jovovich destroying monsters in Anderson’s postindustrial wastelands — has energized them during a 20-odd-year collaboration, which began with “Resident Evil” (2002), an adaptation of a video game that both had played. (A separate “Resident Evil” series is now on Netflix.)Jovovich in the Anderson-directed “Monster Hunter,” one of many films the couple has collaborated on. Screen Gems/Sony PicturesOn a recent video call, I spoke with the cheery couple about their partnership: Jovovich, 46, from Los Angeles, having recently wrapped “Breathe,” a dystopian thriller; Anderson, 57, from Krakow, Poland, where he is in preproduction on their next project, “In the Lost Lands,” based on a short story by George R. R. Martin. The family business continues with their daughter Ever Anderson, who stars as Wendy in David Lowery’s forthcoming “Peter Pan & Wendy.” This interview has been condensed and edited.How did you first meet?PAUL W.S. ANDERSON We were going into Pinewood Studios [outside London] to start production on “Event Horizon,” and they were tearing down these really cool-looking sets for “The Fifth Element” [starring Jovovich] that had just finished shooting. Our paths almost crossed there. And then we were at a premiere together, separately.MILLA JOVOVICH A premiere?ANDERSON Yeah! A Drew Barrymore movie. “Never Been Kissed.”JOVOVICH I can never imagine you watching a rom-com like that! That’s hilarious.ANDERSON I was obviously drawn for another reason, because you were there. Then I finally met Milla officially for the first time in 2000, right before we did “Resident Evil.” She was sitting on the steps outside my office. I thought she was the coolest-looking woman in the world. And I had just seen this really cool truck parked on the street outside — and it was her truck.What was it like giving notes on your first movie together?JOVOVICH Oh, my God, it was a disaster. I had read for a certain version of the movie, and I got the new rewrite the night before I had to go to Berlin [to shoot]. Paul had pretty much written me out of the movie. I was the damsel in distress that Michelle Rodriguez was saving constantly — the “Look out! Behind you!” girl. So by the time I got to the hotel, Paul’s very sweet producing partner was there with flowers, and I grabbed the flowers and said, “I want to see Paul in my room within the hour. There won’t be any script readings in the morning!” Then I quickly changed, did my makeup, put on a really low-cut top and met for some script revisions. [Laughs] He said, “What’s the problem?” I said, “OK, let’s start: Page 1!”Do you work together at all on writing the stories now?JOVOVICH Paul is the writer, I just ask questions, trying to understand where my character fits in. He does the heavy lifting, and I come in and put a kink in the works occasionally.ANDERSON But that’s a hugely important part of the process, and Milla’s really good on script. I remember on “Resident Evil: Afterlife” [2010], I’d written the script, and Milla was like, “It’s just missing something. It needs some signature action scene where I do something, some kind of aerial combat. And I had a dream last night: I was jumping down an elevator shaft.” And I thought, oh, my God, that’s a great idea. I went away and did a big rewrite. And “Resident Evil: Afterlife” opens with this needle-dive sequence, where it’s in this underground skyscraper. She was right!The couple working on “Resident Evil: Afterlife.” She said, “Paul is the writer, I just ask questions.” He added, “But that’s a hugely important part of the process, and Milla’s really good on script.”Rafy/Screen Gems, via Everett CollectionWhat do you feel are each other’s strengths in terms of filming action?JOVOVICH Paul is the action master. It made a lot of sense when I found out that he was the Dungeon Master [as a kid] because you have to have that imagination to direct five nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons for 18 hours at a time. And he still does it with our kids now. It’s so much fun. I’ve always been fascinated by the way Paul’s mind works, because you’re the nicest guy, but in your head you’ve got these horrifying, disgusting visions and fantasies.ANDERSON Monsters from the id!JOVOVICH Who knows what would have happened if you couldn’t take it out in your movies? You’d be having this conversation from prison.Milla, your mother was an actor. Was that an influence for you?JOVOVICH My mother was a movie star in the former Soviet Union. We defected in 1981 or something to America, my parents literally starting from zero. My mom tried to teach me what she knew to help us get a leg up in a new country. So for me, acting was not really a choice. It was more of a necessity. I feel like maybe part of the reason it’s so hard for me to watch myself onscreen is because I never truly had that belief in myself that I could be as good as her. But I don’t resent my mom for it; now I’m really grateful for it, because with my own daughter [Ever Anderson], I feel like I really nurtured her talent.Paul, were there filmmakers that have inspired you?ANDERSON The Scott brothers were a huge inspiration, because Ridley and Tony came from the north of England as well. It used to be shipbuilding and coal mining, and by the time I was a kid, it was all industrial decay and unemployment.Is the industrial decay a key to all the postapocalyptic landscapes in these movies?JOVOVICH Paul is the king of industrial decay. My mom always complains. [Russian accent] “Why you never put her in evening gown and make beautiful, glamorous hair. Always dirty. Always filthy. Always blood. Always horrible locations. Disgusting.” [Anderson laughs]ANDERSON I remember going into the makeup trailer of “Resident Evil: Extinction” in the desert in Mexico [on a visit to the set of the 2007 film directed by Russell Mulcahy]. Milla’s in there and the makeup artist was just putting on so much dirt. I’m like, that’s enough dirt! And you could see Milla was a little disgruntled. I see her outside a minute later, she’s chasing a truck around, because it’s kicking up all this dust. And she’s just trying to get extra dirty!JOVOVICH I’m telling you, nothing suits me better than blood and dust. More

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      The Many Lives of Martine Syms

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      LOS ANGELES — As self-portraits go, the video “DED” by Martine Syms is a bit masochistic. The artist’s digital avatar strolls across a flat, featureless limbo, enduring several gruesome deaths. Seppuku with a chef’s knife. Crippling, fatal allergies. Diarrhea so explosive she rockets into the sky like a rag doll, then dies from the fall. Then, somehow, she gets up and keeps walking.Syms remembers sending an early clip of the 15-minute piece to a friend. “I still think it’s kind of funny,” she said recently, at a booth at Little Dom’s, a red-sauce, dark wood Italian restaurant in this city’s Los Feliz neighborhood. “But let me be clear that I understand how people do not. They were like, ‘What the [expletive] is this? It’s really violent. I don’t like seeing you dying.’”But that’s the thing, she told me. “There’s always a level of seriousness read into a lot of things that I’m doing that I don’t necessarily connect with.”Especially when race is involved. “I’m using a signifier, Blackness, which for some people can connote serious pain,” she acknowledged. “But I see it as a real space of joy and freedom.”Syms, 34, is the sort of “new media” artist who antiquates the term. Since her days as a film programmer at clubs like the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, she has turned the various lenses of media around to interrogate what society expects of Black women, and Black artists in particular. An early video, “My Only Idol Is Reality,” from 2007, consists of a degraded VHS copy of a heated, unedited dialogue on race between two contestants on “The Real World.” Syms studied cinema at the Art Institute of Chicago, co-founded a book store called Golden Age and started an artist-book imprint called Dominica. She racked up tags: artist, writer, musician, publisher, teacher, filmmaker; D.J., influencer, brand. Throughout her art, her moving images feature avatars of herself that she endows with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.“DED” (2021), a digital video on view in “Martine Syms: Grio College” at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. Syms endows avatars of herself, including Teeny, seen above, with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.Olympia Shannon/CCS BardIn the summer of 2017, Syms graduated with an M.F.A. from Bard College; that fall, she began a year as faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. In the interim, she produced a solo show at MoMA — a purple-tinged installation including photographs, furniture and a feature-length video.This fall brings her a triad of institutional coups, and a movie in theaters. Each stars dramatized, extrapolated versions of Syms. A new, open-ended video play fed by machine-learning algorithms anchors “Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And a gonzo sitcom called “She Mad,” 2015-2021, in which Syms often stars, appears at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until February 2023. The most recent episode routes the artist’s real-life ups and downs through a cover of the “Life Story” TikToks posted by the rapper Lil Nas X.“DED” is the showpiece of “Grio College,” Syms’s retrospective at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, in upstate New York. Bard, the artist’s alma mater, also inspired her first foray into independent films: “The African Desperate,” which she directed and co-wrote with Rocket Caleshu, enters worldwide distribution with screenings in New York starting Sept. 16. (The artist Diamond Stingily, an old friend, plays the lead, a Black femme named Palace with a newly minted M.F.A.; Bridget Donahue, Syms’s New York dealer, and A.L. Steiner, her former teacher, have small roles as Palace’s professors.)Installation view of “Martine Syms: She Mad Season One,” a wry take on contemporary life as a Black woman, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, through Feb. 12, 2023.Nathan Keay/MCA ChicagoSyms’s many avatars are a record of survival in a cloying media atmosphere. They’re sometimes self-indulgent — necessarily so, in the manner of psychoanalysis or self-care. The notion of “Grio College,” a place that teaches the trick of honing personal experience into modern stories, developed through the artist’s experience on the M.F.A. track. Syms writes in the press notes to “The African Desperate” that the overlapping dystopias of an advanced art college in the bucolic Hudson Valley came laced with racism. One of the last sequences of the film layers found audio of a man telling off his bigoted co-workers with shots of postcard-perfect fields and shops in Troy, N.Y.“The curriculum that she presents is larger than what a college typically covers,” said Lauren Cornell, the chief curator at the Hessel. “It encompasses one’s whole life, friends, thinkers, culture.” Her professors and gallerists become collaborators; the places she lives become sets and settings.Sitting in the booth at Little Dom’s, on the edge of Hollywood, dayglo-orange braids fell across Syms’s lilac tank top and accented a tattoo on her shoulder: the word “EVIL.” (Seen from a certain angle, it almost reads “LIVE.”) Waitstaff in the hall zapped small flies with loud pops of an electric racquet.Syms grew up in Altadena, a quiet town abutting the mountains east of Los Angeles known as a retreat for roughneck millionaires and an enclave for the Black middle class. Her mother worked as a registered nurse at the Kaiser Permanente hospital on Sunset Boulevard, and Syms would take the bus into Los Angeles to spend afternoons browsing Goodwill and Skylight Books or watching films at the vintage theaters. The kinetic harshness of the city comes through in her work. Her characters take the bus; they walk in Los Angeles.Diamond Stingily, in the role of Palace, stars in “The African Desperate,” which Syms co-wrote and directed, and which opens in theaters this fall.Dominica, Inc.But virtual registers are just as important for Syms and her versions. In some of her videos, characters’ texts pop up on the screen in bubbles; her 2018 piece “Mythiccbeing” is an interactive chatbot. Throughout our conversation, she mustered text messages, voice memos and notes from her phone, piecing together how ideas coalesced into art. Her style of hyperlinking in real time matches the hybrid way she works, reifying, refining and recollecting the thoughts that make a person up.Syms traces “DED” to a dream she had in early 2020, while she was sick with Covid; it is stored in an audio file that she doesn’t remember recording. The title of the 2021 show in which that work debuted, “Loot Sweets,” derives from another reverie. She pulls up her notes app: “post ap life in a weird mall. bard people and others. lauren and i are trying to escape. people are looting so we stop by pleats please on the way out. everything is gone. all the good stuff at least. lauren drops from the second floor into the ocean while i crawl down to meet her. she swims w me bc she’s stronger against the current. we finally get out and i’m immediately shot dead.”It’s heavy stuff, a nightmare fed by civil unrest incited by police killing unarmed Black Americans, against the background simmer of a global pandemic. Syms explained the chain of associations behind the phrase “Loot Sweets”: medieval lute music, Bobby McFerrin’s cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” reparations. While artists and activists have called for ending the exploitation of images of Black death, Syms turned to gallows humor.Syms with her electric guitar in her studio in Los Angeles.Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesBut Syms is mining the vein of absurdity, hidden in plain sight, running through freewheeling experiments in Black culture like Amiri Baraka’s poetry or Sun Ra’s jazz. In 2013, she wrote “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” which deflates Afrofuturist esoterica and other escapism. Instead, she proposes: “The chastening but hopefully enlivening effect of imagining a world without fantasy bolt-holes: no portals to the Egyptian kingdoms, no deep dives to Drexciya, no flying Africans to whisk us off to the Promised Land.”The curator Meg Onli, who included Syms in the 2019 exhibition “Colored People Time” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, told me that the text underpinned the show’s take on “the confluence of temporalities, Blackness and the mundane.”“I love her ability to pivot from conversations around Black futurity that center on the fantastic and spectacular,” Onli added, “and remind us that our future may not look drastically different from our present.”Syms pointed out that Teeny, her avatar in “DED,” doesn’t really die. The back of Teeny’s white sweatshirt reads TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING in all caps. Call it a koan to contain the ambivalence of enjoying an often-awful world.Installation view of “Martine Syms: Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a script and performances constantly revised in real time.Joseph Hu/Philadelphia Museum of ArtAt the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the glowing green installation of “Neural Swamp” mounts two women’s faces on monitors, arranged around vinyl poufs. A third screen flashes with footage from rounds of vintage video game golf. The score and performances are constantly revised in real time: Digitized actors recite a script that Syms wrote but an algorithm updates constantly into an amalgamation of sitcom clichés and tongues.Formally, “Neural Swamp” resembles the Chicago install, and both recall another Syms production: her design for a Prada-sponsored supper club in Hollywood during this year’s Frieze Los Angeles art fair. Her vision for what she called “Prada Mode,” branded “HelLA World,” included “every last detail, from the lecture series to the matchbooks,” Donahue said. Her name on the restaurant’s marquee, DMs from guests crawling around long screens in the dining room, closed-circuit videos of the crowd on monitors hung from the bare studs between the restaurant, the outside bar — “It was a Martine Syms waking dream scene.”Maybe it’s a metaphor, too: There are stanchions, there are walls, but sometimes you can walk through them. Maybe it’s simply that, in a world prone to displays of despair, Syms’s fluorescent way of coping draws a crowd.I asked Syms why, given her dynamic range, she still works as a gallery artist. “I feel a great deal of freedom, you know?” Only in the art world, she said, are your most unqualified hunches met with such serious support. She told me about an event at the Zentrum Paul Klee residency in Bern, Switzerland, where, in lieu of showing slides of old work, she asked the organizers to serve a purple cocktail at the bar. Not only did they agree, a mixologist spent hours beforehand helping her perfect the drink’s taste and color.“If I told somebody I want to run Little Dom’s for a month as an art project,” said Syms, “I probably could.” More

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      Venice: Noah Baumbach Finds the Music in ‘White Noise’

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      An end-credits dance scene, set to a new LCD Soundsystem song, is the talk of the fest. The director explains how it came together and what it means for “Barbie.”VENICE — Noah Baumbach is not a fan of Netflix’s “skip credits” feature. When he directed “Marriage Story” and “The Meyerowitz Stories,” Baumbach implored the streaming service not to speed viewers past the closing credits and into the next piece of content before the film has technically concluded. Still, the 52-year-old director realizes that on this front, he might be an old-school outlier.“When I’m watching a movie with my 12-year-old and it finishes, I like to decompress and watch the credits, always,” Baumbach told me Thursday at the Venice Film Festival. “And he’s like, ‘OK, what’s next?’ For him, it’s just words on a screen, but I’m like, ‘Let’s just vibe out on the fonts.’”To ensure the survival of closing credits, filmmakers now have to make something truly unskippable, and it’s here that Baumbach has delivered in spades: At the end of his new film, the Venice opener “White Noise,” he delivers a full-blown musical number starring the entire cast and set to the first new LCD Soundsystem song in five years. It’s a deliriously fun sequence that has dominated chatter in the first 24 hours of the festival and is doubly surprising because, like the movie itself, it finds Baumbach working at a scale he’s never before tried.In “White Noise,” adapted from the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig play married parents Jack and Babette Gladney: He’s a paunchy professor who blathers about his “advanced Nazism” course, she’s a pill-popper with a mighty ’80s perm. (“She has important hair,” coos Don Cheadle as one of Jack’s colleagues.) The couple’s pillow talk involves morbid debate over which of them will die first, but when a toxic spill forces their neighborhood to evacuate, our leads must confront their obsession with death in a way that hits much closer to home.The only thing that ever seems to soothe these neurotics is the local supermarket, a gleaming, jumbo-sized temple of consumerism where everything is always in the right place. With its abundance, bright-white lights and collection of familiar, beaming faces, a trip to the supermarket in “White Noise” isn’t just like going to heaven — it’s better.Driver in a scene from the film, which opened the Venice festival. Wilson Webb/NetflixThat makes it the perfect place to set the end-credits number. Don’t worry, the sequence isn’t a spoiler — it’s more of a coda, and “a visual, visceral, physical representation of what I felt like the whole movie was about,” Baumbach told me.Here, nearly every character in the movie cavorts among aisles of Hi-C, Doritos and Ritz Crackers while Driver and Gerwig pull boxes from the shelves with Busby Berkeley-level precision. Later, workers in the checkout area throw plastic bags into the air as if they were feathered fans, and a coterie of college professors — played by the likes of Cheadle, Jodie Turner-Smith, and André Benjamin — boogie in a charmingly fussy fashion.The sequence made me think of the dance-heavy curtain calls from “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” and “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again,” though Baumbach, a more refined cineaste, was motivated by “8 ½” and “Beau Travail,” he told me.“As I arrived at the end of the script, it revealed itself to me as the thing to do,” said Baumbach, who likened it to smaller cinematic flourishes that close his previous films: “‘Frances Ha’ has no unmotivated camera until the very end, and then there’s a push in on her face — it’s very simple. ‘Meyerowitz Stories’ is all piano music and then an orchestra comes in at the end. I like trying to listen for those things.”He went to LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, who also contributed to Baumbach’s “Greenberg” and “While We’re Young,” to craft “New Body Rhumba,” an upbeat, catchy song about death for the sequence. “I said, essentially, write the song you would have written if you were writing songs in 1985,” Baumbach said.“For me, that’s not a hard nudge,” Murphy said at the film’s premiere party. If writing ’80s-inflected songs is well in his wheelhouse, what was the greatest challenge, I asked? “Trying not to die before the song was done,” Murphy replied mordantly. (Jack and Babette could scarcely have phrased it better.)The dance sequence, choreographed by David Neumann, was shot over two days at an abandoned Ohio superstore. “It actually was as happy shooting it as it is to watch it,” Baumbach said. “It was this contagious feeling. It just felt good. And though Baumbach has flirted with making a movie musical before — he and Driver once explored the idea of adapting Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” eventually using that show’s “Being Alive” as the climactic sung number in “Marriage Story” — making “White Noise” hasn’t fully scratched that itch.“It makes me interested in doing more of that,” said Baumbach, who also used Neumann to choreograph the movie’s chaotic family breakfasts and massive crowd scenes. “I think this whole movie opened up things for me, aspects of moviemaking that I’ve always been drawn to that the movies I’ve made haven’t needed or wanted.”And it may offer a tantalizing throughline to Baumbach’s next project: “Barbie,” a big-screen take on the iconic Mattel doll that Gerwig is directing from a script she co-wrote with Baumbach. Little is known about the plot of the movie, which stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, though co-star Simu Liu has divulged that it will feature dance sequences, and Baumbach appeared to confirm that.“‘Barbie’ definitely has that as well, that kind of choreographed naturalism. Well, it’s an artificial world, but a choreographed naturalism,” Baumbach told me.“It’s always exciting to me,” he said, “when a movie can be many things at the same time.” More

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      Venice: Can Iñárritu Beguile Oscar Voters Again With ‘Bardo’?

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      The director behind award-season favorites ‘Birdman’ and ‘The Revenant’ returns with a personal new movie, but not everyone is a fan.I love a great movie debate, and on only its second day, the Venice Film Festival has kicked off a robust one. As I walked out of the press screening for Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s lengthy new film “Bardo,” I thought I had just watched Oscar catnip, the kind of movie that awards voters typically go gaga for.Then I talked to other people.“Bar-NO,” texted one critic. “Three hours? So self-indulgent,” said a film festival programmer. And in a hotel elevator later that day, an Italian woman segued smoothly from complaining about the weather (“Horrible!”) to the movie (“Also horrible! Why does he have to copy Cuarón?”).She was implying that “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” (to use its full title) takes more than a few cues from Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” and there are certainly some similarities: Like his friend Cuarón, Iñárritu is a Hollywood-venerated filmmaker who has returned to his native Mexico for a Netflix-financed autofiction teeming with long takes, digital tricks and stunning cinematography.The streaming service certainly hopes that “Bardo” can net the same Oscar nominations as the laureled “Roma” (which wound up taking three statuettes), and with Iñárritu at the helm, there’s reason to be bullish: Every film he’s made has received at least one Oscar nomination, and he’s coming off back-to-back best director wins for “The Revenant” (2015) and “Birdman” (2014), as well as a best picture victory for the latter film.So will award voters respond more favorably than that initial wave of Venice filmgoers would indicate? I think so. Certainly, the plot will resonate more with them: “Bardo” is Iñárritu’s riff on “8½”: it’s a surreal dramedy about Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a documentarian making sense of his life story. Though he’s prone to dreamlike visions, Gama’s problems are the kind that middle-aged Hollywood types can relate to: Do I deserve my success, or am I a fraud? Have I spent too little time at home with my family? Will my children be spoiled and entitled?After Iñárritu shot “Amores Perros” in Mexico in 2000, he and his family moved to Los Angeles to pursue mainstream Hollywood success, just as the “Bardo” protagonist did. In many ways, Gama is a thinly veiled Iñárritu stand-in: He’s attired just like his creator and haunted by an old collaborator who now shuns him, which may be a reference to the rancorous professional breakup between Iñárritu and the co-writer of his early films, Guillermo Arriaga.But though the film acknowledges Gama’s flaws, it doesn’t really examine them. Characters tell Gama that he’s too self-involved, too bougie, too fake, and we have to take their word for it, since Gama just shrugs and moves on. Giménez Cacho is appealing but passive in the role, which may inhibit a robust awards run, but the film can definitely rack up several technical nominations: Darius Khondji’s cinematography is superb, and all of Gama’s visions — apartments flooded with sand, subways steeped in fish-tank water — are brought to incredible life by the production designer Eugenio Caballero (who also worked on “Roma”).Past that, we’ll see how well the film connects with the Hollywood types it’s portraying, and whether Netflix is willing to push it as hard (and as expensively) as it did “Roma.” Certainly, “Bardo” implies that streaming services have the coin for it: One of the movie’s most successful jokes is that in the world of “Bardo,” Amazon is about to complete its successful purchase not of a new awards contender but of the entire state of Baja California. Compared with that, what’s the cost of a few hundred for-your-consideration ads and some private planes? More

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      ‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.’ Review: Resurrecting a Megachurch

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      Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown star in this satire about a fallen megachurch pastor and his first lady praying and angling for a comeback.In the keen-eyed satire “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul,” Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs and his first lady, Trinitie, aren’t simply ready for their close-up, they’re in dire need of it. Sterling K. Brown portrays Lee-Curtis, the fallen megachurch pastor who hires a documentary filmmaker to help him mount a comeback. Regina Hall is a wonder as the woman who stands by her man for a mash-up of reasons, not least being the elevated position the title first lady confers. After all, his and hers gilded thrones sit in their church, Wander to Greater Paths.Thanks to a sex scandal, nearly everyone in the church’s congregation of thousands took its name to heart and departed — many of them for the growing rival church of their former parishioners Keon and Shakura Sumptor (played by Conphidance and Nicole Beharie).The comedy (originally a short) was written and directed by the first-timer Adamma Ebo, who produced it with her filmmaking partner and identical twin, Adanne. The Ebo sisters were raised in the Southern Baptist tradition in Atlanta, where the movie is set, and the director displays a tart and nuanced understanding of pastoral power and the wages of hypocrisy. Adamma Ebo said she was inspired by — or more aptly, she wrestled with — the real-life plummet of the megachurch pastor Eddie Long, who in 2010 was accused of sexual misconduct by young men from his congregation.Still, “Honk for Jesus.” is no straight-ahead mockumentary. The unseen fly-on-the-wall filmmaker hired by Lee-Curtis (voiced by Andrea Laing) is just one more witness to the pastor and his first lady’s unraveling. We viewers are privy to a number of telling, intimate interactions between man and wife.Brown, the former “This Is Us” star, plunges deep into his character, a damaged soul whose conflation of God’s blessings and man’s Benjamins is hardly new: The gospel of prosperity has become the rock upon which many a church is founded. Still, Brown makes it a thing to behold. And Beharie is diabolically good as a First Lady 2.0. But it’s Hall who expresses the film’s emotional complexity — and its characters’ flimsy morality. Trinitie, too, enjoys the bounties bestowed on the couple. A visit to a shopping mall to buy a hat for the comeback service includes a peek at the hefty price tag. Later, when Trinitie sits with her mother one morning to discuss her marital doubts, we learn the tangled roots of her conflict.Naturally, Lee-Curtis’s return is planned for Easter Sunday. As the date nears and a settlement agreement with his accusers teeters, his desperation escalates. Let there be street-side sign-twirling. Let there be something called “praise mime.” Roll out the Black Jesus statuette.In the end, the film doesn’t extend much compassion to the good reverend. (He has more than enough sympathy for himself.) Nor is much made of the ache that actual parishioners might experience when their mighty are fallen. Had Ebo gone in that direction, “Honk for Jesus.” might have been truer but darker, landing on heart-rending over the astutely hilarious. For this oh-so-smart comedy, that would have been tragic.Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters and available to watch on Peacock. More

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      ‘Loving Highsmith’ Review: The Patricia You Didn’t Know

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      A new documentary makes the case that under her hardened exterior, the novelist Patricia Highsmith was a longing romantic.“Loving Highsmith,” a constrained documentary by the filmmaker Eva Vitija, tries to make the case that author Patricia Highsmith was prodigious in both writing and romance.When Highsmith died in 1995 at the age of 74, she left behind several lifetimes-worth of words, according to her biographer: 22 novels, including the best-sellers “Strangers on a Train,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and “Carol” (originally titled “The Price of Salt”), plus over 200 unpublished manuscripts and over 8,000 pages of personal journals.Her handwritten entries, snippets read aloud here by the actress Gwendoline Christie, burn with the grievances — class, racial, familial, romantic, professional — that fed her fictional characters’ homicidal impulses and the public’s image of Highsmith as a coldblooded loner who preferred the company of her pet snail, Hortense. Even her sometime publisher called her “a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being.”Such comments are not included in Vitija’s tale, which is intended to be a counterpoint. “Loving Highsmith” reveals Highsmith’s squishy bits under her shell, the dalliances she tucked into her diaries during an era where queer women like her exited the subway one stop early, lest strangers suspect they were headed to a lesbian nightspot.Highsmith was something of a playgirl, Vitija finds, an assertion confirmed by several former girlfriends interviewed in the documentary who recall the novelist partying with David Bowie in Europe or outfitting herself in men’s wear and grandly buying a round for the bar. Most of her exes’ memories stop short of being psychologically insightful. Strung together, however, these tender confidences shape an outline of a woman who never trusted anyone with her heart. Again and again, Highsmith’s craving for connection is thwarted by her competing desire to be an emotionally invulnerable workaholic.The film builds its conception of Highsmith selectively from her mercurial notebooks, highlighting excerpts that support its argument that her lovelorn disappointments drove her into isolation (“I am the forever seeking”) while omitting those that conflict (“One situation — one alone, could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness”).To make her adventures feel alive, the editor Rebecca Trösch stitches clips from Highsmith’s Hollywood adaptations alongside recently shot B-roll of glitter-strewn drag shows. Slow-motion footage of a cowboy roping a baby steer is paired with Highsmith’s turn to gay conversion therapy in a failed attempt to please her conservative Texan family, particularly her mother, Mary, a figure as cruel as any character she imagined.It’s hard to imagine the author herself would have approved of the documentary’s flowery narration and sentimental acoustic score. More impactful is the realization that Highsmith’s chilliest calculation was correct: She’d inspire more acclaim — and less moral outrage — exposing her murderous hatreds than her strangled loves.Loving HighsmithNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Cathedral’ Review: A Boy, a Home, a World

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      In this striking, formally rigorous drama, the director Ricky D’Ambrose revisits his Long Island childhood with restraint and tenderness.Toward the end of “The Cathedral,” a movie filled with restrained feeling and shimmers of beauty, the young protagonist describes in voice-over a photograph that fills the screen. It’s an image of two of his aunts, both then young women, in a room that’s scarcely bigger than the bed they’re on. One sister, dressed in a bright red sweater and socks, is seated on it. The other sits on the floor, her upper body leaning on the bed. The women are smiling; they seem happy. “The room’s still there,” the voice-over continues, “even if the same people aren’t.”Much like this moment, “The Cathedral” is about absence and presence, rooms and the people who inhabit them. Mostly, though, it is about Jesse, the person describing the photo, and who, over the course of this spare, precise, formally rigorous movie grows from a quiet, wide-eyed toddler into a pensive, watchful teenager. In its sweep, Jesse’s life is unremarkable. He is born and he is loved, or at least cared for; he plays, draws pictures, goes to school, experiences death and observes the world around him. And in observing, Jesse develops a sensibility. He becomes the young man with the photo, one who can discuss — and create — art.What distinguishes Jesse’s story is the striking way that the writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose tells it — its ellipses, voice-over, visual precision and an emotional reserve that can feel like clinical detachment but is more rightly described as an aesthetic. Set on Long Island, it opens in 1986, before Jesse’s birth, with the death of his uncle, which the family has obscured. After Jesse arrives, the movie settles into four roughly divided time frames — different performers play the character at ages 3, 9, 12 and 17 — each with ceremonies that formally mark the arc of a life and end with his graduation from high school.Much of the story and certainly its prickliest, most demonstrative scenes involve the ties — emotional and economic — between Jesse’s parents, Richard and Lydia (Brian d’Arcy James and Monica Barbaro), and their extended families. The relationships are messy, at times petty and grim, painfully human. Richard is the font of much of the tension. He’s from a lower-middle-class family and makes an unfortunate career choice, and from the start nurses grudging resentment that he increasingly, volubly voices toward Lydia’s wealthier parents. When he demands they help pay for his and Lydia’s wedding, the marriage is already sunk.D’Ambrose has said that the movie is autobiographical, and the story takes some wincing and revealing turns, most egregiously in the shabby treatment of Lydia’s grandmother, a frail, somewhat bewildered-looking woman whose children shuttle her around carelessly. Jesse witnesses some of what happens to her, including after she’s finally dumped in one of her daughter’s homes, where she will fade. This is clearly a crucial chapter for him, one that builds its resonant power not in tears and talk but through spare, near-hieroglyphic images.Part of the pleasure of “The Cathedral” is how D’Ambrose plays with — and gently destabilizes — narrative conventions by drawing from different realist traditions. Although most of the main actors are working within the parameters of Hollywood-style psychological realism — their expressions, gestures and movements are recognizable, not alien — the performers playing Jesse are generally tamped down and at times look almost blank. Here, D’Ambrose seems most influenced by the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, who directed his actors (he called them “models”) to deliver minimal obvious expression. “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them,” Bresson said. “The most important will be the most hidden.”D’Ambrose isn’t really hiding all that much. If Jesse seems enigmatic, it’s only because he’s a quiet, solitary kid; his father does plenty of talking for everyone. But the adult who Jesse becomes is evident in every image of this personal movie and in the ways D’Ambrose deploys different storytelling strategies, most notably through his use of still images, tableau staging — including a wedding dinner that evokes Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” — and the novelistic narration (delivered by Madeleine James). Here, when a fight breaks out, D’Ambrose cuts from the brawlers to a lingering shot of a broken glass, letting the angry voices fill the air.In time, Jesse develops an interest in film. He flips through a cinema book (Alain Resnais and Jacques Demy are here but, amusingly, not Disney), and Richard buys him a video camera. Jesse shoots and shoots some more as his family falls apart. In dialogue and drama and through postcards, TV ads and news clips — a bombing, a war, a burial — a larger world comes into view. Again and again, you watch Jesse looking at this reality, taking in its beauty and ugliness. He looks at its kitsch, its vivid faces and bright colors, but he also looks at the light that flickers on the walls — and that eventually leads him to this quiet, tender movie.The CathedralNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More