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      Bernard Cribbins, British Actor Known for ‘Doctor Who,’ Is Dead at 93

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      Mr. Cribbins’s long career included roles on stage, film and television.Bernard Cribbins, a British actor who had roles on “Doctor Who” and “Fawlty Towers,” and whose contributions to children’s programs delighted young audiences over a career that spanned seven decades, has died, his agent said on Thursday. He was 93.In a statement, the management and talent agency, Gavin Barker Associates, did not say when or where Mr. Cribbins died.Mr. Cribbins worked well into his 90s, the agency said, in a career that influenced some of the best-known comedy, drama and children’s programs in Britain. He started acting at the age of 14 in the Oldham repertory company. This period of onstage work broadened into other media, including television and film, for which he became widely known, according to IMDB.He was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2011 for his contributions to the arts. In addition to dozens of roles in film and television, he recorded the 1960s novelty song “Right Said Fred.”For three decades, Mr. Cribbins was regularly featured on “Jackanory,” a BBC children’s program in which an actor read books to young audiences. The program, which ran between 1965 and 1996, was meant to arouse an interest in reading.In one of his more than 100 readings, of “The Wizard of Oz” in 1970, Mr. Cribbins infused the voices of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard and other characters with a full dramatic repertoire of whispers, tremors and shrieks.When he was awarded a BAFTA Special Award in 2009, he grew serious in an interview when asked about the hugely popular “Jackanory” and how it had influenced young audiences.“All you have to do,” he said, “is look down the lens, find one child, and just talk to that child. And you pull them in.”“It really works, and you think all over the country there will be little kids saying, ‘Just a minute, Mum,’ and they will be looking. And the stories, as I said before, were wonderful,” he said.Mr. Cribbins was born in Oldham, England, just outside Manchester, on Dec. 29, 1928, according to IMDB. After his early stage career, he narrated “The Wombles,” a 1970s animated television program created from a series of books about underground creatures, and joined the cast of the science-fiction TV series “Doctor Who” from 2007 to 2010. He had also appeared in a Doctor Who movie, “Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.,” in 1966.Mr. Cribbins, left, and his co-star David Tennant collected an award for “Doctor Who,” which was named most popular drama at Britain’s National Television Awards in 2010.Photo by Ian West/PA Images via Getty ImagesIn the TV series, which the producer Russell T Davies revived in 2005, Mr. Cribbins played a recurring role as the grandfather of one of the Doctor’s companions, Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate. In an Instagram post on Thursday, Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins “loved being in Doctor Who. He said, ‘Children are calling me grandad in the street!’”Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins had once “turned up with a suitcase full of props, just in case, including a rubber chicken.” He added, “He’d phone up and say, ‘I’ve got an idea! What if I attack a Dalek with a paintball gun?!’ Okay, Bernard, in it went!”Mr. Cribbins also starred in the 1970 film “The Railway Children,” based on the children’s book by Edith Nesbit. A review in The New York Times called it “a perfectly lovely little British movie” and said Mr. Cribbins was “excellent” as the stationmaster Albert Perks in a “simple tale about three children who putter around a Yorkshire village, sharing a loving kindness learned at home.”In 1975, Mr. Cribbins appeared in an episode of the comedy series “Fawlty Towers,” starring John Cleese as the hapless manager of a seaside hotel. Mr. Cribbins played a guest mistaken by Mr. Cleese’s character for a hotel inspector, who is trying to order a cheese salad for lunch and instead is served an omelet.A list of survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Cribbins’s wife, the actor Gillian McBarnet, died in October last year.In the interview after receiving the BAFTA award in 2009, Mr. Cribbins and his “Doctor Who” co-star Ms. Tate spoke about how quickly time had gone by during his long career.“I can remember a lot of things with total clarity, total recall,” he said, before adding jokingly, “I’ve got stories I haven’t even thought of yet.” More

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      ‘Hypochondriac’ Review: A Mother of All Breakdowns

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      A son tries to escape the fate of his mom in this psychological thriller.In the psychological thriller “Hypochondriac,” life and all its horrors begin with Mother. When the film’s protagonist, Will (played as a child by Ian Inigo), was young, his mother (Marlene Forte) suffered from psychosis. Her illness manifested in intense, violent spells. She would scream and hurt herself. One of Will’s most indelible memories is of his mother strangling him as a boy.Eighteen years later, Will (Zach Villa) seems to have built a life that’s more peaceful than his childhood. He works as a ceramist, and he has a loving boyfriend, Luke (Devon Graye), who is eager to introduce Will to his family. But Will’s stability begins to crack when his estranged mother re-initiates contact. She sends him boxes of discarded DVD cases and scattered, disturbed voice messages warning him away from Luke. Will is haunted by fear that his mother will infect the rest of his life, that he could become like her. But his fear kicks into paranoia when he begins having visions of a monstrous wolf man, a distorted memory of a childhood costume.The writer and director, Addison Heimann, flirts with horror elements in portraying this story of a mother and son’s mania. Will’s wolfish spectre is executed with practical effects, dripping with blood and matted fur. The bloody consequences of distorted thinking are portrayed vividly, with surgical veracity. But if the film is sure-footed when it comes to stylishly portraying boogeymen, it’s less certain in its portrait of people who experience symptoms of psychosis. The movie links cinematic thrill with real illness, tying movie monstrosity to specific psychiatric symptoms. Its armchair psychology makes for queasy viewing, a conflation of diagnosis and damnation.HypochondriacNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘How to Please a Woman’ Review

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      A bespoke business that offers house cleaning and sex work for women is at the heart of this Australian comedy.The Australian comedy “How to Please a Woman” hinges on an amusing high concept: a company that provides house cleaning and orgasms for women. This hook piques curiosity — at least enough for a coy eyebrow raise. Light intrigue is often not enough, though, and in this case, the movie strains to sustain charm.The story follows Gina (Sally Phillips), a middle-aged woman who is treated like cellophane by her husband and her boss. She escapes this contemporary feminine mystique through swimming, and the writer-director Renée Webster frequently depicts Gina fearlessly front-crawling in the Pacific with her swim club. After this convivial all-women crew sends a male stripper to Gina’s house as a birthday surprise, our housework-weary heroine gets the idea to launch a bespoke business.Inspired by a real Australian sex work service, “How to Please a Woman” casts a clear eye upon the puzzles of female pleasure. Here is a movie that is thankfully under no illusions about the sundry ways to satisfy women, and its emphasis on communication above all is sensible (if safe) advice for viewers craving an answer to the arch title.Yet there is a note of primness to Webster’s storytelling. Sex scenes are mostly ellipses that skip from foreplay to pillow talk, and when addressing more eccentric desires, the movie sometimes spouts a joke at the expense of the women it aspires to empower. Interrogating urges is worthwhile, but playing libido for laughs is one temptation this unsteady comedy would have been wise to resist.How to Please a WomanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Resurrection’ Review: Mother of Fears

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      A successful single mother encounters a terrifying man from her past in this crazily enjoyable horror movie.Somewhere near the end of “Resurrection,” a sleek, hurtling, ridiculously entertaining horror movie from Andrew Semans, there’s a scene of such gruesomely bonkers intent that I actually gasped. And then I laughed, tickled by how easily Semans and his star, the charismatic Rebecca Hall, had persuaded me to invest in their lunatic shenanigans.But then Hall — as proven in last year’s creep-out, “The Night House” — has a knack for pumping gravitas into somewhat batty narratives. Here, she plays Margaret, an executive in some sort of pharmaceutical outfit, and from the start we notice an intensity that verges on obsessiveness. Whether at work or as the protective single mother to her teenage daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman), Margaret is a model of calculated control. Even her sex life is rigidly regulated, the liaisons with her married co-worker, Peter (Michael Esper), unfolding with more efficiency than pleasure. It’s not that Margaret is cold — more than once, we see her empathetically counsel a young intern to leave an emotionally abusive boyfriend — it’s just that she seems permanently on guard.But against what? Clues start to accumulate. Abbie, who’s about to leave for college, finds a human molar in her wallet. Later, the sight of a mysterious man in a lecture room causes Margaret to blanch and shake, as if she has seen a ghost. More than two decades earlier, she was involved with this man, David (Tim Roth), and the relationship has left her, quite literally, scarred. Now, he seems to want something, showing up randomly without approaching her until, terrified, she accosts him. His vulpine grin reveals a missing tooth.As we’re about to learn, David is more than a heel, he’s a hellion, and what begins as the story of a stalking skids rapidly into depravity and humiliation. And when Margaret’s carefully cultivated life starts to crack — she’s sniping at colleagues and fiercely monitoring Abbie’s movements — “Resurrection” teases a familiar fable of female disintegration. But Semans, who debuted in 2013 with the cheeky psycho-comedy, “Nancy, Please,” is too confident an explorer of twisted minds to settle for cliché. The bargain that David hopes to strike with Margaret concerning a long-ago tragedy is unbelievable, unthinkable, insane. Yet Roth’s eerily still body language and quietly sinister line readings choke the urge to laugh. He’s a magnetic sadist.Encouraged by Jim Williams’s unsettling score, Hall and Roth convincingly sell their characters’ sick psychological bond. So while “Resurrection” harbors more than one theme — empty-nest anxieties, toxic men and the long tail of their manipulations — the movie feels more like an unhinged test of how far into the loonyverse the audience can be persuaded to venture.That’s why Hall’s skin-prickling, 7-minute monologue early in the film is so critical. As the screen darkens behind her and her pale face fills the frame, she recounts Margaret and David’s horrifying history with irresistible sincerity. It’s the perfect setup for an ending of such delicious ambiguity it was all I could do not to applaud.ResurrectionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sharp Stick’ Review: The Babysitter’s Schlubs

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      Lena Dunham’s new movie follows a 26-year-old who methodically gains sexual experience after having an uncomfortable affair.Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), the mythical seductress at the center of “Sharp Stick,” an uneven, uneasy fable of desire by the writer, director and performer Lena Dunham, is the kind of erotic nymph who exists only in Penthouse letters and vintage soft-core movies. A babysitter long of hair and limb but short on emotional demands, Sarah Jo ventures through modern day Los Angeles in modest floral pinafores, which she lifts above her waist in invitation. No need for conversation or dinner — she only appears to eat plain yogurt, anyway.The strong first half of “Sharp Stick” places Sarah Jo in competition with Heather (played by Dunham), a harried, heavily pregnant real estate agent. Heather relies on Sarah Jo’s expertise to look after her son, Zach (Liam Michel Saux), who has Down syndrome. But Zach’s slacker father, Josh (Jon Bernthal), is usually floating around the house, too, and the ne’er-do-well suffers only a twinge of guilt as he seizes the chance to recast himself as a romantic hero to Sarah Jo. It’s not much of a fight — and Josh isn’t much of a catch — but one of Dunham’s talents is her ability to capture the allure of heartbreakers, scuzzballs and dopes. At home, Sarah Jo’s mother, Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a former music video starlet who has torn through five marriages, and older sister, Treina (Taylour Paige), a boy-crazy aspiring influencer, chatter constantly (and hilariously) about girth size and titillation tips. Steeped in their dubious advice, Sarah Jo, a 26-year-old virgin at the start of the film, sets out to gain her own life experience with men. Aside from Josh, she doesn’t seem to know any — her father, whom Marilyn dismisses as a dumbbell, isn’t around — and she quickly discovers that she has a lot to learn, including that the names of certain sex acts aren’t literal. The impossibility of these two tigresses raising this lamb is Dunham’s clue that she’s operating in allegory: This film is her test to see whether the world is any kinder to a hetero male fantasy like Sarah Jo than it is to the kind of messy, cranky, needy women that Dunham has made her career putting onscreen.Sarah Jo’s early affair with Josh leads to a garbled, meandering stretch where she works her way through an alphabetical checklist of carnal escapades with a revolving door of men. As Froseth bravely flings herself into vulnerable scenarios, the film is careful to keep the focus on her character’s pleasure (or the lack of it). A montage of flings is shot with all the sizzle of a Slurpee commercial. These scenes are too humorless for satire and too artificial to support the film’s eventual, deluded attempt to shift into a somewhat sincere coming-of-age tale. (The gentle pop soundtrack and Ashley Connor’s naturalistic cinematography seem to think that this has been that kind of movie from the beginning.) By that point, the naif’s misadventures simply feel like an argument to not take sex so seriously. Watching Sarah Jo’s repeated hallucinations of a cartoon woman mating and giving birth, one can imagine Dunham whispering to the audience that moments of awkward, sloppy intimacy aren’t shameful — they’re the foundation of human existence.Sharp StickRated R for sexual situations, including one under the influence of psychedelics. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Vengeance’ Review: A Dish Best Served With Frito Pie

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      In this comedic culture-war thriller, B.J. Novak, who wrote and directed, plays an aspiring podcaster chasing a true-crime story in West Texas.Ben Manalowitz, who writes for The New Yorker (he’s played by B.J. Novak, who has been published in its pages), wants to break into podcasting. “Not every white guy in America needs to have a podcast,” someone tells him, but this white guy sees the platform as a perfect stage for his ambitions and his big thoughts about America.Ben has a theory about the divided, discontented state of the country. Eloise (Issa Rae), a receptive, well-connected, somewhat skeptical producer, tells him that what he needs is a story. Their brief debate about the relative merits of theories and stories distills a conundrum that will be familiar to journalists and other writers. Are we looking for facts or ideas? Characters or historical forces? Generalities or particulars? These questions are the key to “Vengeance,” which tries to have it both ways by reverse engineering its story about the treachery of storytelling from a theory about the danger of theorizing.Novak, who wrote and directed the movie, has his own thoughts about America, subtler than Ben’s but not necessarily any more convincing. “Vengeance,” while earnest, thoughtful and quite funny in spots, demonstrates just how difficult it can be to turn political polarization and culture-war hostility into a credible narrative. Its efforts shouldn’t be dismissed, even though it’s ultimately too clever for its own good, and maybe not quite as smart as it thinks it is.The same could be said about Ben, who is also, at least at the start of the movie, the object of Novak’s most brutal, knowing satire. We first meet him at a party on a terrace with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, where he and a pal spin elaborate philosophical justifications for their cynical, transactional approach to sex and romance. The way Ben intellectualizes his own shallowness feels so accurate — and so repellent — that you may wonder if the film can redeem him enough to make another 90 minutes in his company anything but insufferable.But what looks like yet another self-conscious, New York-centric satire of white male media-elite entitlement turns into something else. A few other things, really, including a fish-out-of-water comedy and a twisty detective story, with Ben as both fish and gumshoe.A late-night phone call dispatches him to West Texas, where an aspiring singer he has hooked up with a few times in New York has been found dead under a pump jack in an oil field. Ben knew her as Abby, though he might not have known that it was short for Abilene. (In haunting, posthumously viewed video clips, she’s played by Lio Tipton.) Ben’s number was in her cellphone, and her family is under the impression that he was the love of her life.Ben flies out to the funeral, where he is welcomed into Abilene’s big Texas family. There are two sisters (Isabella Amara and Dove Cameron) also named for cities, a no-nonsense mom (J. Smith-Cameron), a salty grandma (Louanne Stephens, who also played a Texas granny on “Friday Night Lights”) and two brothers, the younger of whom (Eli Abrams Bickel) answers to El Stupido.The older one, Ty (Boyd Holbrook), dragoons Ben into the scheme that gives the movie its title and its momentum. Ty is convinced that Abilene’s death was the result of a shadowy, nefarious conspiracy, and that her killers need to be dealt with. In his feverish ramblings, Ben hears an opportunity for audio gold. True crime. A first-person meditation on American Life. An inquiry into the nature of storytelling and the slipperiness of truth. Eloise agrees — “a dead white girl: the holy grail of podcasting” — and ships him the necessary recording equipment.The best part of “Vengeance” is the middle, during which Novak humanizes cultural stereotypes — including Ben himself — without losing his sense of humor. It turns out that people are complicated, and that they can surprise you. This is the kind of insight that is easily oversold, since it depends on an assumption that the audience thinks otherwise. But Ben’s superficial self-awareness is replaced by active curiosity (he is a writer, after all), and he comes to feel genuine tenderness for Ty, Granny and the rest. He also meets other local characters who knew Abilene and who aren’t who they seem to be, including a drug dealer (Zach Villa) and a mystical record producer (Ashton Kutcher).For a while, glib sociology and facile plotting take a back seat to sharp, low-key humanist comedy. Novak, who has published a collection of short stories and a children’s book, is a deft writer and (as we know from “The Office”) a nimble ensemble player. A sitcom version of “Vengeance,” with Ben embedded in Abilene’s hometown, might be worth a few seasons on a streaming platform, and for about 45 minutes the movie functions as a pretty good pilot for that.Ben develops an appreciation for Whataburger and Frito pie, learns a hard lesson about college football fandom and discovers that rural red-staters and urban blue-staters share certain aspirations (fame, self-expression) and cultural reference points (Anton Chekhov, Liam Neeson) while remaining out of sync on other matters. It’s when dealing — or not — with those matters that “Vengeance” turns coy and skittish. Gun culture and the opioid crisis receive cursory attention, but the movie mostly wishes away the sand in the gears of the American experiment.Nobody has much to say about politics, race, religion, immigration or any of the other stuff we are always fighting about. Maybe Novak’s point is that, face to face and heart to heart, we don’t really fight as much as our social media avatars and elected representatives do. That’s a comforting idea, but this movie’s sophisticated theorizing and busy storytelling can’t disguise its essential banality.VengeanceRated R. Guns, drugs and digital audio. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Love Song’ Review: When Moving Forward Means Looking Back

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      Two former childhood friends rekindle their connection in this sweetly hopeful story of romantic longing.Framed by soaring mountains and a gleaming lake somewhere in Southwestern Colorado, a woman (Dale Dickey), wiry and weathered, catches crayfish and waits in her small camper for a special someone to arrive. The woman is Faye and, like Lito (Wes Studi), the childhood friend she hopes will respond to her invitation, she is long widowed. Maybe he, too, is ready for some company.Slow, sweet and subdued, “A Love Song,” Max Walker-Silverman’s lovely first feature, is about late-life longing and needs that never completely go away. Building solid characters from mere scraps of information (Faye was once a bush pilot, Lito a musician), the two leads embrace a screenplay (by the director) filled with long silences and searching close-ups. Plaintive country songs leak from Faye’s transistor radio as she studies bird species by day and the constellations by night — scenes that tell us this is not someone who is simply existing. She’s living and learning.From time to time, diverting visitors wander into Faye’s campsite — friendly neighbors with a dinner invitation, Indigenous cowhands with an unusual request — their whimsical intrusions adding flavor to an unyieldingly spare story. We soon appreciate, though, that more than one kind of love is being celebrated in that title, including the director’s affection for his home state, its wide-open spaces and wandering souls. In Faye and Lito, Walker-Silverman is honoring a certain kind of Western archetype, resilient and unsinkable and untethered. This hardiness is echoed in the simplicity of Faye’s diet and daily routines, as much as in Alfonso Herrera Salcedo’s patient shots of flowering plants punching through parched earth.Some of those flowers will be picked and proffered, ice cream will be eaten and remembrances shared before this gentle movie rests in the poignancy of a mourning dove’s call. What lingers, though, is a warmth that’s probably due, at least in part, to the director’s decision to surround himself with people he loves. (The cowhands are played by his four closest friends, and his former roommate, Ramzi Bashour, composed the film’s score.) The result is a tender, laconic look at a woman who rarely faces anything in life, including loneliness, without a strategy.“There’s days and there’s nights, and I got a book for each,” she tells Lito, a declaration more heartbreaking than any monologue of lost love.A Love SongRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ali & Ava’ Review: Don’t You Want to Sing Along?

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      Even as this romantic drama clings uncomfortably to the surface of an interracial relationship, the movie still delivers pops of color and memorable melodies, our critic writes.In “Ali & Ava” the writer-director Clio Barnard (“The Arbor,” “The Selfish Giant”) leans into the emotional alchemy of an unexpected romance between Ali (Adeel Akhtar), a British-Pakistani D.J. who has recently separated from his wife, and Ava (Claire Rushbrook), an Irish-British teacher and mother of four.The two are brought together by their mutual affection for one of Ava’s students, and this understated indie film clings uncomfortably to the surface of their relationship, yet still delivers something pure, melodic and precise. Focusing on vivid blue and peach pops of color bursting through a Northern England town’s foggy daylight and moonlit nights, Barnard and the cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland manage to imbue the film with an undeniable warmth. The handheld-heavy camerawork prioritizes close-up images, especially when depicting the growing bond between Ali and Ava.Yet the onscreen chemistry between them feels forced and flat, and the decidedly tame portrayals of physical intimacy only accentuate this absence. The tension that Ali and Ava’s interracial relationship surfaces within Ava’s family and white neighborhood is barely reckoned with in the film, and the result is an unconvincing racial reconciliation fairy tale in an embattled factory town in Yorkshire.When the film is buoyant, it is through its blending of diegetic music and traditional scoring to create the auditory equivalent of a tracking shot. From Bob Dylan’s 1960s folk tune, “Mama You Been On My Mind,” to its more contemporary pop, techno and bhangra grooves, music plays continuously across multiple scenes at certain choice moments, giving us an immersive link to Ali and Ava’s internal soundtracks. Which makes you wonder: What if “Ali & Ava” had been able to blossom into a full-on musical? I could dance to that.Ali & AvaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More