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      ‘The Black Phone’ Review: The Dead Have Your Number

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      Ethan Hawke plays the big bad in this 1970s-set child-abduction thriller.More touching than terrifying, Scott Derrickson’s “Black Phone” is less a horror movie than a coming-of-age ghost story. In place of gouting gore and surging fright, this enjoyable adaptation of Joe Hill’s 2005 short story has an almost contemplative tone, one that drains its familiar horror tropes — a masked psychopath, communications from beyond the grave — of much of their chill.The movie’s low goose bump count, though, is far from ruinous. Set in small-town Colorado in the 1970s, the story centers on 13-year-old Finney (Mason Thames), an ace baseball pitcher burdened by a dead mother, school bullies and an abusive, alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies). An early lecture from a new friend (a charismatic Miguel Cazarez Mora) about fighting back will prove prescient when Finney becomes the latest victim of The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), a clownish magician and the abductor of several neighborhood boys.While light on scares and short on specifics (The Grabber is a generic, somewhat comic villain with an unexplored psychopathology), “The Black Phone” is more successful as a celebration of youthful resilience. As Finney languishes in a soundproofed cement dungeon, his spunky little sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw, a standout), is using the psychic gifts she inherited from her mother to find him. Finney also has help from the killer’s previous victims, who call him on the ancient rotary phone on the wall above his bed, undeterred by the fact that it has long been disconnected.Revisiting elements of his own childhood and adolescence, Derrickson (who wrote the screenplay with C. Robert Cargill) evokes a time when Ted Bundy was on the news and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was at the drive-in. The movie’s images have a mellow, antique glaze that strengthens the nostalgic mood while softening the dread. (Compare, for instance, Finney’s kidnapping with Georgie’s abduction in the 2017 chiller “It”: both feature balloons and a masked monster, but only one is terrifying.) It doesn’t help that Hawke is stranded in a character whose torture repertoire consists mainly of elaborate hand gestures.Leaning heavily into the familiar narrative obsessions of Hill’s father, Stephen King — plucky kids, feckless parents, creepy clowns and their accessories — “The Black Phone” feels unavoidably derivative. But the young actors are appealing, the setting is fondly imagined and the anxieties of adolescence are front and center. For most of us, those worries were more than enough to conjure the shivers.The Black PhoneRated R for bloody apparitions and blasphemous words. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love & Gelato’ Review: A Young Girl, Transfigured by Italy

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      A mother’s final wish leads her daughter to retrace her Roman holiday in this lighthearted coming-of-age story.For many American teenagers, college is the great undiscovered country. But in the romantic comedy, “Love & Gelato,” Lina (Susanna Skaggs) has just lost her beloved mother to cancer. Before she matriculates to her first year of university at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she is obligated to live out her mother’s final wish for her. Her mother had a transformative trip to Italy in her youth, and her request is that Lina should follow in her footsteps. Cautious Lina can find a way to worry about anything, but magnanimously, she agrees to spend her summer in Rome.Lina inevitably finds herself moved by the beauty of the city — its food, its vistas and most of all, its prettily entreating boys. She becomes infatuated with Alessandro (Saul Nanni), a blue-eyed social butterfly bound for a Boston fall. And lest Alessandro prove too good to be true, a warm and welcoming chef, Lorenzo (Tobia De Angelis), takes an interest in her fish-out-of-water charms. With her mother’s old friends and Lorenzo as her guides, Lina finds purpose in Italy, even daring to search for her Italian father, the man her mother left behind.This is a story where the characters woo each other with artless naïveté, and the movie is shot in a similarly unassuming fashion. The writer and director Brandon Camp opts for a cheerily overlit, comedic tone. It’s the kind of film that is more interested in the appeal of a good Italian accent than it is in finding novel, or even particularly beautiful, ways to shoot and see Rome. The conscious callowness is agreeable, but it lacks freshness, like a midnight pasta reheated in the microwave.Love & GelatoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Granada Nights’ Review: Growing Abroad

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      This drama tells the hackneyed story of a lovelorn expatriate pulling himself together and dragging us around with him.It doesn’t take long in “Granada Nights” before someone is sagely explaining the difference between a tourist and a traveler. A peevish university grad, Ben (Antonio Aakeel), is on the receiving end of this hoary conversation-starter, but he’s a bit distracted. He has journeyed from London to Granada, Spain, to surprise his girlfriend at her doorstep — something that people in movies should really avoid doing. When he realizes it’s over, what follows is a hackneyed story of a tedious, lovelorn expatriate, pulling himself together and dragging us around with him.Ben falls in with an apparently wealthy crowd of European students who advise him on getting girls and appreciating Granada. Their pseudo-wisdom and party-on spirit elbow him to stop moping, take Spanish classes and flirt mechanically. But it’s grating to watch because of banal performances and a screenplay that’s like the dialogue equivalent of a temp track, as if the film is still awaiting an original perspective on this world to be filled in. (The travel/tourist acquaintance, incidentally, is played by up-and-comer Quintessa Swindell, but her character moves on quickly.)Granada, a well-touristed city, sometimes makes for a picturesque backdrop, especially in a faded-looking opening montage that promises an elegance that the film doesn’t deliver. Over the course of the story, the writer and director, Abid Khan, also widens the film’s aspect ratio (starting with a trim, square frame). Maybe it’s meant to symbolize Ben’s broadening of understanding, but his journey largely feels so dull that you might want to take a different route.Granada NightsNot rated. In English, Spanish, Swedish and Urdu, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Vudu, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      How Real-Life and Fictional Horror Seeped Into ‘The Black Phone’

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      Influenced by “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” the filmmaker wove details from his childhood into this supernatural movie starring Ethan Hawke.After scoring a hit with the Marvel movie “Doctor Strange” in 2016, the director Scott Derrickson started working on its sequel, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” In January 2020, however, he abruptly left that movie because of creative differences.For his next film, he started with a short story by Joe Hill, which he layered with autobiographical material. “I had been in therapy for a couple of years, dealing with a lot of childhood trauma issues,” Derrickson, 55, said in a video interview.The result is “The Black Phone,” out on Friday, in which Derrickson and Ethan Hawke reunite 10 years after their collaboration in the terrifying horror movie “Sinister.” Now Hawke plays the Grabber, a masked psychopath who kidnaps and kills children in 1978 Colorado. Until, that is, he sets his sights on the resourceful 13-year-old Finney (Mason Thames), who gets unexpected help from the Grabber’s previous victims — their ghosts communicate tasks for survival via a derelict landline — and his own sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw).Considering how personal the film is to Derrickson, it comes as little surprise to hear him start off with his own story when asked to list five influences on “The Black Phone.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.His childhood“The Black Phone” is set in North Denver, where Derrickson grew up. “It was a working-class, kind of blue-collar neighborhood, half-Mexican, half-white,” he said. “There was a lot of violence — everybody got whipped by their parents, there was fighting on the way to school, on the way home from school, at school.”In the film, Finney is always on edge: His dad has a temper when drunk, and there are all these mysterious disappearances. “I think I was 8 or 9 years old when my friend next door knocked on the door,” Derrickson said. “He was crying and he said, ‘Somebody murdered my mom.’ His mother had been abducted and raped and killed and wrapped in phone wire — I remember that detail — and thrown in the local lake,” he continued. “So the serial killer who could just grab you out of nowhere was a real thing for us in that neighborhood. That was always in the air.”‘The 400 Blows’ (1959)Jean-Pierre Léaud in ‘The 400 Blows.’Janus FilmsFrançois Truffaut’s debut feature retraces much of his upbringing — via a cinematic alter ego portrayed by the 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud — in a way that is warm yet also devoid of sentimentality. “The first idea I had was to take a lot of the traumatic events of my childhood and try to make a kind of American ‘400 Blows,’” Derrickson said. “It’s a movie for adults about children that I wouldn’t describe as nostalgic — that’s a really interesting way to approach one’s own childhood experience as a filmmaker.”And yet Derrickson was also keen to show that fortitude is hard to snuff out. “It’s a really wonderful picture and somehow as bleak as it is, it also shows the resilience of children,” he said. “There’s a lot of joy in that movie, too. Even as this kid keeps getting blow after blow, his spirit is very strong. And I think that shows in both Finney and Gwen.”‘The Devil’s Backbone’ (2001)Irene Visedo as Conchita, a teacher at haunted orphanage during the Spanish Civil War.Sony Pictures ClassicsDerrickson is a huge fan of Guillermo del Toro’s supernatural horror film, which is set in an orphanage in 1939 Spain, and he initially brings up the way it visually represented ghost children, as well as the communal relationship between the orphans. “From a storytelling point of view, it was a really influential movie on me,” Derrickson said.But he also picked up tips from the commentary the Mexican filmmaker recorded for the movie’s DVD release. “One of the things that Guillermo del Toro says in that commentary is that when he casts a child actor, he makes sure that the child can imitate him, and this has been so helpful to me,” Derrickson said. “If you’re giving them a direction and it’s just not working, you need to be able to do it for them and have them just do it back for you the exact same way.”‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968)Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby.”William Castle Productions/Paramount PicturesDerrickson gets granular in his admiration for Roman Polanski’s classic shocker, in which a pregnant woman (Mia Farrow) begins to suspect she might be surrounded by Satan worshipers. In particular, he zeros in on a scene in which we watch Rosemary call her therapist from a phone booth.“I remember watching the scene and being immediately struck by the distorted phone filter on the psychiatrist’s voice — and her voice had the same filter,” he said. “I was very struck by how powerful and strange it felt. There was an otherworldliness to it and somehow it felt scary to me.”Derrickson started by putting a similar filter on Finney’s voice when he’s talking to the Grabber’s victims on the black phone. In postproduction, though, he slightly modified that approach so the filter is applied to the dead children when they manifest. “It creates a real tactile feeling of ethereal unpresence and presence at the same time,” Derrickson said. “And all of that was the result of me thinking about the phone filter that’s in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ in that one shot.”‘A Prayer for Owen Meany’On the surface, there is not much linking “The Black Phone” to John Irving’s novel from 1989, in which the title character is convinced that he has a connection to God and his life is building up to a preordained event. But it inspired Derrickson when he and co-writer C. Robert Cargill were trying to figure out what to do with the characters they were adding to the original short story. “The big expansions were Gwen and adding four other kids based on kids I knew in middle school,” Derrickson said.But then he was stumped: How would those children fit in the plot? “When I thought about ‘A Prayer for Owen Meany,’ I thought, ‘Oh, that’s it: They’re giving Finney missions,’ ” Derrickson said. “And when I did that, I felt, ‘OK, I know how to do this movie. I know how the structure works.’ ” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: The Stanley Cup Finals and ‘Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes’

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      The Tampa Bay Lightning battles the Colorado Avalanche for the Stanley Cup. And HBO airs a new documentary about the Chernobyl disaster.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 20-26. Details and times are subject to change.MondayHOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (2012) 8 p.m. on TCM. Long before there were dependable treatment options for AIDS, activist groups including AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power and Treatment Action Group were hard at work trying to change the rhetoric surrounding the disease and pushing for solutions that could cut down on AIDS-related deaths. This documentary, directed by David France, uses archival footage from the 1980s to explore the rancor and apathy toward the disease during that period and how work by activist groups helped lead to robust treatments and a deeper understanding of the disease.NHL STANLEY CUP FINALS (GAME THREE) 8 p.m. on ABC. The Tampa Bay Lightning, the two-time defending champions, will continue facing off against the Colorado Avalanche in Game 3 of the finals. The best-of-seven format means the team that wins four games first wins the cup. If the Lightning takes home that title, it will be the first team to win three consecutive championships since the New York Islanders won four straight cups in 1980-83.TuesdayWILD ’N OUT 8 p.m. on VH1. The fate of this sketch-comedy and improv show was uncertain when ViacomCBS fired the show’s host and creator, Nick Cannon, in 2020 for making antisemitic remarks on a podcast — but the network hired him again last year. It is safe to assume that the new, 18th season, which debuts this week, will feature plenty of other faces: Previous guests on the show have included Chance the Rapper, Zendaya and Machine Gun Kelly.WednesdayA scene from “Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes.”HBOCHERNOBYL: THE LOST TAPES (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. In the 36 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, there has been a fascination with the incident in just about every form of media imaginable: Movies, video games, YouTube videos of people exploring the exclusion zone and now the recent fictionalized HBO mini-series. “The Lost Tapes” uses a trove of new archival footage to look at the explosion and its aftermath. It also includes interviews with survivors, who discuss what they knew about the nuclear power plant before the incident — and what they were told after.Thursday2022 N.B.A. DRAFT 8 p.m. on ABC and ESPN. Some of the most promising young basketball players will assemble in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Thursday for the 76th annual N.B.A. draft. A draft lottery in May determined that the Orlando Magic will have the first overall pick, with the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Houston Rockets and the Sacramento Kings rounding out the top four in the draft lottery. This is the first time in two years that the draft will take place at the normal time, in June, after pandemic-related postponements in 2020 and 2021.BUCKHEAD SHORE 9 p.m. on MTV. Following in the infamous footsteps of “Jersey Shore,” “Floribama Shore” and “Geordie Shore,” this MTV reality show captures fights, hookups and nights out among a new cast of characters in Buckhead, Ga., where nine friends share a lake house for the summer.FridayJennifer Nettles in “American Anthems.”Believe Entertainment GroupAMERICAN ANTHEMS 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The inspiration behind pieces of music can often be hard to pin down, but that won’t be the case here. In each episode of the six-part series, a country star meets with a local community “hero” and then turns his or her story into a personalized country song. The first episode will feature Jennifer Nettles. Other acts in the series include Lee Brice, the War and Treaty, Cam, Lindsay Ell, and Ruston Kelly.49TH ANNUAL DAYTIME EMMY AWARDS 9 p.m. on CBS. This year’s Daytime Emmy Awards will be live from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in California. The show, which will be hosted by Kevin Frazier and Nischelle Turner, recognizes shows that air during the daytime. This year’s nominees include “General Hospital,” “The Young and the Restless,” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Beyoncé is a nominee in the outstanding original song category for her song she wrote for her mother’s Facebook Watch series “Talks With Mama Tina.” The PBS show “This Old House,” which earned its 100th nomination this year, will receive a lifetime achievement honor.SaturdayTHE HAUNTING (1963) 6 p.m. on TCM. This horror film, adapted from the Shirley Jackson novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” follows Dr. John Markway, a researcher interested in psychic phenomena. He encounters two women, Eleanor (Julie Harris) and Theodora (Claire Bloom), and uses their supernatural experiences in a haunted mansion to investigate his paranormal theories. For a looser, modernized take on the novel, see the much more recent adaptation “The Haunting of Hill House,” a series on Netflix.SundayTaraji P. Henson hosting the BET Awards in 2021. She will return to host this year’s ceremony on Sunday.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated Press2022 BET AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET. Lizzo, Jack Harlow, Chance the Rapper and many more celebrities will be at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday night to perform at this year’s BET Awards. Taraji P. Henson will host. Nominees in the top categories include Doja Cat — who has six nominations, the most of any artist this year — and Drake and Ari Lennox, who each have four. Sean Combs is set to accept a lifetime achievement award.CITIZEN ASHE 9 p.m. on CNN. This documentary on the tennis star Arthur Ashe, a three-time Grand Slam singles title winner who died in 1993, features Ashe’s brother, wife and friends. They discuss Ashe’s experience as a Black man in a white-dominated sport — his ascent to tennis stardom happened during the Jim Crow era — and his career in the context the AIDS epidemic, South African apartheid and civil rights in the United States. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it an “engrossing, politically astute documentary portrait.” More

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      Paul Haggis Arrested on Sexual Assault Charges in Italy

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      Haggis, who wrote and directed the Oscar-winning crime drama “Crash,” was accused of assaulting a woman in Ostuni over the course of two days.The Oscar-winning director and writer Paul Haggis was arrested on charges of aggravated sexual violence and aggravated personal injuries in the Southern Italian city of Ostuni on Sunday, according to the local police.According to a statement from the prosecutor’s office in the nearby city of Brindisi, which ordered the arrest, the accuser was not Italian. The statement identifies the man who was arrested as P.H., a Canadian; Vincenzo Leo, the duty officer of the local Italian police, confirmed it was Mr. Haggis.The statement said that after two days of “nonconsensual intercourse,” he had brought the woman to the Papola Casale airport in Brindisi on Friday and left her there “at the first lights of dawn, despite the precarious physical and psychological conditions of the woman.”The airport’s staff and the border police noticed her in the airport in a “confusional state,” assisted her and took her to the local police office, the statement continued. She was then brought to a hospital where she was treated following a protocol used in Italy for victims of violence against women; she subsequently reported the violence to the police.According to the accusations, Mr. Haggis, 69, “would have forced the young woman, that he had met some time before, to endure sexual intercourse.”“I am confident that all allegations will be dismissed against Mr. Haggis,” Priya Chaudhry, a lawyer for Mr. Haggis, said in an email. “He is totally innocent, and willing to fully cooperate with the authorities so the truth comes out quickly.”Mr. Haggis, who won a screenwriting Oscar in 2006 for the crime drama “Crash,” and who wrote acclaimed movies such as “Million Dollar Baby,” was in the southern city to attend the Allora film festival, where he was set to participate in panels and discussions with the audience, starting on June 21, according to the festival’s program.Mr. Haggis was sued for sexual assault in New York in 2017 by a publicist, Haleigh Breest. Ms. Breest accused Mr. Haggis of forcing her to give him oral sex before raping her after a premiere in 2013. Mr. Haggis has contended that the encounter with Ms. Breest was consensual.Following the lawsuit, which is still pending because of delays related to the coronavirus pandemic, three other women accused Mr. Haggis of sexually assaulting them, according to The Associated Press.A lawyer for Mr. Haggis, Christine Lepera, has denied the three other accusations, saying “he did not rape anybody,” according to The A.P.’s report.Mr. Haggis got his start as a TV writer in the 1980s and went on to help create several series, including “Walker, Texas Ranger,” the long-running drama starring Chuck Norris. But he is perhaps best known for his film work, notably “Crash,” the 2005 ensemble drama he directed and co-wrote. The film won best picture at the Academy Awards as well as best original screenplay for Mr. Haggis and Bobby Moresco.In 2009, Mr. Haggis left the Church of Scientology over its support of Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriage passed by California voters and later overturned. In a resignation letter that was circulated in Hollywood, Mr. Haggis wrote that the church’s position was “a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally.” In the documentary “Going Clear” and elsewhere, Mr. Haggis has become among the more prominent critics of the church. And he has said that, in response, the church has mounted a campaign of harassment.In a court filing last year, Mr. Haggis asserted that the pending sexual assault lawsuit in New York had essentially frozen his career, leaving him unable to work as a director or producer.“I have had discussions with producers and financiers, but have been repeatedly told that they cannot work with me until I clear my name,” he wrote in the filing, which was submitted as part of a motion requesting that the court set a trial date.Stephanie Goodman contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Civil: Ben Crump’ Review: What Becomes of a Missed Opportunity?

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      The documentary “Civil” follows Ben Crump, the prominent attorney who has represented families affected by police violence, for one turbulent year.At the beginning of “Civil” — a documentary about the civil-rights attorney Ben Crump — a phone call from Tera Brown, a cousin of George Floyd, comes into Crump’s office. Crump listens compassionately as Brown relates the 2020 murder of her cousin by a Minneapolis police officer. Crump gently offers her some advice about next steps, then rests his head in his hands. The image of Crump holding his own head, and of Crump rubbing his eyes, is repeated throughout “Civil.” It is the weary physical response to ongoing injustice and to a schedule that keeps the lawyer on planes and on his smartphone, pursuing lawsuits intended to make police departments and municipalities pay financially — and the media and the court of public opinion pay heed.Most viewers will likely recognize Crump as a high-profile legal representative for family members not just of Floyd but of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor and Andre Hill, too, to name some of his clients’ loved ones who have been killed during encounters with the police.The director Nadia Hallgren filmed Crump over a year during 2020 and 2021, and her portrait has instances of tag-along intimacy. The phone calls to Crump’s wife, Genae, and daughter, Brooklyn, as well as his check-ins with his mother, Helen, provide ballast amid the upheaval. And the biographical details about the college, law school and fraternity that shaped Crump tease his roots in Black communities.Yet “Civil” yields fewer insights than hoped. At times, the neat documentary feels nearly as tailored as Crump’s suits. (Perhaps this is what happens when verité-style filmmaking follows such a camera-ready subject?) Given Crump’s vital role in momentous litigation, “Civil” may be crucial viewing — but it’s not always revealing.Civil: Ben CrumpRated PG-13 for strong language and images of violence. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Events for Fans of Horror Films in New York City

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      For fans of scary movies, three horror series around New York just may keep you up all night.Forget the Bahamas, horror fans. This summer, New York is your paradise.That’s because three of the city’s highbrow cinema presenters are offering ambitious and adventurous horror movie series with scares enough for everyone, from squeamish newbies to hardened connoisseurs.The biggie is “Horror: Messaging the Monstrous,” which runs for a whopping 10 weeks at the Museum of Modern Art. With more than 110 features and short films, the series digs deep into sociopolitical horror cinema, with sections devoted to gender, race, sexuality and additional concerns.The other programs are equally enterprising. Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà, the esteemed Italian film studio, are partnering on “Beware of Dario Argento,” a 20-film retrospective of Argento, the horror movie master best known for “Suspiria.” The director himself will be at select screenings.And the Museum of the Moving Image is hosting “Films of the Dead: Romero & Co.,” an 11-film series dedicated to zombie movies by, and inspired by, the maverick horror filmmaker George A. Romero, who died in 2017. It’s a companion to “Living With ‘The Walking Dead’” (June 25-Jan. 1, 2023), an exhibition about the origins and impact of the AMC series. A second film program, “White Zombies: Nightmares of Empire,” follows in August.Caryn Coleman, a guest curator on the MoMA series, said it should be no surprise that all three organizations are turning to horror to “process the world.”“We’re certainly in a collective moment of turmoil, so it seems right on target for New York to be hosting horror programming as both a tool of discussion and celebration,” she wrote in an email.To make your decision-making less scary, here’s one horror lover’s guide to what to watch.From left, Debra De Liso, Michelle Michaels and Andree Honore in “The Slumber Party Massacre.”New World Pictures‘Horror: Messaging the Monstrous’ (June 23-Sept. 5)Museum of Modern Art, moma.orgThe Guilty Pleasure: ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ (1982)What happens when a female director (Amy Holden Jones) and a feminist writer (Rita Mae Brown) team up to make a movie about a deranged murderer with a power drill who kills high schoolers on the night of a sleepover? You get this crazed classic from the golden age of slashers, a film that continues to inspire new generations of female horror moviemakers.The Must-See: ‘The Last House on the Left’ (1972)Wes Craven wrote and directed this rape-revenge film about two young women who are brutalized by psychopaths. This one’s a don’t-miss movie only for folks with a strong constitution and a morbid curiosity about a game-changing but troubling exploitation film. Consider this: Howard Thompson, reviewing for The Times, called it “sickening tripe,” and said he walked out before the film ended.The Find: ‘Jack Be Nimble’ (1993)A terrific rediscovery in the series is this horror-fantasy film from New Zealand. Directed by Garth Maxwell, it stars Alexis Arquette and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy as twins who reunite as adults after being separated and raised in broken homes. In his Times review, Stephen Holden called it a “superior” genre film with “hallucinatory power and psychological refinement.”The Throwback: ‘Def by Temptation’ (1990)The writer-director James Bond III stars as a young man who visits New York to see a friend (Kadeem Hardison), but instead falls under the spell of a succubus (Cynthia Bond). A supernatural investigator (Bill Nunn), a medium (Melba Moore) and a preacher (Samuel L. Jackson) all try to keep the evil at bay. For a low-budget horror comedy, the film takes a surprisingly frank look at Black Gen Xers and presents questions of friendship, sex and faith.Jennifer Connelly in “Phenomena.”DAC Film, via AGFA‘Beware of Dario Argento’ (June 17-29)Film at Lincoln Center, filmlinc.orgThe Must-See: ‘Phenomena’ (1985)Argento’s trippy psycho-thriller stars Jennifer Connelly as a young student at a Swiss girls school who discovers she has supernatural powers to control insects. Donald Pleasence is the scientist who helps her use that power to find a killer. The big screen is the best way to experience the film’s spectacular flesh-dissolving bug attack.The Begetter: ‘The Bird With the Crystal Plumage’ (1970)Argento’s directing debut, for which he also wrote the screenplay, is a stylish prototype of Italian giallo. Set in Rome, it’s a thriller about an American writer who gets entangled in a murder mystery after he witnesses a woman stabbed by an intruder inside a gallery. The gore is mild compared to Argento’s later films. But giallo’s visual signatures — plunging razors, menacing lighting, a killer in chic leather — are abundant.The New Kid on the Block: ‘Dark Glasses’ (2022)One of the films I’m excited to see is Argento’s latest, his first movie since the poorly received “Argento’s Dracula 3D.” Ilenia Pastorelli stars as a prostitute who struggles to adjust to a new life after being blinded during her escape from a killer. True to Argento form, the movie looks as sleek as it is deranged.Duane Jones in “Night of the Living Dead.”Janus Films‘Films of the Dead’ (June 25-July 30)Museum of the Moving Image, movingimage.usThe Must-See: ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968)When Romero’s black-and-white groundbreaker comes to the big screen, just go. Romero championed the oppressed, and for his first feature film he cast Duane Jones, a Black actor, as the man who protects a group of strangers trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse under siege by the flesh-chewing undead. Movies that view horror through a social justice lens, especially when it comes to American racism, bow to this one.The Batty Comedy: ‘One Cut of the Dead’ (2017)Shinichiro Ueda’s film is an absurdly gory horror-comedy about a film crew shooting a zombie movie that’s interrupted by actual hungry zombies. Instead of cutting and running, the director forces his cast and crew to keep rolling. What happens next is a meta-marvel of slapstick, butchery and, surprisingly, heart.The Guilty Pleasure: ‘Day of the Dead’ (1985)I have a soft spot for this talky doomsday story, written and directed by Romero. Set in a dystopian future America — one of Romero’s favorite places to visit — it’s about a group of literally underground scientists and soldiers (with fragile egos) who battle the zombies left above ground after an apocalypse. Tom Savini’s gruesome special effects gave me the heebie jeebies back in the day, and still do. More