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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Old Man’ and Juneteenth Specials

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      Jeff Bridges stars in a new thriller series on FX. And several networks air programs recognizing Juneteenth.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 13 – 19. Details and times are subject to change.MondayDEADLY FRIEND (1986) 6:15 p.m. on TCM. Two years after “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” the filmmaker Wes Craven released this artificial-intelligence fable about a young computer wiz (Michael Sharrett) who implants a microchip into the brain of his injured teenage neighbor (Kristy Swanson). The chip is meant to save her life — and it does, sort of, but it puts others’ lives in danger. (The story is based on a novel by Diana Henstell.) In her 1986 review for The New York Times, Caryn James praised the “unpredictable goofiness” of the film. She called it “a witty ghoul story, a grandson of ‘Frankenstein’ that plays off the conventions of recent teen-age horror movies while paying homage to the classic starring Boris Karloff.”TuesdayBrian Wilson in “Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road.”Barb BialkowskiAMERICAN MASTERS: BRIAN WILSON — LONG PROMISED ROAD 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). A reflection of the depth of influence of the Beach Boys singer-songwriter Brian Wilson, this documentary includes interviews with music figures as disparate as the Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins (who died in March) and the star classical-music conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Those interviews and many others, including ones with Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Don Was and Al Jardine, accompany an extended conversation between Jason Fine, the editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and Wilson, who drive around Los Angeles together discussing Wilson’s life and career.WednesdayElsie Fisher in “Eighth Grade.”Linda Kallerus/A24EIGHTH GRADE (2018) and LADY BIRD (2017) 5:45 p.m. and 7:25 p.m. on Showtime. Here’s a double feature with enough coming-of-age awkwardness to fill a few college-ruled composition books. “Eighth Grade,” from the comic and filmmaker Bo Burnham, follows a very online adolescent (played by Elsie Fisher) navigating her final week of middle school in suburbia; “Lady Bird,” from the actress and filmmaker Greta Gerwig, follows a high school senior (Saoirse Ronan) balancing school drama (in multiple senses) and a complicated relationship with her mother (Laurie Metcalf) in the suburbs of Sacramento, Calif., in the early 2000s.ThursdayTHE OLD MAN 10 p.m. on FX. Jeff Bridges, long an old soul (see “True Grit,” “The Big Lebowski” and “Crazy Heart”), is a natural fit for the title role of this new series — though he’s not often quite this imposing. He plays Dan Chase, a former C.I.A. operative who abandoned the agency long ago. When we meet him, he’s grizzled and living off the grid. But his past catches up with him, as pasts are wont to do, and he finds himself being hunted by an F.B.I. director (John Lithgow). Amy Brenneman and Alia Shawkat also star alongside Bridges, in his first regular role in a series.FridayQuinn Kelsey and Rosa Feola in “Rigoletto.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesGREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET: RIGOLETTO 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher relocates Verdi’s “Rigoletto” from Renaissance Italy to Weimar Berlin in this version of that dark three-act opera. The production, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera at the beginning of this year, stars the baritone Quinn Kelsey and the soprano Rosa Feola as the jester Rigoletto and his beloved daughter, Gilda, under the conducting of Daniele Rustioni. Anthony Tommasini’s review for The Times was positive, with some caveats. “If shifting the opera’s setting from Renaissance Italy to 1920s Berlin was not entirely convincing, this was still a detailed, dramatic staging, full of insights into the characters,” Tommasini wrote. Rustioni, he added, “led a lean, transparent performance that balanced urgency and lyricism.”WATERGATE: HIGH CRIMES IN THE WHITE HOUSE 9 p.m. on CBS. It was through the mouths of CBS reporters including Walter Cronkite, Lesley Stahl and Dan Rather that many Americans heard of developments in the Watergate scandal — and about the infamous break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, which happened 50 years ago this week. This new feature-length documentary about the events takes advantage of the reams of footage in CBS’s archives. It also features new interviews with Stahl, the reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the F.B.I. investigator Angelo Lano and others, including Hugh W. Sloan Jr., a treasurer of President Nixon’s re-election committee who was a major source of information for Woodward and Bernstein.SaturdayACROSS THE UNIVERSE (2007) 8 p.m. on HBO Signature. Paul McCartney turns 80 on Saturday. Consider tipping your hat (or your mop-top hairdo) to him by revisiting this oddball jukebox musical from Julie Taymor, in which the visually sumptuous love story between a Liverpool bloke (Jim Sturgess) in search of his father and a young American activist (Evan Rachel Wood) is peppered with Beatles songs. It’s a “phantasmagoria,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The Times. “Somewhere around its midpoint, ‘Across the Universe’ captured my heart,” Holden wrote, “and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.”SundayEarth, Wind and Fire performing in New York last year. The group is on the lineup for “Juneteenth: A Global Celebration of Freedom,” which will air on CNN on Sunday.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesJUNETEENTH: A GLOBAL CELEBRATION FOR FREEDOM at 8 p.m. on CNN. Sunday is Juneteenth, and many networks have programming lined up to recognize the holiday. One of the highlights is this blowout concert, which is slated to include the Roots; Earth, Wind and Fire; Mickey Guyton; Robert Glasper; Yolanda Adams; Billy Porter; and many more performers. Questlove and the producer, songwriter and instrumentalist Adam Blackstone are the night’s music directors. Other Juneteenth-related programming throughout the day includes BET SPECIAL: THE RECIPE: JUNETEENTH at 1 p.m. on BET; a Juneteenth episode of the family show YOUNG DYLAN at 7 p.m. on Nick; and the 30TH ANNUAL TRUMPET AWARDS, which honor Black performers and other figures (this year’s honorees include the actor Courtney B. Vance and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia), at 7 p.m. on Bounce TV. More

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      ‘Lost Illusions’ Review: The Sweet Smell of Success

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      Xavier Giannoli’s headlong adaptation of a Balzac novel paints a timely picture of literary ambition and media corruption in 19th-century France.A young person from the provinces sets out for the big city, seeking fortune and fame and finding temptation, corruption and ruin. It’s a story that never gets old — there’s usually plenty of lust, ambition and greed to keep the narrative engine humming — and variations pop up in the literature of nearly every nation and era. “Lost Illusions,” Honoré de Balzac’s novel of Parisian literary life, stands as a stellar example in its period and now, thanks to Xavier Giannoli’s invigorating screen adaptation, in ours as well.Balzac, writing in the early 1840s, reached back a few decades to the Bourbon Restoration, a post-Napoleonic moment of high decadence and low scruple, but what he uncovered were some of the perennial principles of modern life. Principles, though, are exactly what his moderns lack. The pistons that keep their world humming along are cynicism and hypocrisy, and brazen amorality winds through every institution they inhabit, from politics to publishing to theater.Into this hive of striving and backstabbing comes Lucien Chardon (Benjamin Voisin), a 20-year-old poet we first meet in his hometown, Angoulême, in Southwestern France. There, he scribbles passionate verses in a sun-dappled meadow and earns his living working in a printing shop. Not that his life is defined entirely by pastoral innocence and honest toil. His hobby is vigorous adultery with Mme. de Bargeton (Cécile de France), a married aristocrat who invites him to read his poetry at artistic gatherings in her chateau.Lucien has aristocratic pretensions of his own. He signs his poems — and, later, his scabrous articles in the Parisian press — Lucien de Rubempré, using his highborn mother’s maiden name. (Lucien’s father, M. Chardon, was a pharmacist.) When Madame’s husband discovers the affair, she takes off for Paris with Lucien and another would-be lover, the Baron du Châtelet (André Marcon), who will eventually be caricatured in the newspapers as an impotent turkey.Lucien has pouty good looks and ostensible literary talent. The baron and Mme. de Bargeton have connections to the Marquise d’Espard (Jeanne Balibar), a powerful figure in royalist circles. What seemed like a lark in Angoulême goes sour in a hurry. Cast out of his protectors’ company — his bumbling naïveté, so sexy in the countryside, is embarrassing in the big city — Lucien finds his way onto the staff of an anti-royalist scandal sheet, where he makes a splash writing criticism, using de Rubempré as his byline.As we follow this rake’s progress onscreen — through editorial offices full of hashish smoke, and on to bistros, bawdy houses and music halls — a narrator lays out how it all works. Balzac, one of the fathers of literary realism, was a pioneer of what a later century would call the systems novel, and his explanatory zeal, far from didactic, is almost always delightful.And so it is in Giannoli’s version. “Lost Illusions” is in some ways a very old-fashioned, supremely French movie, full of costumes and quill pens, sex and speechifying, and stylish acting even in the smallest roles. (The Quebecois actor and filmmaker Xavier Dolan, as Lucien’s well-connected rival, is particularly charismatic.) The novel was turned into a mini-series for French television in 1966, but the breathless sprawl of a longish feature film may serve it better. Balzac was a prodigious coffee drinker, and the movie, though its characters run on champagne and schadenfreude, is nothing if not caffeinated.It is also earnest in its portrayal of cynicism, without being overly moralistic. Lucien’s career is launched when he delivers an impromptu takedown of a book he hasn’t read for an audience of scribblers presided over by a powerful publisher (Gérard Depardieu). Reviews, positive and negative, are bought and paid for through a complex circuit of bribery and extortion. Audiences flock to theaters on a street called “the boulevard of crime” for its sensational offerings. Ovations and boos are purchased from an unctuous fixer named Singali (Jean-François Stévenin).Lucien, egged on by his dirtbag editor (Vincent Lacoste), starts making good money. What he doesn’t lose at the gambling tables he spends on an actress named Coralie (the heart-tuggingly sincere Salomé Dewaels), who becomes his muse, his mistress and the film’s emotional center of gravity. Lucien’s love for her is the only pure thing about him — that and the faith in literature that occasionally flickers amid the hackery.The narrator signals early on that the plot is heading toward tragedy, and further summary would no more spoil “Lost Illusions” than a citation of the law of gravity would spoil a roller-coaster ride. The busy, headlong story, in any case, is a whirring machine for the delivery of piquant ideas about human behavior, and about the workings of a society obsessed with reputation, status and appearance as well as money.It’s a familiar enough spectacle, and if there’s any justice this movie will become a touchstone and cult object among the grasping, scheming denizens of the current media jungle. Giannoli illuminates the dank frenzy of the 19th-century attention economy with an eye on our own post-truth era. “Lost Illusions” is sensational. Nobody paid me to say that. Well, actually, The New York Times did, but you should believe me anyway.Lost IllusionsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A Queer-Film Historian Discusses Movies That Provoke

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      Elizabeth Purchell, who has programmed a series on the documentaries of Rosa von Praunheim, sees Pride Month as a chance to discover, and uncover, the past.Elizabeth Purchell isn’t afraid of “Transexual Menace,” even though she is a transgender woman and the film sounds like the kind of hateful propaganda you’d find for sale at a convention of conspiracy nuts.But “Transexual Menace” is a cornerstone of documentary filmmaking about transgender people — a 1996 time capsule made by the maverick and prolific queer German director Rosa von Praunheim. And Purchell, 32, is a historian of queer film who has a soft spot for movies that provoke, arouse, tickle and otherwise stir the queer cinema pot.“It’s great that we have queer rom-coms, but I want to be challenged,” said Purchell during a phone interview from her home in Austin, Texas. “I don’t want to see the 200th coming out film.”“Transexual Menace” is one of six documentaries in “Revolt of the Perverts,” a new von Praunheim retrospective that Purchell put together for Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater, where the series continues through June 27. Purchell will be in town at the end of the month to introduce some of the films in person.The series is one of the latest queer movie endeavors from Purchell. Her work as an archivist, historian and curator includes a podcast, Instagram account and experimental documentary about gay adult cinema history — all named Ask Any Buddy. She also recently recorded audio commentaries on new restorations of films by the gay adult film directors Fred Halsted and Arthur J. Bressan Jr.On Being Transgender in AmericaGenerational Shift: The number of young people who identify as transgender in the United States has nearly doubled in recent years, according to a new report.Phalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.For custodians of queer film history, Purchell is a standard-bearer.“Elizabeth is doing amazing curatorial work in identifying significant and lesser-known things that deserve to be elevated,” said Jenni Olson, a queer film historian and archivist. “Sometimes I’m not sure how she finds things.”Purchell, who came out as a transgender woman just last November, recently talked about the state of queer cinema and what under-the-radar movie she’d recommend watching for Pride. The interview has been edited and condensed.What’s your goal as a queer-film historian?To get people excited about history and look beyond the surface of queer cinema. I think people want to see more queer films, not just the same five movies over and over. They want to see performances, actors and personalities they’ve maybe never seen before, like Holly Woodlawn and Taylor Mead.In what shape is queer cinema now?It’s remarkable that queer cinema has grown into this gigantic ecosystem of filmmaking. But I want more. I want trans filmmakers to make the films they want to make. I want to see filmmakers push boundaries. Queer cinema should be more than just X film but make it gay — thriller but make it gay or horror film but make it gay. I want to see what’s next.Anna Cobb in “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.”UtopiaIs there a queer film out now that does that?“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” It’s about trans issues, but other people might not pick up on that. It’s undoubtedly a queer film that isn’t textually queer. I find that exciting.How did you first become interested in gay pornography?A few years ago, my partner and I went to a screening of “Bijou,” and Wakefield Poole, the director, was there to introduce it. It opened my eyes to this entire world I didn’t know about. I thought, if this one film exists, what else is out there? So I watched “Thundercrack!” and “L.A. Plays Itself” and it made me want to see more.What did you learn about the connection between pornography and mainstream gay cinema?I don’t think people realize there’s this hidden history of queer filmmaking contained in adult films. People tend to think queer cinema began with New Queer Cinema, but adult films laid the groundwork. The films were made for very little money, but the theaters they played at were safe social spaces for people to watch movies, cruise and meet other people.The other thing that struck me was how connected these films and filmmakers were to mainstream gay culture. If you look at old issues of The Advocate from the ’70s, you see stills from gay porn and reviews of the films. The genre was a crucial vehicle for gay ideas and imagery to make their way across the country.You came out as transgender pretty recently. How has that experience been?People have been very kind to me personally. Growing up in Tampa in the ’90s, there was no way for me to know what trans people were or what it was like to be trans or who could be trans. I settled on I’m a gay man and did that for about a decade. I was working on the Fred Halsted Blu-ray, and I slowly started to realize I was trans. “Sextool” is a Halsted film with a trans woman in it. She’s not in the sex scenes, but her presence got me researching all these trans people and trans history. It just suddenly began to click.Gerald Grant and Claire Wilbur in the Radley Metzger film “Score.”Audubon FilmsIs there an under-the-radar movie you’d recommend people watch during Pride?Radley Metzger’s “Score.” It’s an adaptation of the play by the great Jerry Douglas, a pioneering gay playwright, filmmaker and incredibly important historian. Jerry passed away last year. It’s one of my favorite movies. It’s about this swinging couple who have this game to see who can make it first with someone of the same sex from another couple. It’s a wonderful example of how sex and cinema can combine to create something honest.What is it like to be a transgender person working in queer cinema in Texas these days?You think of Austin as this big liberal bastion, but you’re still in Texas. You drive a mile outside the city and you see the pro-life billboards. I run a queer film series through the Austin Film Society. What I’ve been trying to do is build a community and give people a safe space to explore film. Our screening of “Cruising” sold out. People were in full gear.Full gear?There was a furry bear wearing nothing but a leather jock. It was really wonderful. More

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      ‘I’m Charlie Walker’ Review: More Wink Than Wallop

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      The actor Mike Colter imbues Charlie with cool savvy in this movie about a Black trucker in the ’70s who goes up against the white establishment.In January 1971, two tankers collided in the waters beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, leaking 800,000 gallons of oil. The disaster is remembered for having spurred an environmental movement.Less known is how a Black trucker named Charlie Walker played a pivotal role in the cleanup campaign during a time when the white trucking unions and their political allies were freezing out Black workers in the Bay Area. The director and writer Patrick Gilles sets out to right the narrative with the movie “I’m Charlie Walker,” plying the overly broad gestures of ’70s blaxploitation films to mixed effect.The actor Mike Colter (“Luke Cage”) does his part, imbuing Charlie with cool savvy, though his style is more wink than wallop. As the Black owner of a trucking company, he has to be shrewd to contend with the unrefined racism of white truckers and the self-anointed superiority of oil executives.When a foreman grudgingly gives Walker a stretch of beach in Marin County with a nearly inaccessible road to clear, he catches a break. Currents redirect the crude oil away from the tourist spots where white truckers are waiting. Soon Charlie is marshaling hippie volunteers and hiring truckers keen for a paycheck — both Black and white — for the massive cleanup operation. (Along the way, Bay Area notables Boots Riley and Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor, make cameos.)Dylan Baker plays the unctuous executive who is sure he can control Walker and the narrative. But it’s Charlie’s wife, Ann (Safiya Fredericks), who provides the movie’s voice-over. Her account has a mythmaking undercurrent but is also the film’s deft way of celebrating Black love and family. Charlie Walker might not be John Shaft, but Ann — and the filmmaker — want you to know that he’s still a bad mother (shut your mouth).I’m Charlie WalkerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Walk’ Review: Two Families So Far Apart

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      This sentimental drama about an upstanding cop caught up in the 1974 school desegregation conflict in Boston recycles tired white-savior clichés.Set in South Boston in 1974, in the riotous aftermath of court-ordered school desegregation, Daniel Adams’s “The Walk” shows its hand early on. We first meet Billy (Justin Chatwin), a working-class Irish cop, as he lets a Black shoplifter off the hook and even pays for the man’s stolen baby formula. The perp responds incredulously with a comment that emerges as the film’s thematic refrain: “Damn, I guess there are some good white pigs left.”It’s a dubious choice, centering a film about anti-Black racism on a “noble” Caucasian policeman — no matter that Billy responds to the thief’s comment by gratuitously slamming him against the wall and threatening to arrest him.As the film opens, the Federal District Court has just mandated busing as a means of integrating Boston’s public schools. Much to the chagrin of his prejudiced neighbors, Billy is assigned to escort Black high school students as they are bused to the all-white school attended by his (increasingly, noxiously bigoted) daughter.Among the Black kids is the bright, brave Wendy (Lovie Simone), the daughter of an emergency medical worker (Terrence Howard). The film occasionally switches perspectives from Billy and his family to Wendy and her father, though their arcs all tie up in a melodramatic display of Billy’s heroism that reaffirms tired white-savior clichés.The topic is, of course, timely. (When is racism not?) Yet “The Walk” feels dated. Every exchange among Adams’s schema of archetypes — the radical, quick-tempered Black man and the peace-loving Black woman; the impoverished, racist white people and the do-gooding liberals — lands like a platitudinous lecture about “fighting hate,” with the stilted performances (featuring too-forced Bah-stin accents) adding to the after-school-special vibe.The WalkRated R for racist epithets and violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ninja Badass’ Review: Kill Bad Guys, Save Hot Babes, Look Silly

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      Ryan Harris, an auteur of the gross, includes sight gags like puppies in blenders in this tedious action comedy.“Ninja Badass,” a crude, abrasive action-comedy about an Indiana hillbilly training to become a superpowered martial artist, is the product of one peculiar mind. Ryan Harrison is the writer, director, co-producer, editor and star of “Ninja Badass”; he even created its cheap but plentiful visual effects.Self-financed, and more than a decade in the making, the film is clearly a labor of love, realized in the raucous guerrilla-cinema tradition of Robert Rodriguez’s classic indie shoot-em-up debut “El Mariachi.” But without collaborators to push back against his instincts or question his ideas — the only other credited producer is his mother — Harrison’s vision reigns unchecked, to ends both excessive and self-indulgent. The result is a 103-minute vanity project I found utterly exhausting.Harrison plays Rex, a coarse, ill-mannered layabout with a bleach-blond bouffant hairdo. Attacked during a visit to a pet store by Big Twitty (Darrell Francis), the lunatic leader of the cultlike group Ninja VIP Super Club, Rex resolves to learn the ninja arts and seek violent retribution. Shot in the manic, off-the-cuff style of “Crank,” the action that follows is lurid and over the top, with lots of graphic lacerations relished for their comic shock value. Harrison favors a few gory sight gags, like an arm being ripped out of its socket or a puppy being shoved into a blender, and repeats them frequently, to what would be diminishing results if the jokes were funny to begin with. You get the feeling the film is daring you to wince or take offense, but for the most part, its tasteless provocations are simply tedious.Ninja BadassNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘The Lost Girls’ Review: Wendy’s Telling of Peter Pan

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      In her second feature film, the director Livia De Paolis awkwardly tries to comment on the gender dynamics in J.M Barrie’s classic.Peter Pan might persist as a symbol of whimsy, but never growing up also has a dark side. In her latest film, “The Lost Girls,” based on the novel of the same name by Laurie Fox, the Italian writer and director Livia De Paolis depicts generations of women haunted by Never Never Land. At least, she tries to.The main character is Wendy Darling Braverman, the granddaughter of the original Wendy (played by Vanessa Redgrave). Toward the beginning of the film, Young Wendy has one heady night with Peter Pan at age 13. (Emily Carey plays teen Wendy in flashback.) Though she promises Peter she won’t grow up, she does, eventually marrying and having a daughter of her own. Adult Wendy, played by De Paolis herself, is left struggling to accept her life, including her non-magical husband and her resentful daughter.Such a synopsis makes this film sound deceptively cogent. Adult Wendy, who is supposed to be an American, has a conspicuous Italian accent. What’s more, these characters do not converse like regular human beings. At one point, Wendy’s daughter, Berry, punctuates a dour fight with the line, “Sayonara, Mama.”Instead of laying groundwork for the role of Peter Pan as an arguably antagonistic figure, this film is oddly horny for the magical boy (played by Louis Partridge). The first act climaxes as Young Wendy falls head over heels for Peter. Sure, he thinks of her as a mother figure and also had dalliances with her mother and grandmother, but he’s also a real catch.“The Lost Girls” ostensibly has something to say about the female experience in J.M. Barrie’s classic, but it saves what little meaning it offers for the very end. Those poor viewers willing to take on this Freudian tale and its dialogue rivaling “The Room” must brave a ludicrous slog for crumbs.The Lost GirlsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘1982’ Review: When War Canceled School

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      This film from the director Oualid Mouaness is inspired by his memories of being a child during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that year.“1982,” the first feature from Oualid Mouaness, is inspired by the director’s memories of having his classroom life suddenly interrupted by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that year. The film takes place at a school in East Beirut over a single day that begins quietly enough, although the first sound we hear is of rumbling planes. A fifth-grader, Wissam (Mohamad Dalli), slips an anonymous love note into the locker of Joanna (Gia Madi), a girl he likes from West Beirut, the mainly Muslim half of the city.As the fighting grows closer, culminating in an evacuation while Israeli and Syrian planes clash overhead, the characters show differing levels of awareness. Wissam’s best friend, Majid (Ghassan Maalouf), knows enough to warn a teacher that windows should stay open to reduce the risk of shattered glass — but is also enthused when told that school the next day will be canceled. For the children, the drama over the letter’s provenance is important. The adults, particularly two teachers (Nadine Labaki and Rodrigue Sleiman) whose romance has been strained by political arguments, engage in their own forms of denial. They’re skeptical that violence will reach East Beirut or that it’s time for students to stop their exams and leave.Working with a shrewdly limited setting, Mouaness skillfully gives the film a near-real-time feel, conveying a sense that the war is approaching through small-scale details like radio broadcasts, Wissam’s observation that pigeons have flown unusually close to the school and the volume and frequency of aerial noise. The filmmaker also mostly dodges the potential preciousness that comes with telling a story from a child’s perspective, even if a handful of animated sequences are a bit too cute.1982Not rated. In Arabic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More