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      Fun Things to Do in N.Y.C. This May 2022

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      Looking for something to do in New York? Go see the Asian Comedy Fest at Stand Up NY and Caveat or the British singer Nilüfer Yanya at Webster Hall. Take the kids to Our First Art Fair, as part of NADA New York. Or you can still catch “Hangmen” on Broadway and the Jacques-Louis David blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Comedy | Music | Kids | Film | Dance | Theater | ArtComedyJes Tom, above at Union Hall in Brooklyn in February, will be among the performers in this weekend’s Asian Comedy Fest.JT AndersonAsian Comedy FestFriday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. at Stand Up NY, 236 West 78th Street, Manhattan; standupny.com. Saturday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. at Caveat, 21A Clinton Street, Manhattan; caveat.nycFor the third straight year, Ed Pokropski, a writer and producer at NBCUniversal, and the producer and comedian Kate Moran have assembled dozens of performers for this festival, and like last year, they’re right on time to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The six shows will feature Julia Shiplett, Michael Cruz Kayne, Usama Siddiquee, Karen Chee with the puppeteer Kathleen Kim, the podcasters from “Feeling Asian,” and Yuhua Hamasaki from “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Friday’s 8 p.m. lineup includes perhaps the festival’s buzziest performer: Jes Tom, a nonbinary trans comedian who co-stars in the new Hulu rom-com “Crush.” (Tom will also headline their own show on May 14 at the Bell House.) Tickets start at $25 per show ($65 for an all-night pass) and are available at asiancomedyfest.com. SEAN L. McCARTHYMusicDarius Jones, above at the Winter Jazzfest in 2018, has programmed this year’s MATA Festival, which concludes at National Sawdust this weekend.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesClassical MusicMATA FestivalFriday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at National Sawdust, 80 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn; live.nationalsawdust.org.This year’s iteration of the annual contemporary music blowout known as the MATA Festival has been programmed by the composer and alto saxophonist Darius Jones. For the festival’s final two nights, Jones has put together a set of works by younger artists on Friday and one of his own on Saturday. Friday’s concert will feature notable artists like Travis Laplante, who is scheduled to play his solo tenor saxophone opus “The Obvious Place.” And Saturday’s performance will offer the world premiere of Jones’s piece “Colored School No. 3,” which references a Brooklyn building once used as a segregated school for Black children into the early 20th century. Tickets for each night are $25. SETH COLTER WALLSNilüfer Yanya will headline at Webster Hall on Saturday.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesPop & RockNilüfer YanyaSaturday at 7:30 p.m. at Webster Hall, 25 East 11th Street, Manhattan; websterhall.com.Though as a teenager she was tapped to be in a girl group assembled by Louis Tomlinson of One Direction, Nilüfer Yanya chose a self-determined path over the prospect of pop stardom. The British singer’s debut album, from 2019, contained notes of jazz and indie pop but leaned predominantly into alt-rock, showcasing the guitar chops she had honed since picking up the instrument at age 12. Yanya’s sophomore effort, released in March, follows suit but pares her sound down to essential components: wafty melodies, crisp beats, circuitous guitar work reminiscent of Radiohead. Ironically titled “Painless,” the album is spiked with thorns, its lyrics tackling the complicated, damaging side effects of desire. On Saturday, Yanya heads a bill that also features two other singer-guitarists: Ada Lea and Tasha. Tickets start at $25 and are available at axs.com. OLIVIA HORNKidsOur First Art Fair at Pier 36, sponsored by the New Art Dealers Alliance and the Children’s Museum of the Arts, will feature works by children 12 and under. Above, a display from an after-school class at the museum in 2019.Children’s Museum of the ArtsOur First Art FairThursday from 4 to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at NADA New York, Pier 36, 299 South Street, Manhattan; newartdealers.org.Learn More About the Metropolitan Museum of Art$125 Million Donation: The largest capital gift in the Met’s history will help reinvigorate a long-delayed rebuild of the Modern wing.Recent Exhibits: Our critics reviewed exhibits featuring the drawings of the French Revolution’s chief propagandist and new work by the sculptor Charles Ray.Behind the Scenes: A documentary goes inside the Met to chronicle one of the most challenging years of its history.A Guide to the Met: From the must-see galleries to the lesser-known treasures, here’s how to make the most of your visit.While the New Art Dealers Alliance has always catered to the business’s youngest members, it would be hard to find exhibitors younger than some appearing at this year’s NADA New York exposition. They’re the entrepreneurs 12 and under participating in Our First Art Fair, presented by the alliance and the Children’s Museum of the Arts. Here, youngsters display and price their creations, receiving all proceeds. Little artists who missed the April submission deadline can still contribute by completing a required form and delivering it, along their work, to the fair. On Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m., museum educators will also attend, providing art supplies and helping with last-minute entries. What doesn’t sell goes to the museum’s permanent collection — no small distinction. NADA passes start at $40; they’re free for children. LAUREL GRAEBERFilmThuy An Luu and Frédéric Andrei in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva,” which is screening at Film Forum starting on Friday.Rialto Pictures‘Diva’Ongoing at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org.You’ve seen Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out”? “Diva” is the other major film of 1981 (released in the United States in 1982) that involves a protagonist with a hot-potato audio recording, or technically two: Jules (Frédéric Andrei), a postman and opera fan, secretly records a star vocalist, Cynthia Hawkins (the real-life soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez), who makes a point of only singing live, at a performance in Paris. Soon after, he unwittingly comes into possession of another tape that could expose an international drug-and-sex-trafficking operation.But the crazy convolutions of the plot are hardly the point. “Diva,” directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, who died in January, is perhaps the film most identified with a trend in France that became known as the cinéma du look, movies for which visual style and attitude left the prevailing impressions. In a print showing at Film Forum, the shades of blue are dazzling, and an elaborate chase through the Paris Metro is pretty exciting, too. BEN KENIGSBERGDanceValerie Levine of Ice Theater of New York performing “Arctic Memory” by Jody Sperling on Governors Island in February.Josef PinlacIce Theater of New YorkFriday and Saturday at 7 p.m.; Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Sky Rink, 61 Chelsea Piers, Manhattan; chelseapiers.com.After pivoting to pavement during the pandemic, Ice Theater of New York returns to its true milieu, which is also a fitting place to reflect on climate change. As part of its home season, the company will present the premiere of the choreographer Jody Sperling’s “Of Water and Ice,” which draws on her research in the Arctic and is set to music by D.J. Spooky. It will be joined on the program by 10 other works, many of them also new, with soundtracks ranging from Philip Glass to Rachmaninoff to Madonna. Don’t expect a string of Nathan Chen-like acrobatic feats, though; the company, founded in 1984, is rooted in the art of ice dancing, which combines the ethos of concert dance with the speed, momentum and strength of ice skating. Two of the form’s best-known practitioners, the British champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, will be honored at Monday’s gala performance. Tickets start at $25 and are available at icetheatre.org. BRIAN SCHAEFERTheaterDavid Threlfall, center, with, from left, Richard Hollis, Ryan Pope, John Horton and Alfie Allen in Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “Hangmen” at the Golden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCritic’s Pick‘Hangmen’Through June 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; hangmenbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.In Martin McDonagh’s Olivier Award winner, set in the 1960s, a menacing mod from London (Alfie Allen of “Game of Thrones”) walks into a grim northern English pub run by a former hangman (David Threlfall). Pitch-black comedy ensues. Directed by Matthew Dunster, this production was a prepandemic hit downtown. Read the review.‘Plaza Suite’Through June 26 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; plazasuitebroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker revel in physical comedy as they play two married couples and a pair of long-ago sweethearts in the first Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s trio of one-act farces, a smash at its premiere in 1968. John Benjamin Hickey directs. (Onstage at the Hudson Theater. Limited run ends July 1.) Read the review.Critic’s Pick‘American Buffalo’Through July 10 at Circle in the Square, Manhattan; americanbuffalonyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss team up for David Mamet’s verbally explosive tragicomedy, set in a Chicago junk shop where an inept pair of small-time criminals and their hapless young flunky plot the theft of a rare nickel. Neil Pepe directs. Read the review.Hugh Jackman as Harold Hill in the Broadway revival of “The Music Man” at the Winter Garden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘The Music Man’At the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; musicmanonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.Hugh Jackman, a.k.a. Wolverine, returns to the stage as the charlatan Harold Hill opposite Sutton Foster as Marian the librarian in Jerry Zaks’s widely anticipated revival of Meredith Willson’s classic musical comedy. It’s a hot ticket, and one of Broadway’s more stratospherically priced shows. (Onstage at the Winter Garden Theater.)Read the review.Art & Museums“The Oath of the Tennis Court” (1791), a presentation drawing in “Jacques-Louis David: Radical Draftsman” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts a foundational event of the French Revolution.RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NYCritic’s PickJacques-Louis David: Radical DraftsmanThrough May 15 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.“Radical Draftsman,” a momentous and deadly serious exhibition, assembles more than 80 works on paper by this prime mover of French Neo-Classicism, from his youthful Roman studies to his uncompromising Jacobin years, into jail and then Napoleon’s cabinet, and through to his final exile in Brussels. It’s a scholarly feat, with loans from two dozen institutions, and never-before-seen discoveries from private collections. It will enthrall specialists who want to map how David built his robust canvases out of preparatory sketches and drapery studies. But for the public, this show has a more direct importance. This show forces us — and right on time — to think hard about the real power of pictures (and picture makers), and the price of political and cultural certainty. What is beautiful, and what is virtuous? And when virtue embraces terror, what is beauty really for? Read the review.Critic’s PickJonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always RunningThrough June 5 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.A Lithuanian refugee who landed in New York City in 1949, Jonas Mekas became a founder of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Film Culture magazine and Anthology Film Archives. He also made scores of collagelike “diary” films. “The Camera Was Always Running” is Mekas’s first U.S. museum survey, and its curator, Kelly Taxter, approached the daunting task by mounting a high-speed retrospective projected on a dozen free-standing screens.Most of the films in the exhibition are broken up into simultaneously projected pieces, so that the full program of 11 takes just three hours. Many are diary films — abstract kaleidoscopic records of Mekas, his brother Adolfas, also a filmmaker, and the SoHo bohemians and Lithuanian transplants of their circle. Since the point of all this, even more than documenting the variety of Mekas’s life in particular, is to capture the magical incongruity of life in general, Taxter’s inspired staging may even make the works more effective. Read the review.Painted fabric hangings behind the sculpture “The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro,” 1976. This entire installation originated as part of a performance piece.Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY, DACS, London and ACA Galleries; Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesCritic’s PickFaith Ringgold: American PeopleThrough June 5 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org.Ringgold’s first local retrospective in almost 40 years features the Harlem-born artist’s figures, craft techniques and storytelling in inventive combinations. And it makes clear that what consigned Ringgold to an outlier track half a century ago puts her front and center now. The show begins with a group of brooding, broadly stroked figure paintings from the 1960s called “American People Series.” All the pictures are about hierarchies of power; women are barely even present. Ringgold referred to this early, wary work as “super realist.”In the ’80s, an elaboration on the painted quilt form, called “story quilts,” brought Ringgold attention both inside and outside the art world. It is the vehicle for Ringgold’s most formally complex and buoyant painting project, “The French Connection.” Overall, it feels, in tone, like a far cry from the “American People” pictures, but there’s politics at work in the French paintings, too. Read the review. More

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      New York’s Movie Theaters, From Art-House to Dine-In

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      New York is the nation’s moviegoing capital, especially for cinephiles who treasure archival prints, experimental cinema and concession stands that go far beyond the standard offerings. Below is a guide to the city’s art houses.Alamo DrafthouseFinancial District, 28 Liberty Street, Suite SC301, Manhattan. Downtown Brooklyn, 445 Albee Square West, Brooklyn. drafthouse.com.This dine-in chain, based in Austin, Texas, has a hip aesthetic and is noted for its brews, queso and screenings of cult classics, in addition to regular showings of new releases. A revived version of Kim’s Video has set up shop within the Manhattan location. A Staten Island theater is scheduled to open this summer.Angelika Film CenterAngelika Film Center, 18 West Houston Street, Manhattan. Cinema 123 by Angelika, 1001 Third Avenue, Manhattan. Village East by Angelika, 181-189 Second Avenue, Manhattan. angelikafilmcenter.com.The original Angelika Film Center is the downtown six-screen theater where you can catch art-house releases, like “Petite Maman” or “Anaïs in Love,” while the subway rattles underneath. The brand name has also been appended to the Village East, whose main auditorium is a gorgeous old Yiddish stage theater. In addition to showing new releases, it hosts “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and periodic revival screenings, and like its uptown sibling, the Cinema 123, it is equipped to show 70-millimeter film.Anthology Film Archives32 Second Avenue, Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org.New York’s polestar of avant-garde film (and the preservation of it) for more than 50 years, Anthology was started by some of experimental cinema’s most important promoters (Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney) and practitioners (Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka). In addition to retrospectives, the theater hosts a rotating series, Essential Cinema, that is free with membership; programming includes seminal narrative works by Alexander Dovzhenko and F.W. Murnau and medium-expanding nonnarrative films from Ken Jacobs and Michael Snow.Brooklyn Academy of Music30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn; bam.org.At any given time in the main BAM building in Fort Greene, three out of four screens show new releases, while one holds retrospectives, such as ones on films shot in New York City in the 1990s or others that place David Lynch’s work alongside movies he influenced. Occasional screenings take place at the BAM Harvey Theater a few blocks away.Film at Lincoln CenterElinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street, and Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Manhattan; filmlinc.org.Lincoln Center’s film arm, the hosting organization of the New York Film Festival, runs a year-round theater with one of the largest screens in town: the Walter Reade. There you can catch adventurous revivals, such as programs on the Hungarian director Marta Meszaros or the Japanese actress-director Kinuyo Tanaka, and contemporary series, like the annual Rendez-Vous With French Cinema. Across the street is the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, which houses two screens and a food-and-wine bar, Indie.Film Forum: Come for the popcorn; stay for the cinematic edification.Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesFilm Forum209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org.A New York institution for more than 50 years — it has been at its present location since 1990 and added a fourth screen in 2018 — Film Forum hosts some of the most extensive retrospectives in town, often showing dozens of films from a director or from stars like Toshiro Mifune and Sidney Poitier. Regular attendance constitutes a cinematic education in itself, and the popcorn, to which moviegoers apply sea salt themselves, is a delicacy.French Institute/Alliance FrançaiseFlorence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, Manhattan; fiaf.org.This classy venue with excellent sightlines hosts screenings on Tuesdays. The programming consists of new and vintage films from France, with English subtitles, bien sûr. Series typically have a theme — it might be Wes Anderson selecting favorites by Ophüls and Truffaut or a program of recent French comedies.IFC Center323 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan; ifccenter.com.This Greenwich Village five-screen theater boasts four first-rate auditoriums (and one cubbyhole) and typically shows many more than five movies in a given week, usually with a short beforehand. Shows can start as early as 10 or 11 a.m. and, on the weekends, as late as midnight. The concession stand sells T-shirts that substitute directors’ names for those of heavy metal bands.Japan Society333 East 47th Street, Manhattan; japansociety.org.This theater’s annual Japan Cuts series is probably the largest single showcase of recent Japanese cinema on the New York cinephile’s calendar. For the rest of the year, new movies share screen space with classics, often shown on 35 millimeter.Light Industry361 Stagg Street, Brooklyn; lightindustry.org.This microcinema, which specializes in experimental film and typically holds screenings on Tuesday nights, hosted its final program at its longtime Greenpoint location in April. It will reopen by June on Stagg Street. Past screenings have varied widely; they’ve included early work by William Castle, a four-hour Mexican serial from 1919, Hollis Frampton and Owen Land films on 16-millimeter and a marathon of “Police Squad!” episodes.Maysles Cinema343 Lenox Avenue, Manhattan; maysles.org.This small (about 60 seats) Harlem venue specializes in documentaries — it was founded by the director Albert Maysles, of “Grey Gardens” fame. The programming often places an emphasis on social issues and local artistry.Metrograph7 Ludlow Street, Manhattan; metrograph.com.An ever-changing (and expensive!) selection of international candies, a nook of a bookstore and a high-class restaurant, the Commissary, are among the features of this Lower East Side two-screen venue, which opened in 2016. (Many don’t notice, but it sits across the street from the neglected Loew’s Canal Theater.) The retrospectives, such as a recurring series of the programmers’ favorites, organized alphabetically, have a correspondingly artisanal feel.Museum of Modern Art11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; moma.org.MoMA has been showing movies since the 1930s, when Iris Barry, the museum’s first film curator, helped advance the idea that films should be collected as art. Today the institution’s two main theaters screen films from its own collection and archives around the world (the annual series To Save and Project highlights recent preservation work). Admission to most screenings is free with membership.Museum of the Moving Image36-01 35th Avenue, Queens; movingimage.us.The high ceilings and blue wall padding give a faintly futuristic feel to the 267-seat Redstone Theater, the main auditorium in this museum in Astoria. That works well when a favorite like “2001: A Space Odyssey” is playing on 70 millimeter. More specialized fare sometimes is shown in the Bartos Screening Room down the hall.Nitehawk CinemaProspect Park, 188 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn. Williamsburg, 136 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn. nitehawkcinema.com.These stylish dine-in theaters have several screens that show new releases and perennial favorites (“Carrie,” “Face/Off”) from brunch time to midnight-snack time. Both venues have bars.The Paris Theater, once a destination for French film, is now leased by Netflix.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesParis Theater4 West 58th Street, Manhattan; paristheaternyc.com.Once a go-to destination for French cinema and films with a literary pedigree, the Paris briefly closed in 2019, but then was leased by Netflix, which uses it for theatrical runs of its streaming titles (like Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog”) and older movies intended to complement them. It’s one of the few remaining New York theaters with a balcony.Quad Cinema34 West 13th Street, Manhattan; quadcinema.com.When this Greenwich Village theater opened in 1972, having four screens was unusual. (“A new way to go to the movies,” boasted a New York Times ad on the first day.) It reopened in 2017 after a renovation that gave it bigger, comfier seats for viewing new art-house releases, like “A Hero” or “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” Plus, there’s an adjoining bar.Roxy Cinema New York2 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan; roxycinematribeca.com.Located in the basement of the Roxy Hotel, this plush red screening room offers a mix of revivals (often on 35-millimeter film) and second-run programming — recent releases that have been in theaters awhile.Spectacle124 South Third Street, Brooklyn; spectacletheater.com.A grungy Williamsburg microcinema started in 2010, Spectacle has a calendar as eclectic as it is inscrutable. There’s horror and martial-arts fare that tends toward the obscure, along with a lot of international titles that never turn up in other New York venues.United Palace4140 Broadway, Manhattan; unitedpalace.org.One of the original Loew’s Wonder Theaters — movie palaces built in the late 1920s, with one in each borough except Staten Island (Jersey City got it instead) — this architectural marvel in Washington Heights is an attraction in itself. It’s now run by an organization that promotes interfaith artistic events, but the theater also hosts concerts and, generally once a month, movie screenings. Lin-Manuel Miranda, a neighborhood resident, chipped in for a new screen and projector. More

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      ‘Happening’ Review: An Abortion Story, an Existential Drama

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      In this powerful French movie set in the early 1960s, a young woman struggles to obtain an abortion when the procedure was criminalized.Her body, her choice, her life. That’s the unambiguous refrain that runs through “Happening,” a powerful French drama about a woman seeking an abortion. Set in the early 1960s, when the procedure was criminalized in France, it arrives in the United States at a fraught moment, with the Supreme Court seemingly poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. When I first saw the movie, it felt like a warning shot from a still-distant land. Now it feels urgently of the moment.The world seems lush with possibilities for Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei, restrained and deeply empathetic), a 23-year-old student attending school in the southwest. There, she lives in a women’s dorm, hangs out with friends and sometimes goes with them to a bar, where she drinks and flirts and bobs to the rock ’n’ roll. Sometimes, she visits her reserved but loving parents (Sandrine Bonnaire plays her mother), who own a bistro, a welcoming space that she inhabits freely, whether she’s chatting with customers or studying in the back. But Anne’s horizons extend beyond her family’s. She wants to continue her studies. She wants to write.The director Audrey Diwan quickly makes you want the same for Anne by inviting you into a life that has just begun to bloom. With visual intimacy, calm rhythms and a sensitive touch, Diwan traces its textures and rituals, drops in on lectures and catches the intellectual hum. By day, Anne and her friends casually discuss Camus and Sartre. Later, though, when their talk turns to sex, these young, capable women stammer and even panic, and the palpable heat that they’ve stirred up — simply by being young and alive — condenses into an oppressive fog. It might help if they were reading Beauvoir, but she’s not on the curriculum.Based on the short, impressionistic memoir by the same title from the celebrated French writer Anne Ernaux, “Happening” recounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed — and world ominously narrowed — in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy. In her book (published in 2000), Ernaux shifts between the past and the present, often commenting on what she did and felt decades earlier. Her approach underscores the memoir’s tension between its two time periods and its distinctly drawn subjects, but also puts the past at an emotional remove: The young Annie struggles under the coolly intellectual, contemplative gaze of her older self.Diwan’s sympathies are evident from the start (the camera hovers near Anne like a caring, at times anxious friend), and so are her smart choices. She’s ditched the older Ernaux’s comments to focus exclusively on the younger woman’s desperate efforts to secure an abortion, which intensifies the drama and shakes off its dust. The movie has the usual early 1960s trappings that you expect in period stories, with its knee-brushing skirts and twangy guitars. Yet because Diwan doesn’t embalm the story in history (or with fetishistic production and costume designs), she has also closed the distance between the past and the present.The story unfolds piecemeal. Anne is newly pregnant shortly after the film opens, and is soon checking her panties for signs of her period. “Still nothing,” she writes in her calendar, adding an exclamation mark. The days slip by. She talks to an acquaintance who works at a factory (a flash of an alternate reality), practices conjugating Latin verbs (“to act”) and visits a solicitous doctor (Fabrizio Rongione in a brief, vivid turn). When he asks if she’s had sex, Anne lies — “no” — right before he says that she’s pregnant. “Do something,” she demands. “The law is unsparing,” he replies.As five weeks turn into seven and Anne’s belly swells, “Happening” becomes an existential thriller. Her situation becomes worrying, then excruciating. There’s nowhere for Anne to go for help and no one to turn to, or so it seems to her, creating a sense of mounting isolation that Diwan’s intimate filmmaking only underscores. Anne’s friends are terrified of getting pregnant (“it’d be the end of the world”); she can’t talk to her parents; her doctors are afraid or hostile. The confidence in the state — in the soundness of its institutions and systems — that’s an article of faith in many contemporary French movies is notably, harrowingly, absent.One surprise of “Happening” is that the world it portrays, with its moralistic whispers and prohibitions, bears no relationship to the popular image of French sexuality, specifically that of the nubile Frenchwoman, which once set tongues and fingers wagging. In 1957, the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther (in an article headlined “Probing Foreign Films”) huffed that “the startlingly shaped” Brigitte Bardot had “become France’s undisputed champion in the international sexpot race.” Two years later in a very different consideration of Bardot, Beauvoir noted that the star was more popular in the United States than at home: “In France, there is still a great deal of emphasis, officially, on women’s dependence upon men.”Diwan engages history, the world and the brutal cost of paternalism, at times obliquely. There are no explanatory newspaper or radio bulletins to parse, no righteous speeches; there’s scarcely any exposition at all. Instead, there is Anne up against a world of innumerable barriers, a world with pleasure and hope, yes, but also sexual shaming, furtive looks, hushed confidences and desperate actions. In the library, Anne peers at a medical-book illustration of a gestating woman; later, she takes knitting needles from her mother. Throughout, Diwan’s gaze remains clear, direct, fearless. She shows you a part of life that the movies rarely do.By which I mean: She shows you a woman who desires, desires to learn, have sex, bear children on her terms, be sovereign — a woman who, in choosing to live her life, risks becoming a criminal and dares to be free.HappeningRated R for sexuality, self-harm and graphic imagery. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Reflection’ Review: Through a Looking Glass of Horrors

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      The film, set against the backdrop of fighting in the Donbas region in 2014, would be bracing and haunting even if it weren’t so timely.“Reflection” is interested in the impact of casual violence on everyday life, right from its opening tableau: a lengthy shot in which the protagonist, a surgeon, Serhiy (Roman Lutskyi), chats with Andriy (Andrii Rymaruk), the man now living with Serhiy’s ex-wife (Nadiya Levchenko) and helping raise their daughter. The daughter (Nika Myslytska) prepares for a paintball battle in the background. Soon the sounds of that barrage drown out the men’s friendly conversation about artillery and medical supplies.The situation seems all the more charged if you know that “Reflection,” written, directed, photographed and edited by Valentyn Vasyanovych, is a Ukrainian film. It would be a bracing, haunting work even if it weren’t so timely. The movie premiered last year, before Russia attacked Ukraine in February, and it begins in November 2014, against the backdrop of fighting by Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region. (It is a follow-up of sorts to Vasyanovych’s “Atlantis,” set in 2025 in the ostensible aftermath of that conflict. That film now plays like a dispatch from an alternate timeline — grim, but not as grim as 2025 will look after a much wider war.)“Reflection” follows Serhiy on a mission to the front, where his van gets lost and he is captured. The movie principally unfolds in fixed long shots, but when the camera moves, it is startling: What appears to be a single take follows Serhiy as he is interrogated, tortured, led to a basement, hosed down and, as he shivers, commanded to inspect a corpse for signs of life. This, and cremation, will be his job until the second half, when the horrors he has witnessed go provocatively, largely unmentioned. As the cryptic final moments suggest, “Reflection” is a film about how war requires people to comprehend the unspoken and unseen.ReflectionNot rated. In Ukrainian and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘In Front of Your Face’ Review: Clumsy Interactions, Pensive Revelations

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      This film is a minor addition to the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s continuing investigation of human embarrassment.It often seems as though the most devoted fans of the prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo regard him as incapable of making an inessential work. Because his films play with theme and variation, the logic goes, they are best viewed in tandem, as installments in a continually refined investigation of the clumsy, painful, droll ways that people, often booze-slicked, interact. A current series of Hong’s features at Film at Lincoln Center presents most of the titles on double bills.But if Hong is consistent in his material and his style, down to his signature zooms, his features are uneven in quality. For every “Hotel by the River” (2019), he makes a quickie that seems to have leaped straight from inspiration to screen. With its limited settings and characters, noodled synthesizer score (composed by Hong himself) and long takes that court cringe comedy but also look like they were simply practical, “In Front of Your Face,” one of two Hong movies from last year’s New York Film Festival, falls into the minor camp.Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung) is a former actress visiting South Korea from her home in the United States. Her sister, Jeongok (Cho Yunhee), remarks that there’s a lot they don’t know about each other anymore. Sangok has a meeting with Jaewon (Kwon Haehyo), a Hong-like filmmaker — she compares his movies to short stories — who wants to cast her.A stain on an outfit from an impulsive meal, a changed meeting spot and the absence of food at the new location pose obstacles before Sangok confides in Jaewon, in a revelation that contains the film’s point. The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.In Front of Your FaceNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Wayne Wang Still Isn’t Satisfied

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      On the 40th anniversary of his breakthrough drama, “Chan Is Missing,” the auteur says a new generation of Asian American filmmakers must make more challenging work.Sitting in a booth in a dive bar in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the same one where he shot scenes for his 1985 gem, “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart,” Wayne Wang was still frustrated. We had spoken five years earlier, when he expressed dismay at how little had changed in Hollywood and the indie scene since the 1982 release of “Chan Is Missing,” his seminal neo-noir that was the first Asian American film in modern cinema to gain widespread distribution.Now, things are a little different — for Wang’s own legacy, for a new generation of Asian American filmmakers, for the state of movies. And yet, the elder auteur, whose journey since that breakthrough took him across art-house avenues into Hollywood studios and back out, is still unsatisfied. When it comes to Asian American directors, “none of the filmmakers have really dug in to say these are our own stories and these stories are on one level universal, another level, very specific to our culture,” he said.On the 40th anniversary of “Chan Is Missing,” Wang, sharply dressed and sprightly at 73, is experiencing a belated moment of wider recognition. He’s celebrating two retrospectives, in Berkeley and Los Angeles, a restored director’s cut of his audaciously experimental “Life Is Cheap … But Toilet Paper Is Expensive” (1989), and the Criterion Collection releases of “Chan” and “Dim Sum.”One would be hard-pressed to find any filmmaker who not only daringly chronicled Chinese life in a time when it was unthinkable in American cinema, but also parlayed all that into one of the more eclectic careers in Hollywood, that includes two entries (“Chan” and “The Joy Luck Club”) on the National Film Registry. There are the Hong Kong films (“Chinese Box”) and the New York films (“Smoke”); the near career-ending erotic picture (“The Center of the World”); the pure Hollywood period (“Maid in Manhattan”); and the return to his culturally specific indie roots (“Coming Home Again”).“It comes from the fact that I was born and brought up a mess,” Wang said, explaining the zigzagging. After immigrating to the Bay Area from Hong Kong in 1967 at 18, he was suddenly enmeshed in an America of Quaker families, counterculture figures, the Black Panthers, and urgently political-minded folks in San Francisco’s Chinatown.Wang, who is working on an adaptation of a short story by Yiyun Li and a small-screen series about a Chinese American family, spoke about his career, going to Francis Ford Coppola for advice, and working with Jennifer Lopez. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Victor Wong in “Life Is Cheap … But Toilet Paper is Expensive.” a 1989 Wang film that has been restored. Forever Profits ProductionsPeter Wang in “Chan Is Missing,” which largely used its actors’ feelings about Chinese American identity.Nancy Wong/Wayne Wang ProductionsForty years later, “Chan Is Missing” still feels timeless in how it reckons with Chinese American identity politics. Did you intend to make a film that put a stamp on Chinese American identity?I didn’t think like that. I just wanted to make an interesting, complex film. More what the Chinese and the Chinese American community is, which includes the new immigrants. It was more that than identity. Because mainstream America had no idea who we were.And yet the film is adamant about not trying to offer a neat depiction of who or what the community is. It feels unencumbered by the idea of making a political statement.Because everybody around me who was Asian or Chinese or Japanese wanted to make a film about how badly we were treated. There was always a message. That gave me a clear picture of where I didn’t want to go. I wanted to do something a little more complicated, a little more questioning rather than saying, “We were really badly treated on Angel Island” [the immigration station in California].I only had a script for the structure of the film. Most of the time, what people are saying came from themselves. I would maybe ask them, What do you think Americans really think of the Chinese? [The lead actor] Mark Hayashi always said, “Oh God, this identity [expletive] is old news, man.” I said, “Then put it in the movie!”You then made a string of films about the Chinese diaspora that eventually led to “The Joy Luck Club.” Did you want to bring your sensibilities to the mainstream?It was a pretty conscious step.It was a studio film with an all-Asian cast in 1993. Did it feel like a breakthrough at the time?Absolutely. People were calling from Hollywood, and I knew I had to grab that energy pretty quickly. And that energy wasn’t so much “Chinese American films are really going to do well for us.” But that was also when I said, between “Chan,” “Dim Sum,” “Eat a Bowl of Tea,” “Joy Luck Club,” I’ve got to do something else. Otherwise I’m going to get locked into this one box. I’d been working on a script with Paul Auster, “Smoke.” Miramax said, “What do you want to do next? We’ll just give you the money.”It’s striking that with your success, you did a small movie. You didn’t seem to be trying to climb the ladder.I wasn’t trying to climb the ladder. I just saw Francis Ford Coppola in [an interview], talk about how the thing that drove him was basically fear and not knowing what he was doing. I was kind of functioning in that same way. I wanted to get into a film that I don’t completely understand.You and Coppola were both San Francisco-based filmmakers. Were you friends?My office was in his building, and we would run into each other and have little talks. When I shot “Smoke,” I was working with Harvey Keitel and Bill Hurt. I went to him [Coppola] and asked, how do you work with actors? I hadn’t worked with big Hollywood stars, and I was freaked out by it. Francis basically said, if you find the right person, you give them something to do, and they’ll be fine.I really respect [Hurt], but he’s a nut case in some ways. Throughout the first half of the shoot, we got to be pretty good friends. Then we had three days off, and he came back and had a football helmet on. I went to put my hands on his shoulders, and he said, “What are you doing? Are you trying to push me down the stairs?” So he turned like that. And the football helmet, he said, “I need to protect myself today, you’re going to hit me.” [Laughs] But he [was] one of the greatest actors, so subtle and so sensitive to everything.What led you to eventually do a full-on studio film like “Maid in Manhattan”?“Center of the World” got such bad reviews and everybody hated what I did that I couldn’t get a meeting in Hollywood. One bad film, especially an edgy sex film, you get written off. And the producers of “Maid in Manhattan” came calling. It was probably the most difficult thing I ever did. First day, the executives said, [Ralph Fiennes is] losing his hair in the front — it’s not very good. What can we do? They were more concerned about Ralph Fiennes’s hair.Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes in “Maid in Manhattan,” which Wang shot at the height of the paparazzi frenzy over the actress’s initial relationship with Ben Affleck. Barry Wetcher/Columbia PicturesHow was it working with Jennifer Lopez?It was difficult. She went out on dates every night with Ben Affleck. And in New York [where filming took place], there’s a law where the paparazzi could be in your face shooting stills. The only time they could not do it is when we’re doing a real take. So during rehearsals, they were literally right here, and there were a lot of them.During this period, were you at peace with doing purely studio films?There’s always that question. I knew in the back of my head, I could always leave and go back to what I did before. It just got a little difficult to get off that Ferris wheel.As you’ve returned to indie films, the landscape for marginalized voices like yours has changed.I don’t disagree, but not to the degree that I feel they should be. There’s a lot more Asian American films. I mean, anything from Ali Wong to “The Farewell” [from Lulu Wang].Did you like “The Farewell?”I like it better than the other films, maybe only because it’s more similar to mine. I’m prejudiced that way. It’s about family. But I don’t see anybody trying to do something in a more brave way. They’re still trying to please executives and then to please an audience more, rather than going out there with whatever budget they have to do something that’s challenging.The director and actor Justin Chon was in your most recent film, “Coming Home Again.” What do you think of his films?I think “Gook” was the most challenging film out there. Justin has got it in his heart to do it. And I feel the pain every time I talk to him working on something. Because the producers want a certain thing, and it’s really hard for him.But do you empathize with Asian American filmmakers trying to appease studios or audiences to break through?I talked to [the “Fast and Furious” franchise director] Justin Lin about this. He said, every year the studios make maximum 15 films [each] or something, and if one is made by an Asian American, that is progress. I tend to agree. But at the same time, was there another film completely outside the system that’s challenging the system or doing something really different? No.Not just Asian Americans, it’s across the board. Formally interesting and challenging films are just not being made. All the films are dumbed down to what I would call a Disney level. [Laughs] That’s all dangerous in the long run.The way “Chan Is Missing” happened — made for less than $25,000 on weekends by a crew with day jobs — could a film like that be made now and find an audience?If you get a grant or an independent investor, I think it could still happen again. When you are dealing with interesting characters and a certain kind of humanity, and it’s written well, you can get there. I have a strong belief in that. I have to. Otherwise I would probably just cut meat or something and be a butcher. [Laughs] More

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      ‘Shepherd’ Review: Solitary Assignment

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      An island of ghosts and an ocean of guilt plague a grief-stricken widower in this moody horror movie.With “Shepherd,” the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss. Callum Donaldson’s marvelously icy soundscape might be doing much of the heavy lifting, but it’s Owen’s slow and steady directing style — favoring patient reveals over swift scares — that keeps this ominous horror tale firmly on track.The setup is simplicity itself. Eric (Tom Hughes, perfectly pallid and pained), a brooding widower haunted by vivid nightmares after his wife’s death, takes a job as a shepherd on a desolate Scottish island. When not huddling in a creaking, tumbledown cottage with unreliable phone service, Eric and his collie, Baxter, tend to a scattered herd of horned sheep. In a silence broken only by the howling wind and the clanging bell of a nearby lighthouse, Eric’s macabre hallucinations intensify. When, one morning, his estranged mother (Greta Scacchi) appears in his kitchen, ranting against the “ungodly woman” who was his wife, Eric fears he may be losing his mind.The creepy ferry operator with the milky eye (Kate Dickie) seems to know a thing or two about Eric’s past, but — like the larger narrative — she refuses to share. This withholding may irritate some viewers, but Owen, drawing from several Welsh ghost stories (including the inspiration for Robert Eggers’s 2019 fantasy, “The Lighthouse”) remains unapologetically enigmatic. Coaxing us to a surprisingly satisfying conclusion on the strength of Hughes’ potent central performance and the moldy richness of Richard Stoddard’s cinematography, the director displays an assuredness with Gothic tone that steadily strums our nerves.“Run, Mr. Black,” a chapter heading advises near the end of the movie. I was way ahead of it.ShepherdRated R for mental distress and mutilated animals. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Human Factors’ Review: Paranoia is the Family Business

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      This thriller, about the invasion of a fractured home, is elevated by a talented cast but hampered by a stubbornly intellectual tone.“Human Factors,” from the writer-director Ronny Trocker, is a chilly, airless home-invasion drama in which the threat is out of sight, like termites chewing at floorboards. The members of a disengaged German family — two parents, Jan (Mark Waschke) and Nina (Sabine Timoteo), their teenage daughter, Emma (Jule Hermann), and young son, Max (Wanja Valentin Kube) — are settling into their vacation house when strangers burst from an upstairs bedroom and escape out of the front door. Nothing is stolen and nobody is seriously hurt. But the film repeatedly relives the incident through each character’s point of view, piecing together the mystery and its aftershocks and exposing calamitous emotional fractures within the family.Paranoia is the point. Paranoia is also the family business. Jan and Nina own a marketing company whose new client is a politician who wants to campaign on provocation and fear. Wherever Trocker’s camera goes, it finds characters who seem to be afraid of all the wrong things. The lens skulks like a voyeur and does what it can to frazzle us, too. (Klemens Hufnagl is the director of photography.) A drunken brawl might be an assault or a prank. A locked door looks safe, but adds to the sorrow. At one point, Jan and Nina’s office windows are pelted by mysterious goo. Why? And by whom? Trocker refuses to answer, sustaining the unease until it becomes ennui.The tone is too rigidly intellectual for the movie to succeed as a tense thriller. But the actors are up to the challenge of not so much sharing scenes as coexisting within them, particularly Timoteo as the embittered wife who roils like a teakettle that has been welded shut. The most cleareyed observer, however, turns out to be a pet rat — evidence that this family, a microcosm of modern anxieties, is more imperiled by its silent dysfunction than by outside enemies.Human FactorsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More