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      Mommy Is Going Away for Awhile

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      The antiheroine of the moment, in movies like “The Lost Daughter” and novels like “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” commits the mother’s ultimate sin: abandoning her children.There are so many ways to do motherhood wrong, or so a mother is told. She can be overbearing or remote. She can smother or neglect. She can mother in such a specifically bad way that she is assigned a bad-mom archetype: stage mother, refrigerator mother, “cool mom.” She can hover like a helicopter mom or bully like a bulldozer mom. But the thing she cannot do — the thing that is so taboo it rivals actually murdering her offspring — is leave.The mother who abandons her children haunts our family narratives. She is made into a lurid tabloid figure, an exotic exception to the common deadbeat father. Or she is sketched into the background of a plot, her absence lending a protagonist a propulsive origin story. This figure arouses our ridicule (consider Meryl Streep’s daffy American president in “Don’t Look Up,” who forgets to save her son as she flees the apocalypse) or our pity (see “Parallel Mothers,” where an actress has ditched her daughter for lousy television parts). But lately the vanishing mother has provoked a fresh response: respect.In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film “The Lost Daughter,” she is Leda (played, across two decades, by Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman), a promising translator who deserts her young daughters for several years to pursue her career (and a dalliance with an Auden scholar). In HBO’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” a gender-scrambled remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 mini-series, she is Mira (Jessica Chastain), a Boston tech executive who jets to Tel Aviv for an affair disguised as a work project. And in Claire Vaye Watkins’s autofictional novel “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” she is also Claire Vaye Watkins, a novelist who leaves her infant to smoke a ton of weed, sleep with a guy who lives in a van and confront her own troubled upbringing.In each case, her children are not abandoned outright; they are left in the care of fathers and other relatives. When a man leaves in this way, he is unexceptional. When a woman does it, she becomes a monster, or perhaps an antiheroine riding out a dark maternal fantasy. Feminism has supplied women with options, but a choice also represents a foreclosure, and women, because they are people, do not always know what they want. As these protagonists thrash against their own decisions, they also bump up against the limits of that freedom, revealing how women’s choices are rarely socially supported but always thoroughly judged.A mother losing her children is a nightmare. The title of “The Lost Daughter” refers in part to such an incident, when a child disappears at the beach. But a mother leaving her children — that’s a daydream, an imagined but repressed alternate life. In the “Sex and the City” reboot “And Just Like That…,” Miranda — now the mother to a teenager — counsels a professor who is considering having children. “There are so many nights when I would love to be a judge and go home to an empty house,” she says. And on Instagram, the airbrushed mirage of mothering is being challenged by displays of raw desperation. The Not Safe for Mom Group, which surfaces confessions of anonymous mothers, pulses with idle threats of role refusal, like: “I want to be alone!!! I don’t want to make your lunch!!”Being alone: that is the mother’s reasonable and functionally impossible dream. Especially recently, when avenues of escape have been sealed off: schools closed, day care centers suspended, offices shuttered, jobs lost or abandoned in crisis. Now the house is never empty, and also you can never leave. During a pandemic, a plucky middle-class gal can still “have it all,” as long as she can manage job and children simultaneously, from the floor of a lawless living room.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.Cards on the table: I am struggling to draft this essay on my phone as my pantsless toddler — banished from day care for 10 days because someone got Covid — wages a tireless campaign to commandeer my device, hold it to his ear and say hewwo. I feel charmed, annoyed and implicated, as I wonder whether his neediness is attributable to some parental defect, perhaps related to my own constant phone use.Do I want to abandon my child? No, but I am newly attuned to the psychological head space of a woman who does. The Auden scholar of “The Lost Daughter” (played, in an inspired bit of casting, by Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard), entices Leda by quoting Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Attention is a loaded word: It can mean caring for another person, but also a powerful mental focus, and a parent can seldom execute both definitions at once.Leda wants to attend to her translation work, but she also wants someone to pay attention to her. To be blunt, she wants to work and to have sex. Often in these stories, the two are bound together in a hyper-individualistic fusion of romantic careerism. In “Scenes from a Marriage,” Mira plans to tell her daughter, “I have to go away for work, which is true” — only because she has arranged a professional obligation to facilitate her affair with an Israeli start-up bro. Her gateway drug to abandonment is, as is often the case, a business trip. Mira first strays at a company boat party; Leda tastes freedom at a translation conference; Claire embarks on a reading tour from which she never returns.The work trip is the Rumspringa of motherhood. Like the mama bird in “Are You My Mother?,” a woman is allowed to leave the nest to retrieve a worm, though someone, somewhere may be noting her absence with schoolmarmish disapproval. In Caitlin Flanagan’s 2012 indictment of Joan Didion, recirculated after Didion’s death, Flanagan dings Didion for taking a film job across the country, leaving her 3-year-old daughter over Christmas.Still, there is something absurd about the fashioning of work as the ultimate escape. It is only remotely plausible if our desperate mother enjoys a high-status creative position (translator, novelist, thought leader.) When other mothers of fiction leave, their fantasies are quickly revealed as delusions. In Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel “Patsy,” a Jamaican secretary abandons her daughter to pursue an American dream in New York, only to become a nanny caring for someone else’s children. And in Jessamine Chan’s dystopian novel “The School for Good Mothers,” Frida is sleep deprived and drowning in work when she leaves her toddler at home alone for two hours. Though Frida feels “a sudden pleasure” when she shuts the door behind her, her fantasy life is short and bleak: She escapes as far as her office, where she sends emails. For that, she is conscripted into a re-education camp for bad moms.Each of our absent mothers has her reasons. Leda’s academic husband has prioritized his career over hers, and this makes her decisions legible, even sympathetic. But in “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” Watkins lends her doppelgänger no exculpatory circumstances. Claire has a doula, day care, Obamacare breast pump, tenure-track job, several therapists and the world’s most understanding husband. When she starts sleeping in a hammock on campus, her husband says: “I think it’s cool you’re following your … heart, or … whatever … is happening … out there.” Nothing obvious impedes her from capable mothering, but ​​like Bartleby, the Child-bearer, she would simply prefer not to.In heaping privileges upon Claire, Watkins suggests that there are burdens of motherhood that cannot be solved with money, lifted by a co-parent or cured by a mental health professional. The trouble is motherhood itself, and its ideal of total selfless devotion. Motherhood had turned Claire into a “blank,” a figure who “didn’t seem to think much” and “had trouble completing her sentences.” As these women discover, their menu of life choices is not so expansive after all. They long to be offered a different position: dad. Claire wants to “behave like a man, a slightly bad one.” As Mira abruptly exits, she assures her husband, “Men do it all the time.”These women may leave, but they don’t quite get away with it. Mira eventually loses both job and boyfriend and begs for her old life back. Leda’s abandonment becomes a dark secret in a thriller that builds to a violent end. Only Claire is curiously impervious to consequence. She follows her selfish impulses all the way to the desert, where she spends her days crying and masturbating alone in a tent. Then she calls her husband, who flies out to her, happy tot in tow; eventually Claire claims a life where she can “read and write and nap and teach and soak and smoke” and see her daughter on breaks. By exacting no cosmic punishment on Claire, Watkins refuses to facilitate the reader’s judgment. But she also makes it harder to care.When I was pregnant, I had a fantasy, too. In it I was single, childless, still very young somehow and living out an alternate life in a van in Wyoming. Reading “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness” broke the spell. As Claire ripped bongs and circled new sexual partners, she struck me not as a monster or a hero but something perhaps worse — boring. Even as these stories work to uncover motherhood’s complex emotional truths, they indulge their own little fiction: that a mother only becomes interesting when she stops being one. More

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      Jasmila Zbanic Is Vilified in Serbia and ‘Disobedient’ at Home

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      Jasmila Zbanic, named Europe’s best director for “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, insists on blaming individuals, not ethnic groups, for atrocities done as Yugoslavia imploded, a stance that can anger all sides.SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — A celebrated Bosnian film director always knew her latest movie, the harrowing drama of a mother trying unsuccessfully to save her husband and two sons from the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, would be panned by Serb nationalists.But the filmmaker, Jasmila Zbanic, was still taken aback when Serbian media invited a convicted war criminal to opine on the movie, “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, for which she recently won Europe’s best director award.The chosen critic? Veselin Sljivancanin, a former Yugoslav army officer sentenced to prison by a tribunal in The Hague for aiding and abetting the murder of prisoners in Croatia in the Vukovar massacre.While asking such a notorious figure to comment on the movie was a surprise, his reaction to it wasn’t: He denounced it as lies that “incite ethnic hatred” and smear all Serbs.“He, a war criminal, wants all Serbs, most of whom had nothing to do with his crimes, to feel attacked for his crimes,” Ms. Zbanic said in a recent interview at her production company atop a hill overlooking Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “He is putting his guilt on all Serbs.”Ms. Zbanic speaking after the first public showing of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” in 2020 in Srebrenica, where some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in 1995.Kemal Softic/Associated PressMs. Zbanic’s unwavering belief that the guilt for the atrocities committed as the former Yugoslavia split apart belongs to individuals, not ethnic groups, has also made her a difficult cultural icon for some in her own community of Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, to embrace.When the European Film Academy last month gave her the award of best director and selected “Quo Vadis, Aida?” as Europe’s best film of the year, a few Bosniak politicians congratulated her on their personal Facebook pages, but there were no official celebrations of the kind held whenever Bosniak athletes triumph abroad.“I did not even get any flowers,” she said.Fiercely independent and a self-declared feminist, Ms. Zbanic has for years kept her distance from Bosnia’s dominant and male-dominated political force, the Party of Democratic Action, or S.D.A., a Bosniak nationalist group. Like Serb parties on the other side of the ethnic divide, the S.D.A. now wins votes by stirring animosity toward, and fear of, other groups.“I’m very much against S.D.A., the main political party, so they know I am not theirs,” she said, noting that she had several times selected ethnic Serb actors for starring roles in her movies. “I don’t choose actors because of their nationality but because they are the best,” she said.In her most recent movie, the main role, a Bosniak translator working for the United Nations in Srebrenica, is played by Jasna Djuricic from Serbia. Ms. Djuricic, who won the best actress award from the European Film Academy, has been pilloried in Serb media as a Muslim-loving traitor.The actress Jasna Djuricic, left, with Ms. Zbanic on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” Ms. Djuricic has been called a traitor in her native Serbia.Imrana Kapetanovic/DeblokadaHaris Pasovic, a prominent Bosnian theater director and Ms. Zbanic’s professor during the war years at the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts, said his former student’s collaboration with the Serbian actress demonstrated her faith that culture transcends nationalism.“Events were meant to separate these two people forever, but they came together to create this incredible work of art,” Mr. Pasovic said.International acclaim, he added, has made Ms. Zbanic “the most successful woman in Bosnian history” and, as a result, “she terrifies Balkan politicians,” nearly all men. “She is very careful not to be used in Balkan political trading and has never wanted to be part of anybody’s bloc,” Mr. Pasovic said.Bosnia has a long, rich history of filmmaking from when it was still part of Yugoslavia, the multiethnic socialist state that fell apart in the early 1990s and spawned Europe’s bloodiest armed conflict since World War II. More than 140,000 died in the ensuing conflicts.“What I learned during the war is that food and culture are equal,” Ms. Zbanic said. “You can’t live without either.”Like so much else in Bosnia, a patchwork of different ethnic groups and religions, the film industry has been left bitterly divided by the traumas of war. Emir Kusturica, a well-known Sarajevo-born director who has embraced Serb nationalism, is now reviled by many Bosniaks as a champion of “Greater Serbia,” the cause that tore Bosnia apart in the 1990s.Ms. Zbanic, 47, said she despised Mr. Kusturica’s politics — he is close to Milorad Dodik, the belligerent nationalist leader of Bosnia’s Serb-controlled region — but still respected his talents. “We should appreciate professionals no matter what ideology they have,” she said.Seventeen years old when Bosnian Serbs began a nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo in 1992, Ms. Zbanic said her films, which include “Grbavica,” a 2006 feature about a single mother whose daughter was conceived in a wartime rape, are her “attempt to understand what happened and how what happened during the war is still influencing our everyday life.”Ms. Zbanic speaking to cast members on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?”Imrana Kapetanovic/Deblokada“Grbavica” helped pressure Bosnian politicians into changing the law to give previously neglected wartime rape victims the same official recognition and allowances as former soldiers. She counts that as one of her proudest achievements, noting that “truth is always good, even if it is painful and even if it hurts, it moves things forward.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America’ Review: Social Studies

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      In a documentary constructed around a lecture from 2018, the lawyer Jeffery Robinson presents a persuasive look at United States history.It’s unlikely that any lecture documentary since “An Inconvenient Truth” has had the galvanizing potential of “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America” — and if that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t meant that way.The film presents a talk that the lawyer Jeffery Robinson (a former deputy legal director at the A.C.L.U.) gave at Town Hall in New York on Juneteenth 2018. His subject is nothing less than the history of anti-Black racism in the United States.For Robinson’s arguments, the historical evidence is in plain sight, yet much of it, as he promises, may be new to many viewers. He shows how the text of Article V of the Constitution shielded slavery from amendments until 1808, reads from Confederate states’ secession statements and has a chorus perform the disfavored third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”The film, directed by Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler (daughters of the Chicago Seven lawyer William Kunstler), intersperses scenes of Robinson traveling the country. He visits Charleston, where fingerprints from slave labor can still be seen; Staten Island, where he meets with Eric Garner’s mother; and his native Memphis, where his parents had to devise a workaround to buy a home as a Black family.Robinson brings nuance to topics — unconscious bias, reparations, how to deal with the fact that George Washington owned slaves — that have become flash points in society, without ever losing the core of his progressive message. It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one, and so much of what’s in it is persuasive.Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in AmericaRated PG-13. Discussion and imagery of racist violence, and derogatory language. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Belle’ Review: Soaring and Singing Over the Online Rainbow

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      In this gorgeous anime, a high school student journeys into a virtual world and finds herself amid cute, kooky and menacing fellow users.Colors and hearts explode in “Belle,” and your head might too while watching this gorgeous anime. Set in the undefined future, it envisions a reality that resembles our own, with the same drab institutions and obligations, the same confusing relationships and feelings. Suzu (voiced and sung by Kaho Nakamura), a melancholic high school student, lives with her father (Koji Yakusho) and still mourns her long-dead mother. Suzu exists in a miasma of grief, one she fleetingly escapes by entering a computer simulation.Described as “the ultimate virtual community” and cleverly named U, this other-world is an entertainment but also a refuge. A dazzling phantasmagoria, it allows customers to log out of their reality by slipping into an avatar in the U space. Once inside, users — their real selves obscured by eccentric, sometimes aspirational cartoonish identities — have seemingly unfettered freedom. They can cut loose, bop around like tourists, become someone else or maybe find themselves. “You can’t start over in reality,” Suzu hears when she first fires up the program, “but you can start over in U.” The catch? Everyone is still on social media.Journeys of self-discovery dominate much of contemporary animated cinema, even if the routes and mileage vary. “It’s time to see what I can do/To test the limits and break through,” as Elsa sings in “Frozen.” Suzu’s pilgrimage is somewhat complicated — certainly visually — but she too needs to “let it go” and cut free of her past and her trauma, an agony that the story doesn’t soften. Suzu is unequivocally, openly sad. Her shoulders sag and her head bows, she blunders and shrinks from others, sighing and weeping. Even so, she also questions, searches and keeps trying to sing. She lost her voice to grief; she wants it back.Suzu is a poignant, sympathetic figure but there’s a welcome edge to her, a bit of stubborn prickliness that’s expressed through the animation, the character’s churning emotions and Nakamura’s sensitive, expansive vocal performance. The character design employs the pert nose, heart-shaped face and huge eyes that are standard in anime, but these conventions never feel static because Suzu isn’t. Delicately perched on that unstable boundary between childhood and adulthood, she slips from the comically juvenile (mouth agape) to soberly mature. She can seem younger or older than she is, but she’s never less than human.Before you meet her, though, the writer-director Mamoru Hosoda introduces U’s virtual reality, giving you a seductive eyeful. (His movies include “Mirai” and “Wolf Children.”) The first image in “Belle” is of a thin, pale horizontal line cutting across the otherwise black frame, a visual that wittily suggests the first line in a drawing. This line rapidly changes and, as it does, the contours of the U world emerge, as do its mysteries, oddities, personalities and possibilities. At first, the line seems to consist of a series of rectangular shapes that look like beads on a necklace, a design that amusingly evokes the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and then it explodes into the kaleidoscopic realm of science fiction and U.A rapturously beautiful expanse filled with whirling candy colors and charming character designs, U gives Suzu a virtual reality escape and gives you a great deal to go gaga over. That introductory straight line soon expands, growing evermore complex and giving way to intricate geometric forms. As the shapes shift and mutate, Hosoda uses old-fashioned perspective — differing sizes and planes, parallel edges and vanishing points — to create an illusion of movement through depth. That’s crucial for the user (and viewer) experience in U, where rectangles turn into what look like parts of a motherboard only to then transform into mazelike spaces that give way to soaring buildings in a crowded modern cityscape.Suzu enters this sphere through an app on her cellphone. With a few clicks, she is over the rainbow and flying through U, where she becomes Belle, a hyperbolic beauty with a plaintive singing voice and a billowing curtain of pretty pink hair. The U app’s “body-sharing technology” allows users to experience U alongside other revelers, to interact with an array of colorful, comical and vividly imagined beings, some borrowed and tweaked from myth (or thereabouts), others plucked from pop-culture climes. Some of these appear more human than others; more than a few look like collectible anime figurines with exaggerated features and body parts. It’s a raging party of the cute and the kooky, though with shivers of menace.Suzu continues to travel between reality and U as the story evolves and takes a detour into a fairy tale. Much of what ensues after this narrative turn is familiar, and while not everything that happens then works equally well it’s unfailingly touching. Hosoda throws drama, meanies and a couple of romantic rivals (predictable cuties with floppy hair) into the mix, but to his credit, the story remains focused on its heroine. Suzu is moving between two different, outwardly irreconcilable worlds — each with its own textures, shapes and colors — a divide that reflects and speaks to her internal struggles. And while she sets out to escape, what she finally needs is to find a sense of wholeness even when everything seems broken.BelleRated PG for mild virtual violence. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘Scream’ Review: Kill Me Again, Again

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      Neither a remake nor a sequel, this tired retread can’t move forward for looking back.Throttled by a corrosive self-awareness, the latest “Scream” is a slasher movie with resting smug face, so enamored of its own mythology that its characters speak of little else.This self-referential chatter, disguised as commentary on the franchise-within-the-franchise, “Stab,” means that there’s scarcely a line of dialogue that doesn’t land with a wink and a nudge.“There are certain rules to surviving a ‘Stab’ movie,” Dewey (David Arquette), now a disgraced former police officer and over-imbiber, tells the latest batch of potential victims. But the knowingness that was cute in Wes Craven’s original picture has, over the course of 25 years and three sequels, curdled into complacency, leaving James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick’s screenplay so marooned in the meta it feels weirdly plotless. Thus Dewey, having suffered a total of nine stabbings during the series, is now viewed as an expert to the teenagers seeking his advice when the Ghostface killer once again stalks the streets of Woodsboro.This will require Dewey to sober up, rejoin the force and reunite with his longtime crush, Gale (Courteney Cox), now a TV anchor in New York. The eventual reappearance of Sidney (Neve Campbell), possibly the slasher canon’s most repeatedly traumatized heroine, completes the original threesome. Their return to Woodsboro also fulfills one of the rules of this so-called requel — not quite a remake, and not exactly a sequel — as recited by Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown, currently knocking it out of the park on Showtime’s “Yellowjackets”), a high schooler and the script’s main receptacle of horror-movie trivia. What’s a requel without legacy characters?“Scream” may not define itself as a remake, but much of it wallows in reminders of the foundational film. From the ringing landline that introduces the opening attack, to the painstaking recreation of one infamous character’s home, the movie revels in visual and aural callbacks. Yet by designing a movie that seems solely intended to placate an avid fan base, the directors, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (two-thirds of the collective known as Radio Silence), paint themselves into a creative corner. They’re so busy looking backward, they’re unable to see a coherent way forward.Franchises, of course, have always pandered — it’s in their D.N.A. — but rarely has one groveled quite so thirstily for fan approval. The result is a picture so carelessly plotted, and so coarsely photographed, that it traps its cast in a deadening cycle of blasé snark and humdrum slaughter. This makes the touching warmth of Campbell and Arquette’s too-brief appearances feel imported from a more innocent, earnest time.Also operating on a different plane is the terrific Melissa Barrera as Sam, a fragile Woodsboro returnee hiding a terrible secret. Sam’s back story is little more than a sketch, but Barrera, who mesmerized me for weeks in the recent Starz drama “Vida,” begs us to care about her anyway. She’s a marvel.Wearyingly repetitive and entirely fright-free, “Scream” teaches us mainly that planting Easter eggs is no substitute for seeding ideas.“I’ve seen this movie before,” Sidney remarks at a critical moment. Oh girl, I hear you.ScreamRated R for stabbing, jabbing, slicing and shooting. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hotel Transylvania: Transformania’ Review: Another Monster Mash

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      The plot, about a crystal-powered ray gun that can turn monsters into humans, seems to acknowledge the need to goose its characters out of their inertia.“Hotel Transylvania: Transformania,” directed by Derek Drymon and Jennifer Kluska and streaming on Friday on Amazon Prime Video, concludes the series of four animated features that cast Dracula as a nervous father and the proprietor of a monster resort. This time, the plot — about a ray gun that turns humans into monsters, and vice versa — seems to acknowledge the need to goose characters out of their inertia.“Drac” (Brian Hull, replacing Adam Sandler), has settled down with Ericka (Kathryn Hahn), a great-grand-daughter of the famed monster hunter, Van Helsing. Mavis (Selena Gomez), Drac and Ericka’s daughter, has a child with a goofball human backpacker named Johnny (Andy Samberg). Van Helsing (Jim Gaffigan) roams the hotel basement. It’s his crystal-powered ray gun that transforms Johnny into a dragon, and turns Drac and his circle of monster dads into humans.Johnny embraces his rambunctious new form because Drac, who is typically overprotective, has said that only monsters can take over the hotel after he retires.But Drac, now a flightless human, misses his mojo. He and Johnny go on a Scooby Doo-grade quest to an Amazonian cave in search of a fresh crystal for the now-broken ray gun. Ericka, Mavis, and company give chase in an airship to help.Giving sitcom-style family dynamics to monsters has long been standard in big-tent animation projects, but these dynamics tend to make banal what is weird and intriguing about the characters. The “Hotel Transylvania” series, previously directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, usually compensates with a spry visual imagination for its comedy, a vibrant sense of color, and, of course, dance parties.But despite some flourishes (such as a mirror-like crystal cave), “Transformania” feels locked into the routine rhythms of its plotting and makes one-note jokes out of its human incarnations. It even ends with a character shrugging.Hotel Transylvania: TransformaniaRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      ‘The Pink Cloud’ Review: Love in Lockdown

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      Iuli Gerbase’s first feature film reflects a funhouse-mirror image of our present lives.Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A deadly phenomenon has spread across the globe and forced all of civilization into an extended quarantine. Fights break out in grocery stores and online. Video chat becomes the center of human communication, playing host to everything from work meetings to birthday parties. Many people find that their partners and children are the only souls they’ll keep company with for the next several months.This is the premise for “The Pink Cloud,” a Brazilian domestic drama with a helping of science fiction that, remarkably enough, was conceived of in 2017 and filmed in 2019. Directed by the newcomer Iuli Gerbase, it stars Renata de Lélis and Eduardo Mendonça as two 30-somethings, Giovana and Yago, who have a one-night stand and wake up the next morning to find a mysterious pink cloud hanging over their city, killing anyone who breathes it for 10 seconds. The government orders a nationwide lockdown, and the two of them, alone together, are suddenly forced to reckon with a potential relationship.Like other works of prescient sci-fi, “The Pink Cloud” forecasts an eerie funhouse-mirror image of our present lives. FaceTime becomes the main channel for social gatherings; citizens are issued government-provided care packages that feel insufficient; Giovana’s friend, trapped alone in her home, experiences symptoms of depression and languishing.The film’s pacing often matches that static sensation, to a frustrating degree. Even as the lockdown accelerates intimacy and conflict between the protagonists, their actions feel inconsequential compared with the greater world outside. “The Pink Cloud” is at its most perceptive when it acknowledges this level of powerlessness, like when a hopeful conclusion to the disaster turns out to be a false alarm. Outside, the cloud floats along, with no dissipating end in sight.The Pink CloudRated R for nudity, brief language and pandemic-related despondency. In Portuguese and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Brazen’ Review: Not So Novel

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      A prolific crime novelist teams up with a hunky homicide detective to track down a killer in this painfully formulaic Netflix murder mystery.Early in “Brazen,” a psychological thriller on Netflix, the crime novelist Grace Miller (Alyssa Milano) insists that her books, which feature grisly femicide, aren’t trashy, but illuminative. “They’re about the exploitation of women, and misogyny, and the patriarchy,” she declares.The movie surrounding her has less lofty ambitions. Predictable and all-American, “Brazen” is the murder mystery version of a Hallmark Christmas romance. Indeed, the movie is based on a grocery store paperback by the prolific author Nora Roberts, and its director, Monika Mitchell, counts several made-for-TV holiday movies among her credits. It’s a match made in algorithm heaven.The story begins with the big-city Grace traveling to the suburbs to help her sister, Kathleen (Emilie Ullerup), fight a custody battle. But when the reunion is cut short by a grisly murder, the plot pivots. Grieving and frightened, Grace vows to apply her writerly instincts to track down the killer, with some help from the hunky homicide detective Ed (Sam Page) who happens to live next door.Chock-full of tropes and status quo gender dynamics — “if anything ever happened to you, I would lose my mind,” Ed cries when Grace volunteers for a risky police gambit — “Brazen” occasionally scratches the same itch as does a cop procedural, or a Lifetime drama so formulaic you foresee every beat. It is perhaps fitting, then, that the film is rarely suspenseful; I, for one, guessed the killer from the opening scenes, and I haven’t written even a single mystery novel.BrazenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More