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      ‘The Souvenir Part II’ Review: Life, as She Imagines It

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      In the sequel to her art-house favorite “The Souvenir,” Joanna Hogg picks up the story of a young woman’s journey to becoming an artist.Deep into “The Souvenir Part II,” a young woman walks through a hall of mirrors as if in a dream. It is a freighted moment for the character, a film student whose lover died not long ago. After struggling with her grief and her art, she seems on the cusp of a creative breakthrough: She’s made her graduate movie and her mother, father and friends are there to see it. As she walks among her mirrored reflections, she also seems to be passing her many different selves — the dutiful daughter, the drifting student, the bereft survivor — now all in service to her role as an artist.The latest from the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg, “Souvenir Part II” is a portrait of a young artist. It’s about life and art, inspiration and process, growing and becoming. And while it is familiar in many ways, it also isn’t the usual bleating about art and artists partly because most such stories are about men, those tortured, mad geniuses whose work dominates culture, filling museums and biopics. This, by contrast, is the story of a recognizably faltering young woman who tells her disapproving male professors that her film will be about “life as I imagine it” — and then makes good on her statement of intent.“Part II” picks up more or less where Hogg’s 2019 art-house favorite “The Souvenir” ends. Set in Britain in the early 1980s, the first movie finds Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) in film school, generously supported by her parents. The story’s focus, though, and much of her energy and time are dedicated to her exciting, progressively fraught affair with an enigmatic dissembler, Anthony (Tom Burke), who charms, seduces and robs her. Ultimately, he overdoses on heroin in a bathroom of the museum where he showed her the Fragonard painting that gives the film its title. “Souvenir” ends with a snippet of romantic poetry and Julie walking off a soundstage into the day.That first story has its obvious attractions, notably the irresistible appeal of tragic love, with its messy beds and broken hearts. But it is Hogg’s filmmaking — her narrative and stylistic choices, the precision of her framing, the stillness of her images and how she withholds information — that distinguishes “Souvenir” and her other movies. She’s found her own way at the crossroads of art cinema and the mainstream, and particularly striking is how she handles time and transitions. Most filmmakers smooth out scenes so they seamlessly flow into a whole; Hogg likes to cut off songs, as if snapping off a radio, and abruptly shift from here to there — just as we do in life.When the sequel opens, Julie is lying in bed, back at her parents’ immaculately appointed country home. She’s still in mourning and still seeking refuge with her father, William (James Spencer Ashworth), and her mother, Rosalind (a brilliant Tilda Swinton, Swinton Byrne’s real mother). They’re slightly baffled by their daughter’s life but are kind, gentle and unflaggingly supportive. Back in her own world, Julie hangs out with her friends, spends time on other people’s film shoots and works on her grad project. She also tries to make sense of Anthony, his life and death, and the churning, complex feelings that he left in his wake. She misses the intimacy of the man she calls a “mysterious leader.”“Part II” misses him, too — specifically it misses Burke’s charisma and talent, which worked with Swinton Byrne’s awkward hesitancy in the first film, creating a friction that suited the dynamics of their characters’ relationship. Swinton Byrne presents a likable, sympathetic figure (you’re certainly drawn to the character), and has a jutting, sculptural face that demands your attention. But she isn’t skilled enough to create a persuasive inner life for Julie, and because Hogg avoids scripted exposition, her actress can’t lean on the dialogue to help fill in the blanks. Julie’s uncertainty, her doubts and mistakes are crucial to “Souvenir Part II,” but Swinton Byrne’s wan performance is an uninteresting placeholder for an idea.Eventually and with much stumbling, Julie’s grad film comes into focus; she begins shooting it, basing it on her relationship with Anthony. Embracing a rigorous fidelity to her past, she builds an exact replica of her flat and dresses the male lead in Anthony’s housecoat. Movies about moviemaking are rarely as interesting as their makers think, but Julie’s process does illuminate the character and Hogg’s autobiographical intentions. Julie frets, worries, changes her mind, confusing her actors and (understandably) infuriating her cinematographer. But all of these efforts go on far too long and Julie wears out your patience, as does Hogg’s emphasis on this belabored interlude.Even so, Hogg’s filmmaking presents its own forceful draw and is the reason I watched “Souvenir Part II” again. The second time, I paid closer attention to Julie’s grad film, a fantastical dream of a movie that is a very serious, amusingly arty pastiche of overwrought symbolism and cinematic allusions (“The Lady From Shanghai,” “The Red Shoes”). It’s poignantly terrible, but its badness is immaterial to Hogg’s project. Julie has tapped everything that she has — her images and experiences, her being, seeing, feeling — and in doing so she’s irrevocably blurred the divide between life and art. She lived, made her movie, and will keep on doing both in all the Joanna Hogg movies to come.The Souvenir Part IIRated R for language and adult sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Val Bisoglio, Oft-Cast Character Actor, Dies at 95

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      He was seen on “Quincy, M.E.” and “The Sopranos.” He also memorably played John Travolta’s father in “Saturday Night Fever.”By 1986, after 30 years in the business, Val Bisoglio had made such an impression as a character actor that Danny Arnold, a producer casting a new police series called “Joe Bash,” wrote in a casting notice for a particular part simply that he was looking for “a Val Bisoglio-type.”Mr. Bisoglio saw the notice and figured that he was probably as good a Val Bisoglio-type as anybody. He called Mr. Arnold and landed the role, a desk sergeant.“Joe Bash” was short-lived, but the anecdote shows just how much Mr. Bisoglio was able to do with an Everyman-ish face, a distinctive voice and a versatility that enabled him to play cops, tough guys, bartenders, judges, fathers.He was perhaps best known for portraying the father of John Travolta’s character in the film “Saturday Night Fever” in 1977 (he whacks Mr. Travolta upside the head several times in a memorable dinner scene) and the owner of a restaurant preferred by the title character, a medical examiner played by Jack Klugman, on the television drama “Quincy, M.E.” from 1976 to 1983. But from the 1960s through the ’80s, television viewers were likely to encounter him in a seemingly endless list of guest roles.“If it was a popular TV show,” his wife, Bonnie (Ray) Bisoglio, said in a phone interview, “he was on it.”Mr. Bisoglio, right, with Jack Klugman in an episode of “Quincy, M.E.” He played the owner of a restaurant, and Mr. Klugman played a medical examiner. “Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant.”United Archives via Getty ImagesMr. Bisoglio died on Oct. 18 at his home near Los Olivos, Calif. He was 95.His wife said the cause was late-onset Lewy body dementia, which had been diagnosed a year ago.In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”Italo Valentino Bisoglio (pronounced bee-ZOL-yoh) was born on May 7, 1926, in Manhattan. His father, Mario, was a greengrocer during the Depression, then worked in construction, and his mother, Virginia (Gallina) Bisoglio, did piecework sewing. Both had emigrated from the Piedmont region of northern Italy.Growing up in New York, he said, he was more interested in going to vaudeville and other theaters than in going to school; he dropped out after 10th grade and at 16 made his way to Los Angeles, where he lived for a while, also spending time in Las Vegas. But he came to acting late; first he worked at various jobs, including, in his early 20s, selling water-softening devices, which made him a significant amount of money.“It went through my hands faster than water could soften it,” he told The News, largely because he developed a fondness for gambling.Ms. Bisoglio said that migraine headaches helped drive her husband to take acting classes as a form of tension-relieving therapy. He studied with Jeff Corey, a character actor who after being blacklisted in the 1950s became a well-regarded acting teacher, and by the early ’60s Mr. Bisoglio was back in New York and establishing himself as a theater actor.At the Off Broadway Sheridan Square Playhouse in 1965, he was part of a production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” that also included Robert Duvall, Jon Voigt, Susan Anspach and Richard Castellano, all then still early in their careers. The next year he made his only Broadway appearance, in Frederick Knott’s “Wait Until Dark,” playing a con man (Mr. Duvall played another).He began to find television work as well, appearing in episodes of “Bonanza” and “Mayberry R.F.D.,” among other shows, and in 1969 he landed a recurring role on the soap opera “The Doctors.” By the ’70s he had residences on both coasts to accommodate his increasingly busy TV and stage careers.Mr. Bisoglio tended to be offered roles as mobsters and other heavies — he held up Archie Bunker and family in a 1972 episode of “All in the Family” — but, as his wife said, “he yearned for roles where he could show something else,” and he turned down the thug parts when he could. Partly, he said, that was because they stereotyped a particular sort of Italian, one not representative of his family’s origins; his mother bristled whenever he took such a part.“She doesn’t cook much pasta,” he told United Press International in 1977. “We northern Italians in the Po Valley area eat mostly rice. We’re from peasant stock.”But, he told The Daily News, he also disliked such roles because they reminded him of his time as a gambler.“When I was a New York gambler I had to mix with those tough guys,” he said. “God, they were tough. Their arms were like iron. Their necks were like iron. Now it’s embarrassing for me to play them.”That said, his final credits were in three episodes of “The Sopranos” in 2002, playing a character named Murf who was part of Junior Soprano’s crew. But Mr. Bisoglio said he always enjoyed the chance to play comic roles.In the early 1980s, for instance, he was in several episodes of “M*A*S*H,” playing a cook named Pernelli. In one, Alan Alda’s Hawkeye lectures him at length on how to delicately prepare the perfect French toast. Mr. Bisoglio then ignores him and dumps all the ingredients, including the bread, into a giant pot.Another role that took Mr. Bisoglio a long way from Italian stereotypes came in 1979, when he played an erudite Indian chief named Gray Cloud in the comic western “The Frisco Kid,” with Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford. George American Horse, an actual American Indian, was an adviser on the film, and in 1978 he told The New York Times that, the uncomfortable cross-cultural casting notwithstanding, Mr. Bisoglio’s portrayal was a welcome change from “the stoic Indian sitting on his pony with his arms crossed and wearing war paint.”Mr. Bisoglio’s marriage to Joyce Haden was brief and ended in divorce. He and Ms. Bisoglio married in 1996. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Joseph Bisoglio and Scott Chapman. More

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      ‘Roh’ Review: I See Dead People

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      This atmospheric and grisly horror movie from Malaysia sees a single mother and her children rattled by the arrival of mysterious strangers.When a ghoulish little girl caked in mud suddenly appears near the isolated hut of a single mother, Mak (Farah Ahmad), and her two children living in the Malaysian jungle, things take a turn for the sinister. Not that the family — impoverished and in denial of their father’s death — was doing particularly well before the arrival of the lost child, who rattles them with a morbid prophecy then slashes her own throat within the first fifteen minutes.Emir Ezwan’s feature directing debut, “Roh,” which translates to “soul” in Malaysian, belongs to a wave of homegrown, folklore-inspired horror films taking Southeast Asia by storm (see “Two Sisters,” also from Malaysia, or “Satan’s Slaves,” from Indonesia).A grisly ghost story set against a backdrop of scraggly, claustrophobic vegetation given an eerie vibrancy by the cinematographer Saifuddin Musa, “Roh” isn’t big on the details. The story unfolds at some unspecified point in the past as a distant war rages on, and Ezwan relies on vivid imagery — burning trees, mushy piles of blood — over a concrete narrative, which renders the entry of two additional strangers disorientingly opaque if acutely unsettling.As the indeterminate evil spreads, Mak’s children take cues from “The Exorcist” and a beguiling neighbor begins to wield inordinate levels of influence over the increasingly aghast mother. Symbolism overshadows characterization, or any sense of motive for that matter, nevertheless “Roh” succeeds as a spine-tingling baffler, hitting at nerves we can’t quite articulate but feel all the same.RohNot rated. In Malay, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. On virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘A Mouthful of Air’ Review: Depression Clouds a Domestic Idyll

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      Amanda Seyfried stars as a young mother suffering from postpartum depression in Amy Koppelman’s weepy adaptation of her novel.A young mother battles postpartum depression in the arid melodrama “A Mouthful of Air.” Living in Manhattan in the ’90s, Julie (Amanda Seyfried) is a vision of bliss. Sunlight pours through the windows of her vibrantly colored apartment as she lays sprawled beside her cherubic infant son. But minutes later, the domestic idyll cracks when Julie settles on the floor to slit her wrists.Directed by Amy Koppelman and based on her novel of the same name, “A Mouthful of Air” aspires to show how depression can sully even the loveliest of scenes. The scenes the movie chooses, however, play like a parody of white privilege: Julie and her husband Ethan (Finn Wittrock) are an affluent, affectionate couple whose greatest concern is whether they should relocate to Westchester. Julie’s pampered lifestyle is even such that, upon her suicide attempt, she is carried to an ambulance by her doting doorman.In the months following her rehabilitation, Julie suffers ongoing anxiety. Grocery shopping is fraught with indecision over food brands, and later, a discussion about Julie’s second child spurs a panic attack over whether the baby will like her hair. Koppelman uses jump cuts, a hand-held camera and sound effects to sketch Julie’s distress, but absent a more penetrative window into her character, the movie’s portrait of depression often feels as facile as its opening image: Julie’s wide blue eyes with a single tear trailing down her cheek.A Mouthful of AirRated R for language and inner turmoil. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Cicada’ Review: A New Relationship Buds as Old Wounds Reopen

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      Matthew Fifer writes and co-stars in this understated drama about a man struggling with his past as he forges a new bond.The camera in “Cicada” dwells on scars, literal and metaphorical. There’s a rough, discolored line running down the stomach of Sam (Sheldon D. Brown), the new boyfriend of Ben (Matthew Fifer). Ben drags his finger along that line while the two are in bed together. And there are the ambiguous nightmares that take Ben back to his Long Island childhood home and the beach nearby, the noise of cicadas and waves of the nearby ocean deafening.Ben is first introduced via an elliptical montage of alcohol-infused dates and hookups. But after these encounters, he often finds himself on the floor of his small room overcome with nausea or shaken awake by nightmares. An impromptu date with Sam, which does not lead to sex, unlocks new possibilities for healthy intimacy for Ben, but also reopens the old wounds he’s let scar over.“Cicada,” which is directed by Fifer and Kieran Mulcare, is a muted affair, with even its diffused and desaturated palette conveying a sense of understatement. Ben and Sam’s blossoming romance does a lot of telling and little showing. While there’s the occasional amusingly idiosyncratic section of dialogue that sounds like a series of stagily poetic non-sequiturs, much of the couple’s bonding feels straightforward and unremarkable.The sound design by Gisela Fulla-Silvestre and Travis Jones gives the film a modicum of thoughtful and detailed texture. Their calibrated and minimalist soundscape is subtle and graceful, offering insight into an ostensibly complex relationship informed by trauma when the rest of the film struggles to do so.CicadaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Snakehead’ Review: Nightmares on the Way to the American Dream

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      The writer and director Evan Jackson Leong sets a crime tale in New York City’s Chinatown.“Snakehead” is an unvarnished look at the seedy intersections between organized crime and human trafficking in present-day New York City’s Chinatown. In his welcome but oversimplified addition to the American crime family saga, the writer-director Evan Jackson Leong carves out unapologetic space for a villainous family with a strong bond.Telling the story through an intra-diasporic gaze, Leong positions the Chinese American kingpin Dai Mah (Jade Wu) and her sons against Sister Tse (Shuya Chang), a Chinese national who owes Dai Mah nearly $60,000 for smuggling her into the United States and is willing to become a human trafficker herself to clear the debt.The movie wants to be both an insider look at the global apparatus of human trafficking, including its tragic costs, and a redemptive tale about the women at the center of this criminal underworld. Leong is more successful at the former than the latter.Wu plays Dai Mah with a no-frills abandon that often makes her feel like the film’s protagonist, but even her performance can’t overcome the narrative missteps. The script flatly renders its female characters as either strong or weak, which fuels a stilted quest to prove themselves worthy of redemption in the eyes of the lackluster men around them. Leong confuses motherhood for a personality characteristic, and positions this fact as the reason Sister Tse is worthy of a hero’s pedestal despite her complicity in Dai Mah’s crimes. It is hollow and reductive. Add on the aimless voice-over, flashbacks overdone to the point of diluting their meaning and a couple of feeble fight scenes, and “Snakehead” tumbles all too quietly under the weight of its ambition.SnakeheadNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 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 Spine of Night’ Review: Cosmic Forces at Work

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      Ultraviolent world-building and bone-crushing dominate this animated fantasy film.While there’s a lot of content out there these days that can be described as “adult animation,” we don’t see much in the tradition pioneered by 1980s stoner semi-classics like the sci-fi anthology “Heavy Metal” or the racy sword-and-sorcery saga “Fire and Ice.”Admittedly, it’s not as if there’s a mainstream outcry for such fare. Nevertheless, the existence of “The Spine of Night,” an unabashedly bloody series of interconnected tales about otherworldly cultures and eras, is kind of heartening. The co-directors, Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King, who both wrote the picture as well, are pitching for a venerable dirtbag-nerd sensibility here.The movie signals its commitment to nudity right off the bat, with its depiction of a witchy warrior, Tzod (voiced by Lucy Lawless), racing up a snowy mountainside in the altogether, save for oodles of ceremonial jewelry. Once at the top, she meets the ghostly Guardian (Richard E. Grant), who watches over the “bloom.” It holds an awesome, perhaps cosmic force.They relate to each other stories of the bloom’s power. How it corrupted a medieval scholar turned despot. And of how the quest for knowledge frequently mutates into greed. Some dialogue is amusingly familiar to any Bond fan. “You took me from mother swamp to serve this place?” “No, I took you from mother swamp to die in this place.” Hmm.As philosophical as the movie waxes, it’s mostly a brief history of disembowelment and bone-crushing. Alas, all the world-building filmmakers may contrive doesn’t count for much if they don’t put it across visually. And this heavily rotoscoped vision does not get where it needs to be to achieve genuine trippiness. Not for nothing, the most visually effective sequence is made up of silhouettes.The Spine of NightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Army of Thieves’ Review: A Little Help From Some Old Friends

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      This “Army of the Dead” prequel leans in, deliberately, to every last heist movie cliché.The heist at the center of “Army of the Dead,” the action-horror zombie flick Zack Snyder directed for Netflix earlier this year, wasn’t much of a heist at all — a cursory, surface-level safecracking scene that felt like a brief digression from all the violent zombie mayhem happening around it. “Army of Thieves,” a prequel starring and directed by the “Army of the Dead” ensemble player Matthias Schweighöfer, takes place in the very early days of the zombie apocalypse, and with the undead safely confined to the United States, the Europe-set “Thieves” is free to focus entirely on heisting. In fact, this is a heist movie about heist movies: While it stops short of outright parody, it’s meta in the extreme.Heist movies tend of course to be similar and predictable, and “Army of Thieves” leans in, very self-consciously, to the style of the genre. You’ve got all the usual stuff — the assembly of the team of experts with highly specialized skills, the double-cross that’s really a triple-cross, the plan that looks like it’s failed only to turn out that the failure was part of the plan. A recent episode of “Rick and Morty” wittily summarized heist movies as “60% putting a crew together and 40% revealing that the robbery already happened,” and that strikes the heart of the problem: A winking attitude doesn’t make the extremely tired formula any less rote or tiresome. Despite the in-jokes and references (including nods to “Point Break” and “Heat”), the movie can’t transcend its own clichés.Army of ThievesNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More