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      ‘Isabella’ Review: Audition of a Lifetime

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      The Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro, who riffs on Shakespeare, expands his ambition with this drama.The New York-based Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro has carved out an exclusive niche: Each of his fractured, low-stakes narratives is tied to a different Shakespeare play. His last feature, “Hermia & Helena,” involved a Spanish translation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” His latest, “Isabella,” revolves around two actresses, Mariel (María Villar) and Luciana (Agustina Muñoz), auditioning for the part of Isabella in “Measure for Measure.”If Piñeiro’s Shakespeare citations have sometimes freighted slight stories with unearned significance, “Isabella” finds him expanding his formal ambition. The movie courts confusion, at first: Sorting out the characters and timeline isn’t easy. Piñeiro sometimes shoots dialogue with the actors (or their faces) offscreen. The chronology is scrambled, with Mariel’s state — she is shown visibly pregnant or not, or else with her young son after he’s been born — providing an important marker.While the pieces more or less fall into place, trying to solve the mysteries of “Isabella” may be missing the point. The opening voice-over concerns a ritual in which a person must decide whether to cast stones into water, and the film itself seems to exist in a suspended state. The pivotal color is purple (somewhere between red and blue). A motif of rectangles that evokes Josef Albers’s “Homage to the Square” suggests infinite regress.Rhymed scenes and repeated lines contribute to the sense of indeterminacy. Both women are capable of stepping into the same part; acting is presented as, for some people, the same thing as living. Everything in “Isabella” unfolds in parallel — measure for measure, if you will.IsabellaNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘American Sausage Standoff’ Review: Order the Salad

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      This misbegotten satire about bigotry and mysterious pork products is unfunny and maladroit.The far-fetched but hardly distinctive tale told in “American Sausage Standoff” is prefaced by a title card reading “This story is based on fact.” The opening shot is of a man sitting in his car while addressing the audience directly, his soothing, honey-toned voice setting the scene.The writer-director Ulrich Thomsen nods at Joel and Ethan Coen here, specifically to “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski.” The unfunny and maladroit scenes that follow make one wonder if “the anxiety of influence” also can apply to artists who are, through no fault of their own, doing the influencing.“American Sausage Standoff” is set in a nearly deserted town called Gutterbee. This self-proclaimed “Cabaret Capital of the West” is overseen by a guitar-picking rabid racist named Jimmy Jerry Lee Jones Jr. As indicated by character names like that, this is a movie that delivers its sociocultural observations with a sledgehammer.Starr (who, with Thomsen, starred on the TV series “Banshee”) plays Mike Dankworth McCoid, a one-time confederate of Jones who has tired of grotesquely humiliating Asian Americans and running them out of town. (These humiliations are depicted in some detail; the film’s ostensible objection to such actions is sorely undercut by the relish with which they are staged.) Instead, he forms an alliance with the newcomer Edward, a connoisseur of both German sausage and its lore.Edward is played gamely by Ewen Bremner, but his efforts, like those of the character actor Clark Middleton (who died last year) as a truculent, corrupt preacher, merely demonstrate that commitment will only get you so far with a nothing part. What ensues when Edward and the town’s reactionaries clash cannot be properly called hilarity, and the end product of this dismal film is mostly befuddlement.American Sausage StandoffNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Mosquito State’ Review: Bugging Out

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      A Wall Street genius becomes the willing host to a colony of mosquitoes in this dreamily surreal horror movie.Borne along on the whine of insects and a lead performance of surpassing strangeness, “Mosquito State” is a disquieting merger of body horror and social commentary.It’s the summer of 2007, a global financial meltdown is imminent and Richard Boca (a disconcerting Beau Knapp), a wealthy Wall Street analyst, is attending a black-tie party. When he leaves, he will have a stunning young student (Charlotte Vega) on his arm and a female mosquito on his neck; he will fully bond with only one of them.From its gorgeous opening credits to a peculiarly poignant and lyrical finale, this mesmerically slow-moving tale (directed by Filip Jan Rymsza and written by Rymsza and Mario Zermeno) works to forge a fragile link between psychic and societal breakdowns. Richard may be an algorithm savant, but his colleagues refuse to listen when his computer model warns of looming market instability. Holed up in his cavernous penthouse, all brutalist décor and dim lighting, he fumes, consoled only by the buzzing mosquito whose bites are transforming his body and whose offspring are rapidly colonizing his home.Arranged in chapters named for the insect’s stages of development (egg, larva, pupa, imago), “Mosquito State” has a dreamlike, almost dazed quality, pierced by moments of disturbing beauty. Admirable for its total refusal to ingratiate, the movie nurtures an unapologetically hostile vibe that gradually relents alongside Richard’s deterioration. Like Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly” (1986), he’s a grotesque alliance of two species; yet watching him in his apartment, the mosquitoes a milky cloud above his head or a black swarm feeding off his supine body, we see a man who has chosen the bloodsucking life form he prefers.Mosquito StateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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      ‘The Colony’ Review: Fertile Ground Goes to Waste

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      In this science fiction film, set generations after humans have destroyed Earth, an astronaut returns to the planet to see if it is habitable.“The Colony,” a new sci-fi drama directed by Tim Fehlbaum, posits an Earth once rendered uninhabitable by climate change, pandemics and war. Years later, though the ruling elite has fled to another planet, they must reinvestigate Earth after their society becomes infertile.The astronaut Louise Blake (Nora Arnezeder) leads the latest such mission — not for herself, but, as she has been taught to eerily chant since she was a little girl, “for the many.”Therein lies the problem with this sprawling, ambitious movie: Though it centers on one woman, anything we might stand to learn about her own developing values is quickly swallowed by overcomplicated narratives about secondary characters, corrupt colonizers and family secrets. When Blake lands back on Earth — and smack in the middle of another conflict between warring parties — “The Colony” interrogates who, in this dystopian portrayal of humanity, is really worth saving. But it could be asking far more interesting questions about its own main character.For instance, Blake uses herself as a fertility test subject and dazedly notes the arrival of her menstrual cycle, but is she personally interested in repopulating her society? Given her androgynous appearance, her preference for her masculine surname and the fact that she has the most on-screen chemistry with another single woman, this character could, at the very least, have complicated feelings about heterosexual reproduction.“The Colony” has big ideas about class, colonialism and who should inherit the earth. But in developing them, it sidelines its own perfectly compelling protagonist — and wastes a magnetic lead performance from Arnezeder. It can dress itself up in political intrigue all it wants; this existential narrative is really begging to be a character study.The ColonyRated R for violence and an attempted sexual assault. Running time: 1 hour 44 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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      ‘Together’ Review: Love and Loathing in London

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      Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy play a battling couple trapped in lockdown in this theatrical pandemic drama.Like an awful herald of what could lie in wait as future filmmakers grapple with our ongoing viral nightmare, Stephen Daldry’s “Together” is an almost punishing watch. That it’s bearable at all is entirely because of the superlative acting skills of James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan as an unnamed couple forced to endure an extended London lockdown. In place of a plot, we get a setup: They can’t stand the sight of each other.A yearlong pandemic diary embedded in a prickly domestic negotiation, the movie is essentially a two-person play set in the upscale kitchen of the couple’s comfortable middle-class home. Repeatedly breaking the fourth wall — perhaps to avoid breaking the crockery — the two address the camera in earnest monologues. While these can range from confessional to explanatory (like a lengthy ponder on the meaning of “exponential” when tallying Covid infections), they are almost always suffocatingly self-absorbed.An agonizing opening scene lays out the pair’s practiced hostility (“I hate your face!” “I think of you as a cancer!”) and the bickering state of their union. She’s a Liberal of some privilege; he’s a Tory from a poor background. She works with a refugee charity; he has a highly profitable consulting business. Floating somewhere on the periphery is a young son, Artie (Samuel Logan), who’s supposedly the glue that keeps the couple quarantining together. A monologue from him might have gone a long way toward explaining his parents’ dysfunction.The movie’s persistent squabbling is bad, but its too-raw reminders of pandemic trials are almost worse. The reports of denuded grocery stores and mask refuseniks; the paeans to an overworked Somali caregiver and a saintly nurse standing watch over a relative’s hospital bed. And by intermittently stamping the movie with a date and a U.K. death count, Daldry seems to chide us for caring about his characters at all, the fussing and fighting of the living rendered even more trivial alongside the bodies piling up off screen.An awkward and uncomfortable experiment, “Together” unfolds with a staginess that rebuffs our involvement. Political lectures are never fun, and the movie’s bitterly angry attacks on government ineptitude and nursing-home deaths made me wonder if the writer, Dennis Kelly, needed a back rub. So it’s a relief when McAvoy’s character starts growing asparagus and an uneasy détente is reached: No one needs a plague tale whose arc refuses to bend toward hope.TogetherRated R for cruel language and cringeworthy sex talk. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘No Man of God’ Review: Buddying Up to Bundy

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      The film dramatizes what it sees as the rapport between an F.B.I. profiler and the serial killer.“No Man of God” can’t help but play like the special Ted Bundy episode of “Mindhunter” we haven’t gotten to see yet. The movie, directed by Amber Sealey, dramatizes what it sees as the rapport that developed between Bundy (Luke Kirby) and the F.B.I. profiler Bill Hagmaier (Elijah Wood), who visited Bundy in prison and tried to pick his brain.While they aren’t the only two characters — Robert Patrick appears as Hagmaier’s boss, and Aleksa Palladino plays a lawyer trying to get Bundy a reprieve from execution — the movie is at heart a two-hander, with tense scenes of Bundy and Hagmaier interrogating each another. Will Hagmaier get Bundy to share every grisly detail? Or will Bundy crack him? In this telling, they grow comfortable enough for at least Bundy to consider it a friendship.For anyone who has heard audio of Bundy, Kirby’s impersonation will sound chillingly close to the real killer’s deadened, yet at times disturbingly raffish, cadence. Wood is persuasive, too, although Kit Lesser’s script writes the character as a cliché: the agent who gets too close.Introductory text says the film is inspired by F.B.I. transcripts, recordings and Hagmaier’s recollections, but the conversations carry a distinct echo of other serial-killer movies. Bundy wants to convince Hagmaier that he, too, would be capable of murder, and that they think similar thoughts. The mind meld becomes so intense that when Bundy unburdens himself toward the end, Sealey employs crosscutting that draws attention to the connections between them, and has Hagmaier recite dialogue that should logically be coming out of Bundy’s mouth. The film’s Hagmaier may finally have gotten inside Bundy’s head, but — even in the forthrightly nonrealistic context of the sequence — the mental-linkage conceit is absurd.No Man of GodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Aretha Franklin and the Futility of Trying to Portray Her Onscreen

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      The new film “Respect” is one of three recent attempts to understand the artist. Only the one that focuses solely on her music comes close.Early on in “Respect,” the latest onscreen retelling of Aretha Franklin’s story, the aging jazz and R&B star Dinah Washington asks her protégée, “Child, are you ever going to tell us who the daddy is?”Otherwise timid or thankful, Franklin (Jennifer Hudson) responds to Washington’s probing about the paternity of her sons, the first born when she was only 12, with a mix of incredulity and imposing silence. Suddenly what starts off as one of the film’s main mysteries and perhaps Franklin’s biggest childhood trauma ends up as a throwaway line, never to be revisited again.Instead, “Respect,” the debut film by the renowned theater director Liesl Tommy, ends up heeding the advice Washington gives Franklin about her music: “Honey, find the songs that move you.” The biopic is less a movie about Franklin’s interior life or the origins of what her character insists are the “demons” that haunt her, and more about how she as a prodigious vocalist and brilliant pianist and songwriter channeled her pain into songs that moved not just her, but the entire world. In the end, those gaps in the plot are distracting and keep Franklin at arm’s length, rendering her as elusive on the screen as she was in public in real life.A musical moment from “Respect,” with, from left, Henry Riggs, Jennifer Hudson, Hailey Kilgore, Saycon Sengbloh, Alec Barnes, John Giorgio, Marc Maron and Joe Knezevich.Quantrell D. Colbert/MGM“Respect” is part of a larger trend of films and TV series — including the National Geographic mini-series “Genius: Aretha,” starring Cynthia Erivo, and the Sydney Pollack documentary “Amazing Grace” (filmed in 1972 but released in 2018) — that all try to capture Franklin’s virtuosity. In their own way and to varying degrees of success, each struggles with how best to showcase her as a singular artist while expanding our understanding of a woman so intent on privacy.The upside of “Respect” is that it truly focuses on the intricacies of her music-making. The most riveting scenes are when we see her really play: in a recording studio turned jam session with the all-white Muscle Shoals band in Alabama, turning a sleepy “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” into a sultry, soulful confession. Or when she wakes up her sisters, Erma (Saycon Sengbloh) and Carolyn (Hailey Kilgore) in the middle of the night to rearrange the Otis Redding classic “Respect,” with her siblings adding the famous “Re-re-re” riff and forever transforming the song into a Black woman’s anthem.Given how electrifying those moments were, I found myself wanting more and more music, a feat achieved by Hudson’s own riveting take on Franklin’s classics as well as my memory of hearing Franklin’s powerhouse voice for the first time. In this sense, “Respect” gives us the biopic I always thought I was looking for — a portrait of a Black woman whose musical genius remains front and center without being sidelined or overshadowed by her personal struggle with trauma. Though the movie does show Aretha battling depression or her husband, Ted White, such agony never overtakes the story or our sense of her musicality the way it does in other biopics about iconic Black women performers, like Billie Holiday or Tina Turner. Instead, “Respect” treats trauma as a string of unresolved secrets, the source of which neither the film nor Franklin herself ever felt compelled to share with her audience.Hudson with Forest Whitaker as Franklin’s father in “Respect.”Quantrell D. Colbert/MGMThe result is a movie that skews too closely to Franklin’s own self-image, a narrative that she tightly controlled during her lifetime as a matter of privacy and as a way to assert her own power in an industry, and country, dominated by sexist and racist stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality and intelligence.The biographer David Ritz wrote of this distance in “Respect,” his second book on Franklin, saying, “In spite of my determination to be a compassionate listener, someone whose gentle persistence would allow her to reveal all her sacred secrets, my technique ultimately did not work. In the end, I didn’t make a dent in her armor.”Further reflecting on his first biography, “Aretha: From These Roots,” which he wrote based on interviews with Franklin, and which thus had her blessing, he said, “She got the book she wanted. To this day, Aretha considers her book an accurate portrait.”Franklin’s imprint is all over the film “Respect” as well. She handpicked Hudson, a move that set music as the center of the movie but risked the appearance that Hudson’s depiction might be too dependent on Franklin’s own self-image. In other words, as good as the music sounds (and it sounds soooooo very, very good), the plot holes about her past, which seemed to inform much of her character’s decision-making, kept nagging at me as I watched.Why did her mother, Barbara (Audra McDonald), leave her children behind with her domineering husband, the Rev. C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), only to show up, after her death, as an angelic force in Aretha’s life?Why doesn’t Aretha remember having to rush to the roof and sing loudly with her sisters as children in order to drown out her parents fighting?And what is the shame the film keeps hinting at, but, like Aretha, never wants to confront?What does she need music to save her from?In one notable scene in “Respect,” her friend the Rev. James Cleveland says to Aretha, “There are no demons. Just the pain you’ve been running from your whole life.” Reassuring her more, Cleveland notes, “He knows it wasn’t your fault.”Cynthia Erivo as the singer in “Genius: Aretha.”Richard Ducree/National GeographicAnd because we aren’t quite sure if he is referring to her pregnancy, her mother’s departure or something else, we applaud Aretha’s catharsis while wondering about the cause.The mini-series “Genius: Aretha,” written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, however, is more forthcoming. By showing a young Aretha as the victim of sexual assault and attributing her parents’ breakup to her father’s own impregnating of a 12-year-old girl in his congregation, potential explanations of her childhood trauma are revealed but do not dominate its depiction.But even in this version, Aretha is a somewhat muted presence, and Erivo (a powerhouse vocalist herself) sometimes seems constrained by the need to toggle back and forth between Franklin’s introverted nature at home and her iconic status onstage.A scene from the documentary “Amazing Grace,” which the singer didn’t want released.Amazing Grace Film, LLCMaybe this is why I still find myself obsessed with the one movie that she never wanted to be seen onscreen: the documentary “Amazing Grace.” Filmed ​​by Pollack over two nights in a Los Angeles Baptist church in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts, “Amazing Grace” is all gospel, a cinematic capturing of spiritual ecstasy and religious exaltation, and a Franklin who surrenders her voice to God, and is at her most sublime.Dismissing the documentary in 1999 in her memoir, she told Ritz, “When I saw what had been done in one section of the film, I was appalled.” She went on, referring to the gospel singer Clara Ward, “One of the cameramen kept shooting straight up underneath Clara’s dress. She was in the front row. Talk about bad taste!” (Franklin would later say her aversion to its release had nothing to do with its content, which she claimed to have “loved.”) Her disdain for the project led her to sue repeatedly to block its release, though it finally found its way to theaters a few months after her death in 2018.This is perhaps why both “Respect” and “Genius: Aretha” felt compelled to include Pollack’s shoot in their narratives. For “Amazing Grace” had the privilege of giving us Franklin on her own musical terms without having to contend with the singer’s self-portrait. And in that freedom, it was able to share itself as one of Franklin’s best kept secrets. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: Lorde on Late Night and ‘American Horror Story’

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      The musician Lorde has a residency on CBS’s “Late Late Show With James Corden.” And a new season of “American Horror Story” begins on FX.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Aug. 23-29. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE LATE LATE SHOW WITH JAMES CORDEN 12:37 a.m. (Tuesday morning) on CBS. The musician Lorde released a new album, “Solar Power,” Aug. 20. This week, she’ll have a four-night residency on James Corden’s late-night show. Monday night’s broadcast will pair her with the actor Jason Momoa, who will appear as a guest to promote a new Netflix action movie, “Sweet Girl,” which also came out last week.THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (2013) 5 p.m. on AMC. In November, Disney is slated to debut Peter Jackson’s latest project, “The Beatles: Get Back,” a documentary about the making of the Beatles’s final album. The project was originally intended to be a feature-length movie that would have been released in theaters, but it was recently announced that the film would be expanded into a three-part TV series. That Jackson decided to go long is no surprise: The combined running time of his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of the early 2000s was over 9 hours, and his follow-up trilogy, “The Hobbit,” clocked in at just under 8 hours. If you’re looking to pass some (or more than some) time on Monday, AMC is showing the whole “Hobbit” trilogy in order, beginning with “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012) at 1 p.m. and ending with “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” (2014) at 8:45 p.m. All three movies follow Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the hero of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel of the same name, whose adventures here reach a level of maximalism that rivals that of a child’s imagination.TuesdayFIRST REFORMED (2018) 4:15 p.m. on Showtime 2. The screenwriter and director Paul Schrader is set to return to theaters next month with his newest movie, “The Card Counter,” a drama about a troubled gambler. Schrader was last in theaters in 2018, when he released “First Reformed,” a drama about a troubled Protestant minister. That pastor is Rev. Ernst Toller, played by Ethan Hawke, who oversees a small church in upstate New York. His story intersects with that of a young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried). The movie touches on issues of faith, money and climate disaster, and is, A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times, “an epiphany.”WednesdayAMERICAN HORROR STORY: DOUBLE FEATURE 10 p.m. on FX. This long running horror anthology series from the “Glee” creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk had a year off in 2020 because of the pandemic, but it will make up for that this year with its new season, “Double Feature,” which will tell two parallel stories. One is about a family that goes on a winter retreat by the sea; the other shows horrific events in drier environs.CMT GIANTS: CHARLEY PRIDE 9 p.m. on CMT. The singer Charley Pride, who broke ground as country music’s first Black superstar, died from complications of Covid-19 in December. He was 86. This 90-minute special will honor Pride’s career and the impact that he had on country music. It brings together performances from other country stars — including Darius Rucker and Reba McEntire — and archival interviews with Pride himself.ThursdayFRENCH EXIT (2020) 9 p.m. on Starz. Michelle Pfeiffer plays an over-the-top New York socialite who was recently widowed in this comedy-drama, adapted from Patrick deWitt’s 2018 novel of the same name. After learning that her once-considerable bank account has dried up, Pfeiffer’s character, Frances, moves to Paris to live at a friend’s cramped apartment with her son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges). The movie is “hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. But, she added, “Pfeiffer is flat-out fabulous here, at once chilly and poignant.”FridayAnthony Mackie, center left, and Bryan Cranston, center right, in “All the Way.”Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/HBOALL THE WAY (2016) 4:35 p.m. on HBO. Bryan Cranston won a Tony Award for his performance as President Lyndon B. Johnson in the stage version of the Robert Schenkkan play “All the Way.” This television adaptation, which also includes performances from Bradley Whitford, Anthony Mackie and Frank Langella, hews to the play; it, too, follows Johnson’s first year in office. In his review for The Times, Neil Genzlinger wrote that, while “nothing beats witnessing this kind of larger-than-life portrayal onstage,” Cranston’s performance in the TV adaptation is still powerful. “In his hands,” Genzlinger wrote, “this accidental president comes across as an amazing bundle of contradictions, someone who seems at once too vulgar for the job and just right for it.”SaturdayTHE DIRTY DOZEN (1967) 5:15 p.m. on TCM. When this Robert Aldrich war movie debuted in 1967, The Times’s Bosley Crowther called it a “studied indulgence of sadism that is morbid and disgusting beyond words.” Nevertheless — or, perhaps, accordingly — it was a hit at the box office. The story, based on the novel of the same name by E.M. Nathanson, follows a group of criminals who are given an extraordinarily dangerous mission during World War II, and are promised pardons if they succeed. The ensemble cast includes Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Donald Sutherland.SundayThe World Trade Center, as seen in “9/11: One Day in America.”Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress9/11: ONE DAY IN AMERICA 9 P.M. on National Geographic. Leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, this six-part, seven-hour documentary series revisits the events of that day and their immediate aftermath. It includes interviews with firefighters, emergency medical workers and others who experienced the wreckage firsthand. More