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      Five International Movies to Stream Right Now

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      Take a cinematic trip around the world with these fine options.In the age of streaming, the earth is flat — screen-sized, with travel to faraway destinations only a monthly subscription and a click away. But sifting the wheat from the chaff can be hard with so many options, and harder still if you don’t know what to look for in the bounties of different national cinemas and film industries.So let me be your travel agent each month: I’ll journey through the world of streaming and choose the best new international movies for you to watch. This month’s picks take you to Britain, India, Algeria (by way of France), Japan and Spain (by way of Germany). If you feel intimidated by the foreign languages, remember the wise words of Bong Joon Ho, the Oscar-winning director of “Parasite”: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”‘Rocks’Stream it on Netflix.We hear the boisterous teenage girls of “Rocks” before we see them. Their affectionate banter plays over the opening credits, which cut to a rooftop in London from which the girls gaze at the city’s skyline. A rousing, wonderfully specific film about a 15-year-old whose mother suddenly leaves, forcing her to fend for herself and her brother, “Rocks” uses voices, noises and languages to conjure up an absorbing portrait of Britain’s working-class immigrant community.Rocks (Bukky Bakray) is of Jamaican and Nigerian descent, and her friend group comprises diverse nationalities and ethnicities: Somali, Romany, Bangladeshi, white. The girls’ conversations grapple with their cultural differences while never losing the natural rhythms of adolescent chatter. When Rocks encounters speakers of other languages, their dialogue is unsubtitled, faithfully capturing the aural fabric of a cosmopolitan city where the familiar mixes with the unfamiliar.Most of the film’s young actors, including Bakray, are first-timers, but their ebullient performances convey multitudes: They switch effortlessly between rebellion, seriousness, and playfulness. Even as the director Sarah Gavron paints a wrenching portrait of abandonment and poverty, she makes no sweeping judgments about the film’s characters. Life, “Rocks” recognizes, can be messy and difficult, but the bonds of community can sustain us when all else fails.‘Eeb Allay Ooo!’Stream it on Netflix.In this clever satire from India, a rural youth newly arrived in Delhi lands a strange job: shooing away monkeys from the city’s grand government buildings by making shrill sounds. It might seem like a gag out of a Tim Burton film, but “Eeb Allay Ooo!” draws from real life — some supporting roles are even played by actual “monkey repellers,” experts at the guttural calls that give the film its onomatopoeic title.As one of these veterans warns our hero, Anjani (Shardul Bhardwaj), the job may seem like a lark but the stakes are high. The workers are caught between the demands of ruthless contractors, snooty bureaucrats, animal rights activists and Hindus who hold monkeys sacred. And as the director Prateek Vats emphasizes through bustling shots of Delhi’s thoroughfares, trains and cramped slums, Anjani is just one of many precarious migrants trying to eke out a living in an unsparing city.But what sets “Eeb Allay Ooo!” apart from run-of-the-mill poverty-porn dramas is the mix of comedy and rage it taps into. Though no good at monkey chasing, Anjani starts to find release in the performative aspects of the job, and the film’s serene tableaux of working-class life soon give way to pricklier evocations of working-class discontent. Bhardwaj nails his character’s outward spiral, giving it all in a frenzied denouement set within a religious procession.‘South Terminal’Stream it on Mubi.Time and space ripple like the ocean in “South Terminal,” directed by the Algerian-French filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche. The plot suggests that we’re in Algeria sometime in the 1990s, in the midst of a bloody civil war. But the film’s cobblestoned streets and sun-dappled coastlines are from southern France, and glimpses of cellphones and new car models scramble the period setting. Ameur-Zaïmeche never resolves these anachronisms, instead crafting an intentionally abstract film that powerfully evokes the repetitions of history and the troubling universality of violence.Even the characters are nameless. The protagonist is simply “the doctor” (played with gruff vulnerability by the French comedian Ramzy Bedia), a surgeon who stays put even as those around him flee the country’s growing sectarian conflict and surveillance. His mulish commitment to his lifesaving work lands him in trouble when he is kidnapped and forced to treat a rebel leader, which makes him a target of the army.The film is violent and fast-paced, and yet curiously spare, with stripped-down sound and languorous moments of mundanity. Ameur-Zaïmeche captures the resilience of ordinary lives caught in the cross-fires of war, while scenes of military checkpoints and oceanic escapes point to resonances with the contemporary crises of migration.‘Any Crybabies Around?’Stream it on Netflix.The title of Takuma Sato’s film is the chant of the Namahage: folkloric ogres that visit houses on Japan’s Oga Peninsula every New Year’s Eve to playfully scare children and teach them good values. Tasuku (Taiga Nakano) is one of the young men who don monstrous masks and straw capes to enact this annual ritual — until, on one of his runs, he drunkenly embarrasses himself on live TV. (I won’t spoil how; it’s a masterful exercise in straight-faced cringe comedy.)“Any Crybabies Around?” picks up a couple of years later when Tasuku is living in Tokyo, estranged from his wife and child. But when he hears that they’re struggling to make ends meet, he returns to his hometown to reconnect with his family and win his way back into his daughter’s life.Crisscrossing folklore with the classic movie trope of a man-child, Sato crafts a thoughtful meditation on alienation and masculinity, and the delusions of male saviors. Nakano pulls off a difficult balancing act with the piteous, whimpering Tasuku, who nevertheless invites our empathy with his sincere hope for change. It’s the Namahage that finally offer him some salvation, and the scenes featuring them are some of the movie’s best: gorgeous choreographies of color and slow motion, set to haunting beats of woodblock and drums.‘For the Time Being’Stream it on Mubi.Larissa, a German woman, arrives with her 9-year-old twins at her husband’s family home in the Spanish Sierra Morena mountains, where her mother-in-law and sister-in-law live a quiet, secluded life. Her husband is supposed to join them soon, but when his flight is delayed, the three women and two kids bide their time, waiting for his arrival.This is the entirety of what might be described as “plot” in Salka Tiziana’s “For the Time Being,” an atmospheric, slow-burning feature that turns uneventfulness into something thrilling. Larissa (Melanie Straub) and her in-laws communicate awkwardly across a language barrier, while the boys (Jon and Ole Bader) explore the lush outdoors with curiosity. The film’s growing sense of intrigue derives from sensory stimuli rather than narrative. Nearby wildfires make the air shimmer, and strange explosions from a military test punctuate the passing time. As days go by with no news of the father, Tiziana fills the characters’ uneasy limbo with thick, intoxicating natural sounds (whooshing winds, chirping cicadas) while alternating between drone shots and crackling, 16-millimeter images of the sun-faded landscape. It’s a lovely film to watch while at home during the pandemic, both for its transporting shots of the mountains and its charged depiction of stillness and anticipation. More

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      ‘Thunder Force’ Review: Saving Chicago, One Mutant at a Time

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      Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer don superhero suits in this painfully lazy Netflix comedy.“Thunder Force,” the latest in a string of dismal comic collaborations between Melissa McCarthy and her husband, Ben Falcone, does nothing to improve upon its predecessors. It does, though, underscore how cemented in shtick McCarthy’s comic characters have become, and how much better this gifted actress deserves.Written and directed by Falcone with slapdash insouciance, the movie follows the titular duo of zaftig superheroines, Lydia and Emily (McCarthy and Octavia Spencer) as they strive to save Chicago from genetic mutants known as Miscreants. These supervillains, we learn, trace their lineage to 1983, when cosmic rays jangled their D.N.A. (On the plus side, the rays only worked on those already predisposed to sociopathy, conveniently releasing Thunder Force from any sticky ethical constraints.)Any crime-fighting, though, is only the silly sauce on what is essentially a story of an odd-couple female friendship. Estranged since high school, Lydia and Emily reconnect as adults when Lydia, now a Bears-loving forklift operator with an impressive beer can collection — in other words, a blue-collar cliché — stumbles into a lab where Emily, a genius geneticist, is testing mystery serums. A few pratfalls and a bit of slapstick later, Lydia has been injected with inhuman strength and Emily treats herself with the remaining serum. I have to believe Spencer was relieved to learn that the superpower it conveyed was invisibility.As the pair, encased in costumes that make them look like unhappy 16th-century jousters, tackle an embarrassingly small number of Miscreants, a plot of sorts emerges. A skeevy mayoral candidate (Bobby Cannavale) and his pet mutant (Pom Klementieff) — who specializes in lobbing deadly balls of energy — are terrorizing voters. Armed only with a supersized Taser, and musically primed by Glenn Frey, Thunder Force must stop them. Just as soon as Lydia overcomes her lust for a man with crab claws in place of arms.This bit of sexual slumming is enlivened considerably by Jason Bateman’s sideways-skittering performance as The Crab, a criminal with no discernible superpower and all-too-visible obstacles to romance. He’s not nearly enough, though, to rescue an indolent script with only a handful of funny lines and a seeming confusion over its target audience. The jokes are juvenile, but how many youngsters will recognize Lydia’s mimicry of a 1994 Jodie Foster in “Nell?”For McCarthy, whose 2019 Oscar nomination for “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” was exceedingly well-earned, a return to drama might not go amiss. It would certainly seem wiser than repeating projects like this one.Thunder ForceRated PG-13 for suggestive language and human-crustacean foreplay. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      40 Acres and a Movie

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      Disney owns a piece of every living person’s childhood. Now it owns Marvel Studios, too. The co-hosts Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris look at depictions of racist tropes and stereotypes in Disney’s ever-expanding catalog. The company has made recent attempts to atone for its past. But can it move forward without repeating the same mistakes?On Today’s EpisodeThe Marvel Cinematic UniverseLetitia Wright as Shuri in “Black Panther” (2018).Disney/Marvel Studios, via Associated PressTeyonah Parris portrayed Monica Rambeau in the 2021 Disney+ series “WandaVision.”Marvel Studios/Disney PlusEarlier this year — during “season three of the pandemic” — Jenna binged the M.C.U., the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While she appreciated the moral messaging of the movies, which are centered on a fight against evil forces, she was appalled by the lack of nonwhite characters. “You mean to tell me they’ve been making these movies for over a decade — 12 years — and you have still not managed to decenter the whiteness of this universe?” she exclaimed.Jenna and Wesley talked about these offerings from the Marvel universe: “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), “WandaVision” (2021) and “The Eternals” (2021).The Disney of Your Childhood and NowWesley and Jenna discussed how rewatching classic Disney movies with adult eyes has been unsettling, from the colonial undertones in “The Little Mermaid” (1989) to the Orientalist tropes peddled in “Lady and the Tramp” (1955).Disney, however, has tried to atone for its history. On the Disney+ streaming service, some older movies, such as “Dumbo” (1941) and “The Aristocats” (1970), contain warning labels about “negative depictions” and “mistreatment of people or cultures.” And one musical, “Song of the South” (1946), does not appear on the platform at all.Still, the labeling effort isn’t comprehensive and seems to address only movies with instances of blatant racism, Jenna noted. “It’s worth interrogating how all of these movies reinforce the ideas that are so harmful in the formation of this country,” she added.In recent years, Disney has started to make movies that feature more diverse casts and story lines, such as “Coco” (2017), “Moana” (2016) and “Soul” (2020). They’ve also remade classics, including the live-action “Mulan” (2020) and a super-realistic version of “The Lion King” (2019).“Moana” (2016) is about a Polynesian girl who embarks on a journey to save her island from destruction.DisneyBlack FuturesJenna mentioned the essay, “Fandom, Racism, and the Myth of Diversity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” which unpacks how Black and Asian stereotypes are employed in Marvel comics.She also pointed to Alisha Wormsley’s art project “There are Black People in the Future,” which began as “a response to the absence of nonwhite faces in science-fiction films and TV.”Alisha’s project gets at the importance of thriving representation in popular culture. “What is on our screens matters so much,” Jenna said, and “has a huge impact on how we see ourselves.” She added: “We have to be able to imagine ourselves whole, happy and healthy in the future for that to be possible today.”Hosted by: Jenna Wortham and Wesley MorrisProduced by: Elyssa DudleyEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Corey SchreppelExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy DorrExecutive Editor, Newsroom Audio: Lisa TobinAssistant Managing Editor: Sam DolnickSpecial thanks: Nora Keller, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani and Desiree IbekweWesley Morris is a critic at large. He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his criticism while at The Boston Globe. He has also worked at Grantland, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner. @wesley_morrisJenna Wortham is a staff writer for The Times Magazine and co-editor of the book “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew. @jennydeluxe More

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      Overlooked No More: Granville Redmond, Painter, Actor, Friend

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      He was known for his California landscapes. Deaf since childhood, he acted with Charlie Chaplin in silent films, an early example of deaf representation in Hollywood.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In the opening scene of the classic silent film “City Lights” (1931), Charlie Chaplin’s character, the Little Tramp, dangles comically from a statue while its sculptor watches in horror, raising his hand to his mouth in surprise and wiping his brow in distress.The actor portraying the sculptor, Granville Redmond, appeared in seven Chaplin films, recognizable by his wild mane of hair. Redmond was deaf, and his performances were early examples of deaf representation in Hollywood. Some believe Redmond even taught Chaplin, famous as a pantomime, how to use sign language.But Redmond was first and foremost an artist, one who inspired Chaplin with paintings of California’s natural beauty: quiet, brown tonal scenes; lonely rock monuments jutting off an island peninsula; tree-dotted meadows lit by a warm sun; blue nocturnal marshes under the dramatic glow of the moon. His paintings are considered today among the best examples of California Impressionism.“California Poppy Field” — Redmond  was admired for his landscapes depicting golden poppies, the state’s official flower. California School for the Deaf, Fremont, Gift of Edith RedmondThe Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier wrote in 1931 that Redmond was “unrivaled in the realistic depiction of California’s landscape.” Yet his style was never uniform: Some paintings left sections of the canvas exposed and chunky deposits of pigment, while others took on a smoother look.Above all he was known for his paintings of golden poppies, the state’s official flower. His poppies accented his renditions of the rolling meadows of the San Gabriel Valley, often accompanied by purple lupines. Sometimes they complemented a coastal scene with bursts of yellow highlights.“He painted them better than anyone else; I don’t think that can be argued,” said Scott A. Shields, who curated a show of Redmond’s work last year at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. “You can feel the seasons. You can feel when it’s spring, you can feel when it’s winter, and you can feel when it starts to become summer.”His paintings of poppies became a popular keepsake for tourists, to Redmond’s chagrin; he preferred painting scenes of solitude.“Alas, people will not buy them,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “They all seem to want poppies.”Chaplin supported Redmond’s painting career, offering him a room to paint in the loft of an unused building on his studio lot. On breaks, Chaplin would visit Redmond there and quietly watch him work.“Redmond paints solitude, and yet by some strange paradox the solitude is never loneliness,” Chaplin told Alice T. Terry in a 1920 article for The Jewish Deaf, a magazine.Redmond in his studio in 1917. Chaplin would sometimes visit him and quietly watch him work.Collection of Paula and Terry Trotter.He had such an appreciation for Redmond’s paintings that he took down the photographs of film celebrities from his walls so as not to detract from the Redmond work that he placed over his mantel.“You know, something puzzles me about Redmond’s pictures,” Chaplin was quoted as saying in 1925 in The Silent Worker, a newspaper for the deaf community. “There’s a wonderful joyousness about them all.”“Look at the gladness in that sky, the riot of color in those flowers,” he continued. “Sometimes I think that the silence in which he lives has developed in him some sense, some great capacity for happiness in which we others are lacking.”Grenville Richard Seymour Redmond was born in Philadelphia, Pa., on March 9, 1871, the oldest of five children of Charles and Elizabeth (Buck) Redmond. (He changed the spelling of his name to Granville in 1898 to differentiate himself from an uncle.) His father was a Civil War veteran in the Union Army and a laborer who worked across several trades. Redmond lost his ability to hear when he was 2, after coming down with scarlet fever. The next year his family moved to San Jose, Calif., to live near a family member who owned a ranch.“Moonlight on the Marsh” Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Stiles IIIn 1879, he enrolled in the California Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, and the Blind (now the California School for the Deaf) in Berkeley. It was there Redmond found an affinity for drawing under the instruction of another deaf artist, Theophilus Hope d’Estrella, who introduced him to a Saturday art class at the California School of Design. He went on to enroll in the school. In 1893, he was selected by the faculty to create a drawing for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.Redmond communicated through sign language and writing, but because of his focus on art he never mastered written English, a gap in his education that he came to regret. “In my early days in school I was always drawing, drawing,” he wrote.After graduation, he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian. In 1895, his painting “Matin d’Hiver” (“Winter Morning”), depicting a barge on a bank of the Seine, was admitted to the Paris Salon, a high honor for an artist at the time. He painted in France for a few more years, hoping to enter another painting at the Salon and win a medal, but he struggled financially and returned to California, depressed, in 1898.He married Carrie Ann Jean, who was from Indiana and also deaf, in 1899, and they had three children.Redmond’s paintings of poppies became popular among tourists — much to his chagrin. He preferred painting scenes of solitude. “Alas, people will not buy them,” he said. “They all seem to want poppies.”Collection of Thomas GianettoRedmond’s early works were Tonalist in nature, a nod to his training in San Francisco as well as to the artists of the 19th-century Barbizon school, whose landscape paintings he had come to know in France. Many of his paintings are scenes from Terminal Island, Catalina Island and Laguna Beach in Southern California. He returned to Northern California in 1908, living and painting in Monterey, San Mateo and Marin Counties.“A lot of newspapers would write that he could see more than the average person because his sense of vision was heightened,” Shields, the Crocker museum curator, said in a phone interview. “Redmond kind of believed that himself.”Redmond’s work was well received, but a lack of funds — partly because of an economic downturn at the beginning of World War I — led him to move back to Los Angeles and try his hand at acting.In the silent-movie era Redmond’s disability, coupled with his artistic inclination, worked to his advantage. Chaplin saw him as a natural for small parts in his films because Redmond expressed himself through gestures, Shields said. The two men communicated on the set by signing to each other.Sometimes Redmond’s deafness worked its way into plotlines. In Arthur Rosson’s “You’d Be Surprised” (1926), Redmond played a coroner pretending to be a deaf valet. Only viewers who knew sign language could follow the conversation.The movies also provided him with a new market for his art; buyers included the Hollywood elite, like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.Redmond died of complications of a heart condition on May 24, 1935. He was 64. (Chaplin died at 88 in 1977.)Alice Terry, the writer for The Jewish Deaf magazine, saw artistic commonalities in the two friends.“For more than two years now, these two have worked side by side,” she wrote in 1920, “Chaplin, silently and dramatically, by his ingenious trivialities, creating mirth and sunshine for millions of tired people; and Redmond, silently and none the less effectively, brightening the lives of all, by his radiant, appealing pictures on canvas.” More

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      ‘Shiva Baby’ Review: It’s Complicated

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      The potential land mines of a young woman’s life are set to explode simultaneously in this tense comedy from Emma Seligman.“Just try to behave yourself today,” her mother pleads. But alas, larger forces of the universe seem to be working against Danielle (Rachel Sennott), who finds all of the potential land mines in her life exploding simultaneously at the shiva of a family friend in Emma Seligman’s nerve-racking comedy “Shiva Baby.”Danielle is feeling especially aimless; her parents are still paying her bills, and the money she tells them she makes from babysitting is, in fact, contributed by “sugar daddies” (older men who pay her for sexual favors and attention). She’s already rankled by the interrogations of family friends, and the unexpected presence of an ex-girlfriend (Molly Gordon), when her primary benefactor (Danny Deferrari) walks in the door — with his heretofore unmentioned wife (Dianna Agron) and baby in tow.The single location and collapsed time frame of Seligman’s screenplay give it the efficiency of a well-constructed stage play. But Danielle’s ordeal is as tense as any thriller, with the strained small talk, copious side-eyes and unapologetic gossip augmented by nervous camerawork, jarring sound effects and a jangling, dissonant musical score. It’s rare for a film to simultaneously balance such wildly divergent tones, to interweave big laughs with gut-wrenching discomfort, but Seligman pulls it off.Her cast helps. Sennott is a revelation, and that matters; she carries much of the picture’s weight on her face, and its ability to express the mounting levels of stress and deadpan reactions. She’s surrounded by some of the best character actors in the game (including a standout turn from Fred Melamed as her father), while she and Gordon beautifully convey the pain, anger and leftover heat of their relationship.Seligman piles on the complications with the clockwork precision of a Rube Goldberg machine, but never at the service of the genuine emotions at the picture’s core. Near the conclusion, Danielle surrenders to the sheer helplessness of being completely overwhelmed, a moment that perhaps lands with more impact after a year of collective isolation and fear. “Shiva Baby” knows that feeling, and another important one besides: that in the midst of nonstop stress and distraction, a moment of quiet, unprompted tenderness can make all the difference.Shiva BabyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In select theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Moffie’ Review: A Bleak Coming-of-Age

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      This grueling film about the South African military going to war with Angola is replete with vicious, stark depictions of racism and homophobia.From the mid-1960s to 1990, South Africa not only imposed apartheid but in a sense exported it. In Angola and nearby regions, white South African armies ostensibly fought communism in a long border war. Starting at age 16, white South African boys went through a period of mandatory military service.The title of the often grueling movie “Moffie” is a derogatory Afrikaans term for homosexual. As young Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer) heads off for training in 1981, his father hands him a rolled-up girlie magazine. “For fuel,” he explains, as Nicholas shrugs, clearly bemused. In a trench much later on, he forges a mild physical connection with another soldier.This is not a prudent move. This young man’s army is a particularly brutal one. The training sequences bring to mind Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” but with a lot more racism. Not that these young men need to be trained in racism itself. The way a gaggle of them terrorize a lone Black man at a train depot, where they stop on the way to camp, is stomach-churning. And the homophobia displayed by the recruits isn’t casual; it’s vicious.Hilton Pelser, playing a berserk drill sergeant named Brand, sometimes makes R. Lee Ermey of “Jacket” look like Don Knotts. (For Pelser, this is an almost shocking reversal from his work in both “Kissing Booth” movies.) There is talk of a secret ward where soldiers with psychological issues — mostly discussed in terms of sexuality — are shipped and subjected to further trauma.Brummer, who bears a passing resemblance to a young Peter O’Toole, is attractive and enigmatic as a young man finding himself in less-than-encouraging circumstances. The movie’s story line, adapted from a 2006 novel of the same name by André Carl van der Merwe, keeps its feet on the ground, rarely allowing the characters to express desire beyond implying it.Because, as the movie shows, in the world of this army, merely exchanging a glance with another soldier could kick up enough homophobic fear and rage to start a riot. The director Oliver Hermanus also draws from Claire Denis’s “Beau Travail” in depicting attractive young male bodies. He gets too arty with the soundtrack at times — scoring a “Fight Club”-like “spin the bottle” game to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor is a bit much — but in depicting the horrific specifics of this particular man’s awful military experience, Hermanus delivers in abundance.MoffieNot rated. In Afrikaans and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In select theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘The Tunnel’ Review: Fire in the Hole

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      Painfully cliché but sufficiently diverting, this is the latest in a string of disaster movies from Norway.Filled with breathtaking fjords and steep, snow-capped mountains, Norway relies on hundreds of tunnels to connect its hinterland communities to the rest of the country. Essential as they are, these tunnels — per “The Tunnel’s” foreboding opening titles — are also sites of potential devastation. A collision within these cavernous pathways could trigger a domino effect of raging fires, chaos and survivalist panic as blinding black smoke threatens to asphyxiate those struggling to find a way out.Surprise, surprise. This is precisely what happens in the director Pal Oie’s formulaic, but sufficiently diverting thriller, the unofficial third in a string of popular disaster movies from Norway with self-explanatory titles (i.e. “The Wave” and its sequel, “The Quake”).The crisis unfolds via multiple perspectives — a family of four trapped inside the tunnel; an obnoxious businessman who, by chance, avoids the accident; a traffic controller remotely guiding rescue efforts. The bulk of the film, however, follows a burly firefighter, Stein (Thorbjorn Harr), whose feisty teenage daughter, Elise (Ylva Fuglerud), finds herself in peril after defiantly hopping on an Oslo-bound charter bus for the holidays. Stein and his crew of rescuers are out of their depth against the miles-long hellhole. Nevertheless, news of Elise’s whereabouts sends her intrepid father to the rescue.The human dimension is painfully cliché, and Oie’s clunky orchestration of intersecting individual stories flattens the film’s overall momentum. It does, however, manage to eke out moments of genuine suspense and harrowing claustrophobia with its straightforward premise and contained, small-scale action. “The Tunnel” isn’t a bad time, but it’s also not terribly memorable — a shame given the familiar jitters of driving down those long, dark passages.The TunnelNot rated. In Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘The Power’ Review: Night Terrors During a London Blackout

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      The writer and director Corinna Faith doesn’t wait for the lights to dim to unleash a creaky, eerie atmosphere.In 1970s Britain, as the government and trade unions were warring, blackouts were regularly ordered to conserve power. During one of these pitch-black nights, a timid young woman named Val (Rose Williams) finds herself working the dark shift on her first day of duty as a trainee nurse at a run-down London hospital. The writer and director Corinna Faith doesn’t wait for the lights to dim to unleash the uneasiness in “The Power.” The creaky, eerie atmosphere is felt even in daylight as Val starts to hear children’s indecipherable whispers. “A place people die in should never be allowed to get that dark,” one nurse says, anxiously building up the frights to come, which work to a mixed degree.When the lights do go off, the terrors ramp up with bent finger joints, bodily fluids and a heart-pounding synth score when a disturbed spirit latches onto Val. Faith displays a familiarity with the language of horror with these spectacles and shots of ghostly reflections that effectively play with the notion of a spectral possession. She also nicely complements supernatural tensions with hostile human ones as Val clashes with other employees, namely the hospital matron and an old friend who also works as a nurse. But Val remains so wide-eyed and naïve for so long that you spend most of the runtime wondering when she might grow a backbone.By the final act, “The Power” reveals a double meaning with its title, with Faith introducing a feminist-bent social commentary — it refers not just to electrical power but the manipulative kind. Unfortunately, that message and the previous happenings feel so disjointed that the film stumbles in delivering a cohesive vision.The PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More