in Movies
The Biggest Influencers of the Pandemic May Not Be Who You Assume
Forget Instagram. Cherchez the costume designers. It’s time they got their due. More
Movies
Subterms
More stories
- in Television
For Eddie Izzard, a ‘99’ Ice Cream and a Waterloo Sunset Are Wondrous Things
The star of “Six Minutes to Midnight,” opening Friday, tells why Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, “Great Expectations,” David Bowie and London landmarks hold meaning for her.Eddie Izzard, the British comedian-actor-writer-activist-endurance runner, tends to push herself to the limit. And then some.“I do find — because I had my sort of 10 wilderness years before things took off — that I’ve tried very hard to stay four steps ahead of where I need to be,” Izzard, who is transgender, said in a video interview from London.She performs stand-up in English, French, German and Spanish. She channels 21 characters in a one-person show of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” She runs multiple marathons for charity — clocking 32 in 31 days in January, each followed by a comedy routine, for her Make Humanity Great Again campaign, which supports global unity and tolerance.And still, Izzard found time to co-write, executive produce and star in “Six Minutes to Midnight,” set in 1939, about a teacher at a finishing school in the south of England whose students include the daughters of high-ranking Nazis. The film, out Friday, based on a true story she learned about from a museum curator in Bexhill-on-Sea, where her family is from, was a 10-year process: five to develop the characters and five to get her acting to a level where she could play a lead, alongside stars like Judi Dench.Catch her while you can: Izzard hopes to go into politics in the near future as a member of Parliament for the Labour party, during which she’ll take a hiatus from performing.With her career in high gear, the timing may not be perfect, but she’s not worried. “There’s the critical momentum you need when you’re going in,” she said, “but that will stick around for when you come out.”Izzard channeled her trademark whimsy into her list of 10 cultural essentials — from the fantasy world of the Narnia books to the simple delights of an ice cream cone — which she wrote herself. KATHRYN SHATTUCK1. Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations My mum used to love to listen to classical music. My mum and dad were married in ‘Adan (Aden) in Yemen and Dad talked of her liking to go up onto the roof of a local hotel and play classical music from a gramophone record as the sun set. I think that, amongst others records, she would have played Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, as it was one of the classical albums that was often played in the house. My mum died when I was only 6 years old, but I do remember hearing different albums played at home in the years she was alive, and this one stuck with me from an early age. The fact that he was called Edward, and so was I, didn’t hurt.2. “30 Rock” “30 Rock” is just gold dust. If you have a brain and a sense of humor, just buy the first episode. If it grabs you then just do what I did and download the whole box set. The height of great comedy is to be as intelligent as it is bonkers, and this is it. It’s the kind of sitcom that probably only could exist in a post-“Seinfeld” America, and it probably had to fight just as hard as “Seinfeld” did for its own existence over its first few seasons.3. “David Bowie: Finding Fame” The key thing in this documentary to take home to your brain is that it shows the 10 wilderness years before Bowie took off with Ziggy Stardust in 1972. One needs to know that he was in his first band in 1962, when the Beatles were just taking off. So the stamina that 10 years adrift taught him, and also the few times when it looked like things were taking off but then didn’t, must have informed the rest of his career. I didn’t realize until I watched this that he was at times, in the early days, way off course but he kept regrouping and coming back.4. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” by C.S. Lewis It is a great mystical adventure story to feed the imagination of kids. You have to understand that I’m dyslexic and so read very few books, but I read all of the seven Narnia ones when I was young. I later found out that Lewis was lacing in religion to the series, and this made every feel a little hoodwinked about the whole thing. But later, I realized you could just ignore the symbolism if you wanted to.5. “The Great Escape” A classic war film and one I’ve watched many times. The fact it is based in truth, when a lot of war films in those days were not, makes it even better. I like the film so much, I’ve even watched it in German. As I do my stand-up in German, I was playing Berlin, and I bought the DVD of the film there. If you switch on the German audio track and just have English subtitles, it is a different film. Suddenly they’re all talking German, and so it just becomes a battle between an extreme right regime and people fighting for a return to humanity.6. “Waterloo Sunset” Written by Ray Davies of the Kinks and performed by them. It’s a song that I’ve always thought was accidentally perfect for me as I knew exactly where to see a Waterloo sunset. Waterloo Bridge is my favorite London bridge (we have many). When I was a street performer at Covent Garden, I used to walk across the bridge to perform in front of the Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. And at some point soon after Covid, I will perform inside the Festival Hall. And then I’ll watch another sunset and I will play “Waterloo Sunset” again.7. “Pogles’ Wood” If you search for “Pogles’ Wood: Honey Bees” on YouTube, you can see an episode of this early animated TV series that I was mesmerized by when I was about 5 years old. Normally if you watch back at TV shows that you found entertaining at that age, you will find them tired and old-fashioned in modern times. But “Pogles’ Wood” still holds up with its mixture of animated characters, weirdly beguiling music and short pieces of live-action documentary that showed and taught you things from the real world.8. The “99” Ice Cream What did people do before ice cream? Nobody knows. But the “99” is a staple of the British ice cream world. It is just a basic wafer cone with soft white vanilla ice cream swirled on top of it, but the crowning difference that makes it a thing of genius is a chocolate Flake stuck diagonally (always diagonally) into the side of the vanilla ice cream.Once you buy your “99,” experienced users will have their own eating ritual to perform. Mine is always to push the chocolate Flake with one finger so that you push it down into the center of the cone. Then you close the hole in the ice cream over with your tongue and carry on eating the cone as if it never had a chocolate Flake. Then, when you are down to the final handle part of the cone, you have a heady mixture of wafer, vanilla ice cream and flaky chocolate to feast upon.9. “Great Expectations” Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, and slightly bizarrely, I was born on Feb. 7, 1962, 150 years later. Having never read a great work of literature, I thought I should start with a work of Dickens due to the weird link. I chose “Great Expectations” to firstly read and record it to become an audiobook (which I have now done), and then I thought I should turn it into a solo show. So I commissioned my older brother, Mark, to adapt it down from over 20 hours of book into a 90-minute solo performance.Apart from it being one of Dickens’ more mature books and a great story of Pip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella, “Great X” is also interesting for me as it starts off down to the South East of London, along the river Thames towards the mouth of the river. This is the Chatham, Kent area of England and was where Dickens grew up, and the book starts here in about the 1820s, which is when he was there as a child. So you hear about “the marshes” direct from his childhood, a place that was barren in the winter and glorious in the summer.10. The Parks of London I do find them a joy. Are they culture? I think so, for they can inspire. Two of our biggest are slap bang in the center of London. They are Hyde Park and Kensington Park. They are essentially one large park, but they have West Carriage Drive running between that separates them. The ancient Serpentine River runs through them, which was long ago turned into a boating lake. Speakers’ Corner, where anyone can pull up and hold forth on any subject, is in the northeast corner of Hyde Park — which is right by the beginning of the old Roman road of Watling Street. I encourage anyone to take a walk from the bottom corner of one park to the top corner of the other park on a warm and sunny day, and it will feel like a walk in the countryside. More
- in Movies
‘Donny’s Bar Mitzvah’ Review: A Rude and Raunchy Coming-of-Age
A boy becomes a man, and the writer-director Jonathan Kaufman is there, like a faux-VHS cameraman, to capture the juvenile festivities that ensue.The year is 1998. Donny Drucker (Steele Stebbins) is 13 years old and his family has thrown him a glitzy, red-carpet-worthy bar mitzvah, inviting classmates and relatives to toast his newfound adulthood. Shot entirely like camcorder footage from the point of view of a hired videographer, Jonathan Kaufman’s debut film, which he wrote and directed, has all the potential to be endearing and nostalgic, even if it’s slim on plot. Instead, “Donny’s Bar Mitzvah” — which is littered with chaotic party scenes of horny, dysfunctional attendees — oscillates between offensive and offensively unamusing.There’s little effort made to make the film actually look and feel like the ’90s. While it’s in 4:3 aspect ratio, the staticky old-school filter fails to lose its Instagram-era veneer. Beyond that, its tone-deaf comedy suggests an era when crude jokes about sensitive issues like race and addiction were commonplace and therefore acceptable.The only semblance of narrative cohesion here is the ridiculous undercover investigation of a literal “party pooper” (a side-plot that involves the cast’s biggest name, Danny Trejo), but otherwise “Donny’s Bar Mitzvah” is so scattered with half-baked skits that it’s not hard to imagine a better, funnier version of this movie made by an actual 13-year-old. It’s only 79 minutes long, but this critic spent the entire time sitting through gross-out gags hoping to laugh just once.Donny’s Bar MitzvahNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon and Apple TV. More
- in Movies
In the Shadow of Nollywood, Filmmakers Examine Boko Haram
“The Milkmaid” and other African productions are putting extremism under the microscope and drawing diaspora audiences in the process.In the moving Nigerian drama “The Milkmaid,” Aisha and Zainab are Fulani sisters taken hostage by Boko Haram insurgents, the extremist group that in 2014 kidnapped more than 250 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok. With sweeping landscapes shot in Taraba State in the northeastern part of the country, the film, written and directed by Desmond Ovbiagele, deftly tells a story both hopeful in the possibility of reconciliation and harrowing in the journey to get there.The film is the latest entry in a growing body of African cinema focused on the grim toll exacted by the terrorists of Boko Haram. In addition to “The Milkmaid,” there’s Netflix’s “The Delivery Boy”; “Stolen Daughters: Kidnapped by Boko Haram” on HBO; and “Daughters of Chibok,” a documentary short that won Best VR Immersive Story at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. Each has examined the magnitude of violence the extremist faction has inflicted on northern parts of Africa’s most populous country and the neighboring countries of Niger and Cameroon.When Nigeria’s film regulatory board recommended that 25 minutes of footage be cut from “The Milkmaid” and then curtailed showings in theaters there in the fall, the producers and director sought to cultivate audiences in Zimbabwe and Cameroon; the drama eventually earned the prize for best film in an African language (the story is told entirely in Hausa, Fulani and Arabic) at the 2020 African Movie Academy Awards. It was also Nigeria’s selection for the international feature Oscar, though the movie did not make the final cut.Despite the censorship and truncated distribution, however, “The Milkmaid” and other movies in this emerging genre have found a diasporic audience abroad.“‘The Milkmaid’ is anchored to a certain social discourse we’re seeing unfold currently,” said Mahen Bonetti, founder of the New York African Film Festival, which chose the drama as the opening selection last month for its 2021 edition. “We’re seeing a rise of extremism and religious fanaticism, particularly amongst youth, and witnessing the disintegration of families and bonds that once held communities together. And young filmmakers are being brave and telling these stories.”The amplification of these stories, namely those of Boko Haram’s female victims, was especially important to Ovbiagele, who also produced “The Milkmaid” over the course of three years.“I felt we didn’t hear enough from the victims of insurgency and who they really were,” Ovbiagele said in an interview by phone from Lagos. “They’re not always educated” like the Chibok schoolgirls, he added, and “most don’t get international attention. But despite that, their stories deserved to be heard too.”Kalunta, front, and Maryam Booth as sisters captured by Boko Haram.The Milkmaid/Danono MediaAnd so, Ovbiagele sought to recreate the plight of Boko Haram victims the best way he knew how as someone with little intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the organization. After a community of survivors from northern Borno State relocated near his home in Lagos, he spent months gathering first-person accounts from survivors — women and girls who were piecing their lives together, he said, and making sense of their new realities as orphans, widows and victims of sexual assault. He also asked local nongovernmental organizations who were working with Boko Haram victims to properly assess the challenges faced by the survivors.In “The Milkmaid,” the young title character, Aisha (Anthonieta Kalunta), is captured, along with her sister, Zainab (Maryam Booth), by Boko Haram insurgents who turn the women into servants — and soldiers’ wives — in a terrorist camp. Aisha is able to escape but eventually returns to the settlement to find Zainab, hardened and indoctrinated with zealous devotion, now enlisting female volunteers for suicide missions.But creating a movie in Nollywood — the nickname for Nigeria’s thriving movie industry — is not without challenges. Certain elements of producing a full-length film — financing, endless paperwork and audience building — would be familiar to filmmakers everywhere. But making a serious drama about Islamic fanaticism — in a country where roughly half the residents are Muslim and where recent instances of religious terrorism have gained unwelcome global attention — makes such a task especially daunting. And driven to make a movie that appealed to a larger international audience accustomed to sleek, big-budget Hollywood productions, Ovbiagele reasoned that “The Milkmaid” wasn’t a Nollywood production but rather its own form of cinema in Nigeria.The Nigerian movie business has its origins in local markets, where storytellers on limited budgets readily met the sensibilities of local viewers. Eager to generate profits and offset rampant piracy, filmmakers would quickly churn out full-length, shoddy productions.However, the sometimes hackneyed movies served a purpose, explained Dr. Ikechukwu Obiaya, who, as the director of the Nollywood Studies Center at Pan Atlantic University in Lagos, studies movie productions. Nollywood has always been “a chronicler of social history,” he said, paraphrasing the Nigerian film scholar Jonathan Haynes. Obiaya added, “During Nollywood’s early years, often something that happened one week would be depicted in a Nollywood film available at the local market the next.” And the industry has made movies about Boko Haram. But productions like “The Milkmaid” have “shown greater creative growth in the industry as a whole and in turn, demonstrated a greater interest from the rest of the world in Nigerian stories.”Ultimately, Ovbiagele wants to continue making films he feels passionately about and hopes the film will impart a lasting impression on viewers. “I hope audiences will leave with a deeper insight into experiences and motivations of both the victims and the perpetrators of terrorist organizations and specifically the resilience and resourcefulness of the survivors.” More
- in Television
What’s on TV This Week: ‘Coded Bias’ and ‘Tina’
PBS will air a documentary that examines the biases embedded in algorithms and other technology. And HBO to debut a documentary about Tina Turner.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, March 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: CODED BIAS 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The filmmaker Shalini Kantayya (“Catching the Sun”) examines the ways biases and inequities have become embedded in algorithms and other technology in this, her latest documentary. Kantayya focuses on the M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini, who has done prominent work on the subject. (Buolamwini was a witness at a congressional hearing on facial-detection technology in 2019, an event that the documentary covers.) Kantayya also looks at how these digital biases play out in the real world using examples in the United States and abroad, where algorithms can determine who qualifies for certain housing or who gets stopped by law enforcement. The documentary “tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs,” Devika Girish wrote in her review for The New York Times last year. She added that the movie “moves deftly between pragmatic and larger political critiques, arguing that it’s not just that the tech is faulty; even if it were perfect, it would infringe dangerously on people’s liberties.”AFRAID: FEAR IN AMERICA’S COMMUNITIES OF COLOR 9 p.m. on CNN. Just days after killings at three Atlanta-area massage parlors amplified fears about the recent rise of violence against Asian-Americans, the CNN anchors Amara Walker, Anderson Cooper, Victor Blackwell and Ana Cabrera will host a discussion about the state of hate in America, and how crimes like last week’s terrorize communities of color.TuesdayBUGSY MALONE (1976) 8 p.m. on TCM. Pinstripe suits and potty-mouth language come together in this bizarre mobster musical satire, which casts a group of young actors (including Jodie Foster and Scott Baio) in a prohibition-era gangster story. The movie’s writer and director, Alan Parker, replaces bullets with whipped cream and Model Ts with toy pedal cars; and his story is injected with musical numbers by the songwriter Paul Williams. The results, Vincent Canby wrote in his 1976 review for The Times, are “wildly uneven but imaginative and stylish.”WednesdayA scene from “Fast-Forward: Look Into Your Future.”FLX Entertainment/Twin Cities PBSFAST-FORWARD: LOOK INTO YOUR FUTURE 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Hollywood makeup artists might get jealous of the technology used in this documentary, which follows several families who experiment with suits designed by M.I.T. researchers that allow their wearers to get a preview of what their bodies might feel like in old age. Narrated by Rosario Dawson, with original music by Andrew Bird, the documentary uses the technology as a tool to encourage the families to plan for the future.ThursdayCASINO (1995) 6 p.m. on VH1. If the whipped-cream Tommy guns in “Bugsy Malone” (airing Tuesday) are too childish for you, consider instead this over-the-top Scorsese mob movie, where the bullets are real and the liquor is consumed legally. The story, based on a nonfiction book by the journalist Nicholas Pileggi, spans years. It revolves around a mobster (Robert De Niro) whose gig managing a Las Vegas casino leads to murder and betrayal. “Scorsese has been here and done this already in ‘Goodfellas,’ but not with his new film’s blistering bitterness or its peacock extravagance,” Janet Maslin wrote in her 1995 review for The Times. “The long, astonishing Copacabana sequence in ‘Goodfellas,’” she added, “was only a warm-up for this.”FridayDanny Glover in “To Sleep With Anger.”SVC Films, via Kobal CollectionTO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) 10 p.m. on TCM. The filmmaker Charles Burnett paints a surreal portrait of a family in this poetic drama, which was Burnett’s third feature. Paul Butler and Mary Alice play a mother and father in Los Angeles. The couple’s relationship, and more, start to waver after an old friend, Harry (Danny Glover), who they haven’t seen in years, arrives at their doorstep out of the blue. When “To Sleep with Anger” was reissued by the Criterion Collection in 2019, The Atlantic’s David Sims referred to it as “one of the best movies of the 1990s, an American masterpiece that remains relatively unheralded almost 30 years after its release.”SaturdayA scene from “Tina.”Rhonda Graam/HBOTINA (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. The life of Tina Turner — her rise to stardom, her escape from an abusive relationship, her cementation as a figure of rock resilience — is revisited in this new documentary from Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin (“Undefeated”). The film combines archival footage with present-day interviews, including with Angela Bassett, Oprah Winfrey and the playwright Katori Hall, who was the lead book writer for the recent musical “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.” Expect Turner herself, who is also interviewed, to bring her legendary persona down to earth. “I don’t necessarily want to be a ‘strong’ person,” she told The Times in 2019. “I had a terrible life. I just kept going. You just keep going, and you hope that something will come.”THE 52ND N.A.A.C.P. IMAGE AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET and CBS. You’d be hard pressed to find an awards season event more wide-ranging than the N.A.A.C.P.’s Image Awards, which honor film, television, music and writing all at once. Nominees this year include Regina Hall, who is up for the best actress in a comedy series prize for “Black Monday”; Delroy Lindo, a best actor in a motion picture nominee for his performance in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”; and the writer Brit Bennett, whose novel “The Vanishing Half” is up for the top literary-fiction prize.SundayGREAT PERFORMANCES: MOVIES FOR GROWNUPS AWARDS WITH AARP THE MAGAZINE 8 p.m. on PBS. At 59, George Clooney probably isn’t quite old enough to qualify for senior discounts at his local multiplex yet, but he was still on the cover of AARP’s magazine earlier this year. He’s also slated to receive a career achievement award at this year’s edition of the AARP’s awards show, which recognizes films and TV programs. The NBC anchor Hoda Kotb will host. More
- in Movies
‘Promising Young Woman’ and ‘Borat’ Win at Writers Guild Awards
In three of the last five years WGA winners have gone on to take the screenplay Oscars. But union rules mean that not all of the Academy Award nominees were eligible here.Two of this award season’s most unique contenders triumphed Sunday night, as the dark dramedy “Promising Young Woman” and the heavily improvised “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” took honors at the Writers Guild of America ceremony.In the original-screenplay category, the “Promising Young Woman” writer-director Emerald Fennell faced stiff competition in the form of 13-time WGA Award nominee Aaron Sorkin, whose “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is also considered a top Oscar contender. But Fennell was nominated for a best-director Oscar while Sorkin was snubbed, and the WGA win for “Promising Young Woman” is another key laurel for that film as it heads into the homestretch of the season.In his acceptance speech for “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen joked that the improvised movie may have won a screenplay award because it “employed 60 percent of the Writers Guild.” The large team of writers included Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Dan Swimer, Peter Baynham, Erica Rivinoja, Dan Mazer, Jena Friedman and Lee Kern, with a story by Baron Cohen, Hines, Swimer and Nina Pedrad. Because the movie is a sequel based on a pre-existing character, it won in the adapted screenplay category.In three of the last five years — including 2020, when “Jojo Rabbit” and “Parasite” triumphed — the two films that won the WGA Awards also went on to win their respective Oscar races. But two years ago, the guild gave its original-screenplay prize to “Eighth Grade,” a script that Oscar voters had failed to even nominate.And narrow rules of guild eligibility often preclude Oscar front-runners from taking part in the WGA Awards at all: This year, “Nomadland,” “Minari” and “The Father” were all ruled ineligible, since they were not written under a bargaining agreement from the WGA or its sister guilds. Still, if Fennell and the “Nomadland” writer Chloé Zhao go on to win the original and adapted screenplay Oscars, it will be the first year when both script races were won by women who were the sole credited writers of their films.WGA nominees were asked to send acceptance speeches ahead of time; only the winner’s would be played during the ceremony, which was pretaped and hosted by Kal Penn. Here are some of the night’s other top winners:Documentary screenplay: “The Dissident,” Mark Monroe, Bryan FogelDrama series: “The Crown,” Peter Morgan, Jonathan WilsonComedy series: “Ted Lasso,” Jane Becker, Leann Bowen, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, Jamie Lee, Jason Sudeikis, Phoebe Walsh, Bill Wrubel. (“Ted Lasso” also won best new series.)Original long form: “Mrs. America,” Tanya Barfield, Joshua Griffith, Sharon Hoffman, Boo Killebrew, Micah Schraft, April Shih, Dahvi WallerAdapted long form: “The Queen’s Gambit,” Scott Frank, Allan Scott, based on the novel by Walter Tevis More
- in Movies
‘Before the Dying of the Light’ Review: Moroccan Cinema’s Attempted Revolution
This Ali Essafi documentary presents an inspiring view of the roiling visual-arts scene in 1970s Morocco.In 1968, the first substantive film festival was hosted in Tangier, Morocco, an event not mentioned in this impressionistic documentary directed by Ali Essafi. For the most part, “Before the Dying of the Light” is an immersive creation — its on-screen texts mostly philosophical rather than explanatory.The date of that festival is significant, though, because it can be seen as an indicator of emergent Moroccan cinema, which in the 1970s aligned itself with other visual arts and briefly, under the oppressive regime of King Hassan II, tried to forge an authentic politically pertinent body of work.
Essafi assembles and presents staggering images. He juxtaposes on-the-street archival interviews; multiple covers of literary magazines, both in Arabic and French (France claimed the country as a “protectorate” from the 1910s until the mid-1950s); newsreel clips; scenes from European films shot in Morocco; and Morocco-produced mainstream films (including 1973’s “A Thousand and One Hands,” directed by Souheil Ben-Barka and starring the American actress Mimsy Farmer).These are interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the 1974 film “About Some Meaningless Events.” Its filmmakers, led by the director Mostafa Derkaoui, are very self-interrogating, as was the custom in leftist aesthetics around the world at the time. Contemplating how to best use working-class people in the picture, a team member says, “We could write a script”; another immediately counters, “No.” Their obsessing about how to best capture the spirit of their times resulted in a picture that was suppressed soon after it was completed.Even for viewers with little grounding in Moroccan history, Essafi’s film offers an inspiring view of a roiling period of artistic exploration.Before the Dying of the LightNot rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 8 minutes. Watch through MoMA’s Virtual Cinema. More - in Movies
‘Luz’ Review: Love In and Out of Lockup
In this romantic drama from Jon Garcia, two men find love in prison, then try to make it work on the outside.The lovers in the romantic drama “Luz” don’t meet under ideal circumstances. Ruben (Ernesto Reyes) is a new inmate at a minimum-security prison, and he is assigned to bunk with Carlos (Jesse Tayeh), who promptly threatens him over the use of their shared sink. When Ruben fights back, it’s the first sign that the duo might be evenly matched.Carlos begins to warm to Ruben, and he becomes a mentor as Ruben adjusts to prison life. As roommates, they eat together, and they spar together. They share stories from their pasts and dreams for their futures. They are intimate before they ever have sex.The film follows their relationship from its humble beginnings to their lives outside of prison, after the couple weathers a separation caused by differing sentence lengths. When Ruben finds Carlos after his release, Carlos invites his former lover back into his life.Together, the pair has to decide if the connection they made in confinement is worth carrying into their free lives — if each wants the other to meet and merge with family. The affair between Ruben and Carlos alternates between passionate sex and whispered intimacies.The film’s writer and director, Jon Garcia, treats the physicality of their romance in a frank way, staging realistic love scenes that show the attraction between the characters. But Garcia is less adept at finding passion in between scenes of sex. There is a seriousness to Ruben and Carlos’s relationship that becomes enervating. The first time strings resound in the film’s score, they produce is a plaintive, engrossing feeling. When the same theme plays for the 15th time, the romance feels monotonous.LUZNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters and on Laemmle’s Virtual Cinema. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More
