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      ‘Rebel Ridge’ Review: Their Corruption, His Destruction

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      This crime drama from Jeremy Saulnier stars Aaron Pierre as a man whose run-in with small-town police officers uncovers uncomfortable secrets.A veteran arrives in a rural town to find his friend. He comes in peace — but the police demand submission. “Rebel Ridge,” written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, wears its “First Blood” inspirations as boldly as John Rambo sported a patch of the American flag. That franchise distended into Afghanistan, where Sylvester Stallone machine-gunned the Red Army during the long Soviet war there. But Saulnier (“Blue Ruin,” “Green Room”), a specialist in thrillers set in the margins of society, keeps this efficient tale of ethical outrage as simple as a punch to the throat — or rather, given its stark cinematography, like a shot of someone patiently walking up to a bully and then punching them in the throat.The law remains more or less the same as it was 40 years ago, when it didn’t strain the audience’s credulity to imagine conservative cops loathing a hippie drifter. These Southern officers are nearly all indistinguishable, fatuous men with cropped goatees and dull stares, headed up by a swaggering police chief (Don Johnson) who drawls that he wouldn’t cut a guy a break for “eee-ternal life and a catfish sandwich.”But today, and with pointed reason, Saulnier has cast Aaron Pierre, a Black actor, as Terry, a former Marine who is simply pedaling a bicycle when he gets stopped and frisked. The officers, played by Emory Cohen and David Denman, confiscate the cash Terry’s carrying to bail out his cousin (C.J. LeBlanc) who’s been arrested on a weed possession charge, plus a few extra dollars Terry intended to use to buy a new truck. Here, as in the real world, “civil forfeiture,” the seizure of money or property from people who have not been charged with or convicted of a crime, is extra income for police departments. (Terry’s situation, not an uncommon one, mirrors an incident reported in The New York Times in 2021.)The local judge (James Cromwell) won’t help, and the court’s bail collector (Steve Zissis) is unswayed by Terry’s argument that the money to free his cousin is already in the building. (“This is surreal!” Terry sputters.) No one mentions race, not for a long while, and no one has to. The tension is in the cops’ confidence that they can do anything they want to Terry, in how doggedly he remains civil, long past the point where we want him to lose his cool. In one scene, he even appears to bring them doughnuts.Terry will snap, but the dominant mood isn’t revenge — it’s futility. The recent push for increased oversight of law enforcement is folded into the story, yet the fixes haven’t helped. One plot point centers on when a cruiser’s dashboard camera starts recording, and there’s a running gag about the linguistic shift from “nonlethal” to “less-lethal” weapons that hammers home the idea that the damage hasn’t changed, only the veneer. But the script resorts to a go-there, get-the-thing structure that sends Terry and his only supporter, a scrappy low-level court employee named Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), skulking around to obtain taped evidence of police abuse. Given the unshakable mood of cynicism, it’s hard to get very invested in their quest — especially when we’re already aware of so many similar videos that haven’t changed a thing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Red Rooms’ Review: A True Crime Obsession Unravels

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      A mysterious young woman becomes deeply invested in the trial of an accused serial killer in this courtroom thriller.“Red Rooms,” a disturbing courtroom thriller from Quebec, explores the fascination with serial killers and true crime from an enticingly fresh perspective. Directed by Pascal Plante, it takes the genre’s ingredients — vulnerable girls, male sickos — and adjusts them to the loneliness of the internet age.Kelly-Anne (a formidable Juliette Gariépy), a model, is deeply invested in the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) — in part because she looks like the brunette version of one of his victims. Ludovic, a gaunt figure with sleepy eyes, has been accused of killing three teenage girls — not just killing, but torturing, disfiguring and dismembering them. These repugnant acts were captured on video, and anonymous users on the dark web paid extravagant sums to watch.The first half of the film, composed of glacial pans and unsettlingly static images, builds up to the day of the trial when the full-length videos are presented to the jury. A conspiracy-peddler, Clémentine (Laurie Babin), believes Ludovic is innocent — she brings to mind a Manson groupie — but Kelly-Anne is something else, a kind of cyber-samurai who lives alone in a sterile high-rise and has a small fortune in bitcoin from playing online poker. The two women are always the first in line to secure a spot in the trial gallery and they bond, uneasily and with ambiguous motives, until the true nature of Kelly-Anne’s voyeurism pushes Clémentine away.The film’s tension rides on the unknown, a paranoid vibe accented by Kelly-Anne’s shady online presence and Gariépy’s stark, sphinx-like performance. With a gaze that flings daggers, Gariépy’s an anchoring force that makes the more deranged second act feel credible. Most importantly, it’s her face — the way she looks at Ludovic in the courtroom or reacts to audio of screaming and chainsaw-whizzing — that works together with the film’s restraint to tug at our morbid curiosity.In one scene, Kelly-Anne watches one of the videos and all we see is the menacing blood-red glow of the torture room illuminating her enraptured expression. What could be so awful? So hypnotizing? We’re dying to know.Red RoomsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. More

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      ‘Hoard’ Review: Dirty Romancing

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      A spiraling teenager and a tenderhearted garbage collector bond over debris in this stunningly unconventional drama.Mothering and madness, trash and trauma erect an empire of filth in “Hoard,” Luna Carmoon’s gut-punchingly original first feature. In scenes that can shift from warily unsettling to plainly disgusting, Carmoon rubs our noses in the dreadful consequences of maternal dysfunction.For Maria (a captivating Lily-Beau Leach), the grotty home in London that she shares with her mother, Cynthia (Hayley Squires), may be rank and rodent-rich, but it’s filled with magic and love. Together, they sing and play games among the fruits of their nightly rummage through neighborhood dumpsters. At school, though, Maria is too ripe and sleep deprived to make friends.“I’m ashamed of us,” she complains to her mother. Yet “Hoard” is no parable of poverty, as we see when the film leaps forward 10 years to the mid-1990s and Maria, now a vivacious 18-year-old and played by the remarkable Saura Lightfoot Leon, is warmly settled with a loving foster mother (Samantha Spiro). This hard-won stability is threatened when Maria meets Michael (Joseph Quinn), a garbage collector and former foster child who is approaching 30 and on the verge of marriage. Drawn to the scent of each other’s damage, they begin to play their own increasingly dangerous games.Though at times squirmingly unpleasant, “Hoard” is never a drag. The insolence of the filmmaking and the artlessness of the leads energize a plot of stunning recklessness and unexpected humor. Combining joy and tragedy, realism and surrealism, Carmoon — who completed the film before she was 25 — loiters defiantly on incidents of distressing rawness. To Maria, trash is her turn-on, her safety blanket and the keeper of her memories, and Lightfoot Leon plays her with unselfconscious abandon. Like the heroine of David Wnendt’s provocative second feature, “Wetlands,” Maria is an eager explorer in the realm of the senses. She may sometimes gross you out, but you won’t easily look away.HoardNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I’ll Be Right There’ Review: Her Maternal Commitment is Apparent

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      Edie Falco plays a matriarch bending over backward for her grown children in this uneven character study.Early in Barbara Loden’s classic indie film “Wanda” (1971), the emotionally dysregulated title character hitches a ride to the courthouse to surrender custody of her children.It is perhaps with a wink and a nudge that the protagonist of “I’ll Be Right There” shares a name with Loden’s character; in this sappy ode to supermoms, just spending a day apart from her grown children is enough to give Wanda (Edie Falco) a conniption.Directed by Brendan Walsh, the movie opens on Wanda escorting her family members through a series of minor crises. She sits with her mother, Grace (Jeannie Berlin), as a doctor delivers health news. Her pregnant daughter, Sarah (Kayli Carter), expects hand-holding through an anxiety attack. And her ne’er-do-well son, Mark (Charlie Tahan), must be bailed out after a mishap lands him in jail.Set in rural New York, “I’ll Be Right There” aspires to show how, even in a family of adults, matriarchs can come to act as a chauffeur, benefactor, peacekeeper and security blanket all in one. But the movie’s bigger revelation is how these relationships sometimes slip into codependence. For Wanda, being needed by her mom and kids gives life a purpose that she otherwise struggles to find.The screenplay, by Jim Beggarly, is uneven, and many of the movie’s jokes are spoiled by a conservative strain that finds Sarah hellbent against giving birth out of wedlock and Grace making light of Wanda sleeping with a woman. Even as the gifted actresses trade jabs and punchlines gamely, the moments leave a sour taste.I’ll Be Right ThereNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Goldman Case’ Review: Sticking to the Facts

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      An electrifying courtroom drama based on a real 1976 case calls the very nature of equality and justice into question.Few settings are as omnipresent in screen entertainment as the courtroom. The halls of justice, the argumentation of lawyers, dramatic backroom dealings, the telling facial expressions of the jury — all of it makes for very good drama. (And sometimes comedy, too.)Why? There are obvious hooks: salacious crimes, shocking lies, sudden gasps when a hidden revelation turns the case on its head. But there’s also something epic, almost mythic, about what goes on in a courtroom. Questions as old as Hammurabi or Moses, as ancient as civilization itself, are hashed out: good and evil, guilt and innocence, justice and fairness. Furthermore, modern presumptions of equality, democracy and objectivity face challenges. And that space, increasingly, is where the modern courtroom drama lives.American courtrooms are so familiar, thanks to Hollywood’s ubiquity, that it’s bracing to get plunked down into the minutiae of another legal system. The last few years have given moviegoers an unusually heady dose of French courtrooms. In 2022, Mati Diop’s searing “Saint Omer,” based on the real case of a woman accused of killing her infant, confronted the ways race, class and gender skew and degrade justice. Last year, Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” electrified audiences with its courtroom scenes, which probed the knowability of the inner workings of a marriage.Now there’s Cédric Kahn’s “The Goldman Case,” nearly all of which takes place during the second trial of Pierre Goldman in 1976. It’s a true story: Goldman (played by an electrifying Arieh Worthalter) had been charged with four armed robberies years earlier, one of which resulted in the death of two pharmacists. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Goldman and his legal team appealed his case — some of it, anyhow. While he freely admitted to the robberies, he maintained that he was not involved in the killings. In 1975, he wrote a memoir entitled “Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France,” making him an icon among French leftists, and a month later the appeals court canceled the initial ruling.Set almost entirely within the courtroom, “The Goldman Case” is not a Hollywood-style heart-pumping work. But it’s plenty thrilling. Kahn, whose previous films include the 2004 thriller “Red Lights,” wrote the “Goldman” screenplay with Nathalie Hertzberg, who used newspaper articles and meticulous research to reconstruct what happened in the courtroom. The pair imbues the result with urgent, stirring drama even though it is, for the most part, just people standing at microphones, talking. And shouting. And looking outraged. Because of Goldman’s celebrity, his supporters crowd the room and punctuate proceedings with yelps of derision or support, whatever feels called for.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Front Room’ Review: A Force Too Malevolent for This Movie

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      Kathryn Hunter is enjoyably creepy in this new horror film starring Brandy Norwood. Too bad the rest of the freakouts are predictable.The first time that Kathryn Hunter appears in the ho-hum horror movie “The Front Room,” her head is forebodingly obscured by a veil. She’s at the funeral of her husband, who, you suspect, probably left this mortal coil unwillingly. It’s too bad that he couldn’t stick around longer because if he had, the poor guy would have been able to watch Hunter — as a flamboyantly malicious force named Solange — rapidly get her weird on, inching into the shadows like a malevolent spider while weaving a progressively stickier, ickier web.Hunter greatly enlivens “The Front Room,” so it’s too bad she is mostly relegated to supporting duties in this tale. Its featured attraction is Belinda (Brandy Norwood), an anthropology professor who quits in a fit of pique shortly after the story opens. She has her reasons, more or less; she feels understandably aggrieved and undervalued at work, but given that she’s pregnant, and that she and her husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap), need the money, it’s clear common sense isn’t her strong suit. This first impression deepens into an irksome trait when she and Norman learn that Solange — his stepmother — will help them out if she can move in with them. Since they’re cash-hungry, they agree; woo-woo trouble ensues.The writer-director twin brothers Sam and Max Eggers, making their feature directorial debut, have a grasp of the genre’s fundamentals: They know how to stage an unwelcoming house, and how to play with light and shadow. But either they don’t know or don’t care how easy is it for viewers to lose interest in characters who, like Belinda and Norman, consistently make wrong choices. It brings out the sadist in you (or maybe it’s just me), especially when those wrong choices are so obviously a matter of narrative contrivance and weak character development. (“The Front Room” is loosely based on a short story of the same title by Susan Hill about a couple who, inspired by a sermon, charitably take in a widowed relative.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venice Film Festival Looks: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt And More

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      No amount of star power can truly outshine the beauty of La Serenissima, the ancient republic better known as the city of Venice. But the Venice Film Festival, with its parade of A-listers arriving for movie premieres in water taxis, comes close.Typically held not long after the fall couture shows in Paris, the Venice Film Festival benefits, in pure fashion terms, from being a showcase of the newest garments from some designers. How these elaborate, often form-fitting, confections are transferred so rapidly from Parisian runways to Venetian red carpets hardly matters to looky-loos with their eyes perennially pressed to the glass of fashion.This year’s festival, running from Aug. 28 until Saturday, has not just been an exhibition for new designs, but also of vintage pieces. Some looked as fresh as ever. Garments old and new are among these 15 looks, which will be hard to forget for reasons good and bad (but mostly good).Taylor Russell: Most Modern Retro!Louisa Gouliamaki/ReutersThe actress radiated an icy elegance in a Loewe gown reminiscent of the creations of Jean Louis, a designer who had the lock on high glamour during the golden age of Hollywood studios.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘My First Film’ Review: Arriving Where You Started

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      Zia Anger’s movie about her first movie is full of nested layers, but mostly it’s a meditation on how, and why, we create.A cursor appears on a blank screen, blinking, waiting. And then text appears: “This probably shouldn’t be a film … but it is.”A purposefully ironic admission for a movie called “My First Film,” but a great way to set the tone for what follows. In 2018, the filmmaker Zia Anger sat before an audience at a Brooklyn venue, pulling up video clips on her computer from a project entitled “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” that she’d shot and then abandoned years earlier, combining them with spoken and typed words. The presentation morphed into a live performance that Anger toured called “My First Film,” which then further evolved into a digital performance during a pandemic-locked world.I’d seen various iterations of “My First Film,” but the new feature film version, also directed by Anger (and written with Billy Feldman), still came as a surprise to me. It’s as personal and experimental as the live presentations, but mixes fiction (or perhaps autofiction) into the recipe, producing something that looks and acts a little more like a traditional movie. “My First Film” stars Odessa Young as Vita, a Zia stand-in, who is telling us the story of the making of her first film, also entitled “Always All Ways, Anne Marie.” The screenplay of that movie was about a young woman caring for her ailing father. She gets pregnant and leaves home in search of her mother, who had abandoned her.The “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” story is a version of Vita’s reality, just as Vita’s story is a version of Anger’s. But it’s also different, and Vita wonders aloud, in a way that feels appropriate to a 25-year-old first-time filmmaker with dreams of artistic authenticity, about whether it still gets at her emotional truth. Vita wasn’t abandoned by her mother — in fact, she had two mothers, and they raised her together, and she felt loved and supported throughout her childhood. Various other pieces of Vita’s real life refract through “Always All Ways, Anne Marie,” while her narration about drama on set and off give the story of “My First Film” shape.Everything in “My First Film” doubles back on itself, which can make it feel repetitive at times. If you’ve never been a young person harboring dreams of creative genius, it might start to feel a little forced, a little twee. Even if you have, impatience lurks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More