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      ‘Between the Temples’ Review: A Widower Walks Into a Bar

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      And meets his former music teacher, upending his life, in Nathan Silver’s touching comedy, starring Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane.Ben Gottlieb — the touchingly soulful hero of the soulful, delightfully tetchy “Between the Temples” — is a mess. He needs a haircut and a shave; he could do with better-fitting clothes. He’s having problems at work. He also lives in his family’s basement, that much-derided refuge of the eternal man-child and terminal loser. Yet because the filmmaker Nathan Silver has an appreciation for life’s ironies and likes putting a topspin on his comedy, Ben lives with both his mother and stepmother. He lives, in other words, in his mothers’ basement.Ben — a perfect Jason Schwartzman — is a sad sack, but he’s also just sad and for a very good, excruciating reason, too. His wife died not long ago, leaving him bereft and, increasingly, without an evident sense of self or purpose. He seems to have lost his bearings, but he’s also lost his singing voice, which proves a problem given that he’s the cantor at a local synagogue. He still teaches there, working out of a cramped, shambolic classroom in which he helps boys and girls prepare for their bar and bat mitzvahs, the traditional Jewish coming-of-age ceremonies that formally announce the passage from childhood to adulthood.Set in the present in an upstate New York hamlet, this coming-of-middle-age story follows Ben during an eventful time in his life, which takes a turn after he runs into his former elementary-school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor (Carol Kane, divine). They reconnect in a bar, where she helps the soused, deflated Ben, a kindness that takes an unexpected turn when she shows up at the synagogue. Carla wants to take his class, explaining that she never had a bat mitzvah. Ben is reluctant because, well, she isn’t a child, but after consulting with his boss, Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), Ben relents. A friendship blossoms and perhaps something deeper does, too, and the movie gets its blissfully offbeat groove on.Silver, who wrote the movie with C. Mason Wells, introduces Ben without preamble, immediately dropping you into a conversation that started before the movie did. Ben and his mothers, Meira and Judith (the nicely synced Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon), are in the family’s dining room having an apparently serious heart-to-heart. Judith says they think he “needs to start seeing a doctor,” a suggestion that Ben says he’s open to. As the camera zooms out, Ben keeps talking only to be cut off by the doorbell. The moms jump up, and a pretty female doctor enters and almost immediately begins hitting on Ben, a shift that abruptly gives new meaning to the advice the moms have just voiced.With the doctor’s entrance, the movie turns straightaway from the plaintive to the humorous. The scene is characteristic of how Silver changes up the tone and mood, creating an unexpected pacing that’s complemented by Sean Price Williams’s agitated cinematography and the jumpy rhythms of John Magary’s editing. The movie is laced with absurd setups, slapstick and some silly props, all of which converge in a scene at a restaurant called the Chained Duck (the name of a satirical French newspaper). There, Ben and Carla have dinner with her belligerent son, Nat (Matthew Shear), a hostility that Silver slyly deflates when the waiter hands everyone menus as large as battleground shields.The outlandish menus undercut the son’s disproportionate, clenched-jaw anger at Carla without draining the scene of its tense realism or turning the son into the butt of the joke. Silver is a sharp, cleareyed observer of human nature, and while he pokes at his characters, including Ben, it’s more teasing than cruel. If there’s a mean joke in “Between the Temples,” I missed it, which helps explain where Silver is coming from. He and Schwartzman make Ben’s pain palpable without sentimentalizing it; you see the hurt in the sag of Ben’s shoulders and in the melancholy that clouds his eyes. Yet there’s a fundamental resilience to the character who, while he’s sometimes off on his own, is never really alone.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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      Sarajevo Film Festival, Born in War, Turns 30

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      The Sarajevo Film Festival, now 30 years old, grew out of underground screenings during the siege of the city. Those roots still define the event’s character.From 1992 to 1996, Serbian forces laid siege to the city of Sarajevo, relentlessly bombarding it and cutting off electricity, heat, running water and regular food supplies. Because of snipers perched on hillsides and constant shelling, going outside was a life-threatening act.Yet these were the conditions under which the Sarajevo Film Festival came to life. Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the festival, which runs through Friday, has grown to become the premier movie industry event for the Balkan region. But its roots still define its character.After the breakup of Yugoslavia, ethnic tensions in Bosnia deepened, resulting in a violent nationalistic campaign led by Bosnian Serbs targeting Bosniaks and Croats. When war broke out in Sarajevo, Mirsad Purivatra, the festival’s founder, was living in a cellar with other members of what he called a “punk” collective — artist types who worked in theater, music and film, many of whom were involved with the University of Sarajevo’s Academy of Performing Arts.“After a few months, we figured out how to survive physically, but then we asked ourselves: ‘How are we going to survive mentally?’” Purivatra said over coffee in a downtown square. Purivatra and his collaborators began staging performances in the cellar and inviting artists to create installations in the underground passages that Sarajevans used to move around the city.The first office for the Sarajevo Film Festival, in 1995.Obala Art CentarEventually, word of these efforts got around to the international press, which inspired writers and artists from outside of Bosnia to visit Sarajevo and raise awareness of the city’s plight through acts of cultural solidarity. Susan Sontag, for instance, brought a candlelight production of “Waiting for Godot” to life with Bosnian actors and theater experts.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 Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat’ Review: Hungry for Drama

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      You’ll want to pass the ketchup, and the hankies, for this buffet of tear-jerking deep-fried decadence.“The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat” is a melodrama sampler platter of adultery, alcoholism, cancer, teen pregnancy, derailed careers, heckled memorial services and accidental electrocution, plus a phony psychic, a heartbroken ornithologist and a double helping of murder. This wisecracking, tear-jerking, deep-fried decadence is plenty satisfying if you’re in the mood to indulge.Directed by Tina Mabry and set between 1950 and 1999, it’s the rousing saga of three friends. Clarice (Uzo Aduba) is the image-conscious pushover; Barbara Jean, (Sanaa Lathan) the fragile beauty; and Odette (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) the bigmouth who narrates the film and ignites most of the confrontations. As girls, they’re played by Abigail Achiri, Tati Gabrielle and Kyanna Simone, who do a fine job establishing the tone. In a movie crowded with faces (including Mekhi Phifer, Russell Hornsby and Vondie Curtis-Hall) and more plot twists than a plate of curly fries, Simone and Ellis-Taylor make a feast of the flashiest role. Young Odette impulsively strips off her dress to throw a punch at a slimeball. Later, when her adult incarnation announces she’s going to finally speak her mind, both the audience and her fellow characters are agape. What else has she been doing for two hours?The script, adapted by Mabry and Cee Marcellus from Edward Kelsey Moore’s novel of the same name, takes a few liberties, tweaking the titular hangout into a retro-chic diner, blurring the location to Anytown, America and scrapping a cameo from Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost. No one seems to believe this is Michelin star cuisine — the score is clatteringly whimsical, the scene transitions teeter toward the absurd — but it’s a treat to watch these believable pals hoist each other back up, taking the occasional breather to clink milkshakes in slow motion.The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-EatRated PG-13 for adult themes, as well as strong language including racial slurs. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Strange Darling’ Review: Assume Nothing

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      In this cheeky, cunningly assembled thriller, a serial killer gets a satisfying and surprising comeuppance.A movie that’s best experienced stone cold, “Strange Darling” is so dependent on its surprises — one head-snapping twist, with several judiciously spaced lesser shocks — that to reveal any one of them would be critical malpractice.A crawling onscreen text, read by Jason Patric, informs us that what we are about to see is the dramatization of a spree killer’s final, vicious acts. Thus primed, we’re thrown into the middle of a frantic car chase as a terrified young woman in scarlet scrubs races to escape a shotgun-wielding man in a pickup truck. She is known only as The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), and she is bleeding from a head wound; he is The Demon (Kyle Gallner), his sleazy mustache and snorts of cocaine familiar bad-guy signifiers. We’ve got this, we think, settling in for some serial-killer comfort viewing. We could not be more wrong.Playing out in six, ingeniously scrambled chapters, this headlong thriller transforms a simple cat-and-mouse premise — and maybe even a toxic love story — into an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions. Flexing back and forth in time, the writer and director, JT Mollner, bets the house on a mechanism that repeatedly asks us to reassess what has gone before. Cunning as it is, structure is not the movie’s sole strength. Both Z Berg’s haunting, otherworldly pop songs and Giovanni Ribisi’s eloquent photography (it’s the actor’s first stint as a feature cinematographer) bathe the film’s violence in an unexpected dreaminess. In one pivotal scene, shot with shadowy intensity, flirtation and threat alternate so frequently that the flickering power dynamics are completely destabilizing.Less complicated by far are Ed Begley, Jr. and Barbara Hershey as a pair of doomsday preppers who think the bleeding woman at their door has been attacked by a Sasquatch. They will soon learn that there are some problems even bear spray can’t solve.Strange DarlingRated R for cutting, ketamine and lots of killing. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ Review: A Mourning Journey

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      This visually elegant indie follows a soft-spoken Swiss widow visiting Japan.A visually elegant drama by the writer-director Bradley Rust Gray, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” spins a gossamer-fine story about grief — about the struggle to live fully again when the tragedies of the past still exist in your bones.Chloe (Carla Juri) is a soft-spoken Swiss widow visiting Japan for work, though we first learn about her husband’s passing indirectly. She can’t speak Japanese, which gives her an excuse to keep her feelings private and remain trapped in her own head. In the beginning of the film, against a breezy pastoral backdrop, a Japanese friend, Toshi (Takashi Ueno), discusses Chloe’s misfortune in front of her with his grandmother. Chloe smiles, unaware.The moment encapsulates the film’s delicate dynamics, shifting between Chloe’s unspoken hurt (there are occasional flashbacks to her husband that bleed into the main narrative) and the concerned friends orbiting around her, both wary of upsetting her but also, because of the language barrier, naturally at a remove.The static camerawork by the cinematographer Eric Lin gives Chloe’s stilted but openly vulnerable encounters a fluttering poignancy; particularly lovely is a ferry-ride conversation with an older man, Yatsuro (Issey Ogata).The meandering nature of the film creates a special kind of intimacy with Chloe, one that relies almost entirely on Juri’s subtly heartbreaking performance. Chloe’s mourning isn’t always legible, and we often see her engaging in banal activities like shopping, eating and playing with Toshi’s young daughter, Futaba (Futaba Okazaki); her awkward banter with friends is endearing though it also grows rather dull, and the constant obliqueness draws some power and believability away from the developing romance with Toshi. There’s an implication that repressed emotions are simmering beneath the mundane, but that doesn’t always come across.I’ll Be Your MirrorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Mountains’ Review: Razing Houses, Building a Future

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      This feature debut from Monica Sorelle observes the tensions in an immigrant family in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami.“Mountains,” the feature debut from Monica Sorelle, opens by observing the demolition of a house. In one sense, Sorelle is simply setting the scene. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), the father in the central family in the film, has a job razing buildings, a role he fulfills without much complaint (although at a crucial moment he sticks up for a co-worker).Xavier is not overtly bothered by how his work might contribute to gentrification. “They give me an address, I come to demolish it,” he says, when confronted with the fact that he is slated to clear a 50-year-old church. But the tension at the movie’s heart involves the difficulty of leaving homes and finding new ones, as experienced by immigrants and their children in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.Xavier, who worked as a cabdriver after arriving from Haiti, can’t stop looking to advance; he has his eye on a house he and his wife, Esperance (Sheila Anozier), a school crossing guard who moonlights as a dressmaker, may not be able to afford. Their son, Junior (Chris Renois), is a college dropout who still lives with them. He wants to make it as a standup comedian and weighs how much of his upbringing to incorporate in his routine. To Xavier, Junior isn’t living up to his potential.As a drama, “Mountains,” whose characters move fluidly between English and Haitian Creole, is too low-key to leave much of an impression. But as a portrait of intergenerational tensions in an immigrant family, it is poignant, and it captures an area of Miami that is rarely seen onscreen.MountainsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      1999 Was a Great Year for Movies. It Was the Best Year to Write About Them.

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      At the box office 25 years ago, hits like “Runaway Bride,” “The Sixth Sense” and “Bowfinger” hint at the abundance that overwhelmed a young critic.One thing to love about time is how liberating it can be. I, for instance, am at liberty to look at the Top 10 movies for the weekend of Aug. 20, 1999 — when “The Sixth Sense,” in its third week out, began its monopoly of the chart — and declare “The Thomas Crown Affair” the best of the lot.What could be going on here? Am I actually saying that a Pierce Brosnan-Rene Russo remake of the old Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway love heist, from 1968, was always superior to M. Night Shyamalan’s where’d-that-come-from supernatural smash? Or have 25 years ripened one and grayed the other? Hadn’t “The Blair Witch Project” opened in July yet was still very much a thing? (It had, yet it was, down at No. 5.) Only one of the 10 movies was a sequel. In the mix were Julia Roberts, at her commercial peak, in “Runaway Bride” (No. 4, after opening in July) and Steve Martin and a gonzo Eddie Murphy, holding at second, in “Bowfinger.” More

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      ‘Querelle’: Fassbinder’s Defiant Swan Song

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      Anthology Film Archives is screening Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 film, based on Jean Genet’s novel, about a young sailor’s criminal and erotic escapades.Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film, “Querelle,” released posthumously in 1982, was the most lavish and artificial of the 40-odd movies the prolific filmmaker directed over the course of a 13-year career.A film that recapitulates even as it embalms many of Fassbinder’s concerns, “Querelle” screens in a new digital version for a week starting Friday at Anthology Film Archives.At once lurid and static, a funerary frieze of power plays, treachery and weaponized sex, “Querelle” is faithful to Jean Genet’s sensuous prose-poem novel in tracking the criminal and erotic escapades of the title character, a charismatic young sailor (Brad Davis).Universally desired, Querelle is a killer, a masochist, a smuggler, a stool pigeon, and a participant in a convoluted daisy chain. His brother Robert (Hanno Pöschl) is sleeping with Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), the madam of a waterfront bordello; Querelle, who allows himself to be sexually used by Lysiane’s husband, Nono (the Fassbinder regular Günther Kaufmann), has sex with her as well. He also seduces (or at least vamps) and frames a good-hearted Polish sailor (Pöschl again) and, throughout the movie, is cruised by his ship’s repressed lieutenant (Franco Nero).This tawdry rondo is frequently accompanied by a celestial chorus and bathed in a golden light, with Davis individually glorified. (Beautiful and inert, he might be a stand-in for Rock Hudson, who was not only closeted but the favorite actor of Fassbinder’s favorite director, Douglas Sirk.) Moreau, virtually the only woman in the film, comments on the turgid delirium by twice singing a ditty taken from Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” in which the phrase “each man kills the thing he loves” is followed by a jaunty “dadada-dadada.”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