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    ‘Man’s Castle’: Free Love, Hard Times

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    Restored to its original length and screening at the Museum of Modern Art, this 1933 movie starring Spencer Tracy feels at once surprisingly frank and disquietingly coy.A celebrant of redemptive love, Frank Borzage (1893-1962) was the most romantic of classic Hollywood directors and, however unconventionally, perhaps the most religious as well. “Man’s Castle” (1933) conflates an economic crisis — namely the Great Depression — with a spiritual one. The movie also represents premarital pregnancy as salvation rather than sin, and scenes were consequently cut for its post-Production Code rerelease in the late 1930s.Restored to its original length of 78 minutes, screening at the Museum of Modern Art (April 18-24), “Man’s Castle” feels unique — at once surprisingly frank and disquietingly coy.A leading director of silent films, Borzage (Bor-ZAY-ghee) left the Fox studio and went independent in 1932. His first production was an adaptation of Hemingway’s World War I novel “A Farewell to Arms.” “Man’s Castle” also concerns love in extremis with the starving innocent Trina (20-year-old Loretta Young) falling for and shacking up with an older if equally indigent man of the world, Bill (Spencer Tracy).Their meet-cute on a park bench, with Bill feeding the pigeons as ravenous Trina looks longingly on, proceeds to a nice restaurant (where Bill gets out of paying the check) and winds up back at his jerry-built hovel in a homeless encampment near the East River. A natural man, Bill amazes Trina (and possibly the viewer) by diving naked into the water. She more discreetly follows. Cut from Edenic skinny-dipping to radiant Trina at the washboard happily scrubbing Bill’s clothes.A brash roughneck with a golden heart, Bill inspires Trina’s puppy-like devotion. In his New York Times review, Mordaunt Hall praised the stars’ “thoroughly efficient portrayals” — an odd choice of words to describe their evident mutual attraction. Indeed, the chemistry was real. Young’s daughter would later detail the pair’s guilt-ridden love affair. (Both were Catholic; Tracy was married.)For Trina, Bill’s Hooverville home is “heaven,” with various down-and-out denizens adding to the allegorical flavor. Bragg (Arthur Hohl) is not only a lech and a thief but a leftist loudmouth. His alcoholic companion, Flossie (Marjorie Rambeau), is both a fallen woman and a salvation project tended to by a former minister (Walter Connolly). Dismissive of all three, the cynical Bill is tempted by the fun-loving cabaret star Fay La Rue (a reliably sassy Glenda Farrell, here mimicking Mae West).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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      At New Directors/New Films, the Kids Are Not All Right (Nobody Really Is)

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      This year’s edition of the festival tends toward familiar art-house fare, but there are standouts in which characters young and old grapple with childhood.The terrific Ukrainian documentary “Intercepted” — screening in this year’s New Directors/New Films festival — is an austere and harrowing chronicle of life, death and indifference. For roughly 90 minutes, it juxtaposes images from everyday life in Ukraine with audio gleaned from phone calls between Russian soldiers and their families. As the camera steadily focuses on the devastations of war, you hear these soldiers talking about what they’re doing, how they’re feeling, what they ate, what they plundered and who they killed.Directed by Oksana Karpovych, “Intercepted” is tough to watch — and listen to — and it’s also one of the strongest movies in an uneven lineup running Wednesday through April 14. It’s also one of a number of movies that, by turns bluntly and elliptically, either focus on young people or on adults grappling with childhood in some manner. “Intercepted,” for one, includes heart-skippingly upsetting images of Ukrainian tots and teens being just kids, riding bikes and frolicking against a cityscape of bombed buildings, though some of its most indelible and dreadful sections feature snippets from the Russians and their families.In one clip, as a soldier talks to a woman, presumably his wife, their children cry out, “We love and miss you.” Separately, another soldier details how he helped torture Ukrainian captives. “If I go there, too,” his mother says, “I would enjoy it like you.”A joint venture of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New Directors/New Films focuses on emerging filmmakers; it culls from other festivals across the world and, over the years, it has showcased artists as diverse as Wim Wenders, Wong Kar-wai, Spike Lee, Pedro Almodóvar and many others now lost to time. Given that there were relatively few high-profile platforms for younger filmmakers when the event was founded in 1972, its commitment to young talent was laudable; events like Sundance and SXSW, it’s worth noting, didn’t yet exist. There are far more festivals now, and the website for New Directors says its focus is on filmmakers “who speak to the present and anticipate the future of cinema, and whose bold work pushes the envelope in unexpected, striking ways.”“Intercepted,” directed by Oksana Karpovych, contrasts images in war-torn Ukraine with audio from Russian families.Christopher NunnThat’s an estimable goal, and while I’m unsure how any movie could foresee the future of cinema, I love the optimism of that statement. There has been some worrying chatter about the health of festivals following the pandemic and the industry strikes — late last year, the Toronto International Film Festival cut a dozen staff positions — yet the international circuit remains essential. Among other things, festivals serve as promotional tools, function as markers of distinction in an image-saturated world and help turn audiences into dedicated communities that sustain the larger film ecology. New Directors, for instance, was among the festivals that drew attention to upstarts like Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan.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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      Once You Watch an Ernie Gehr Film, You’ll Never See the World the Same Way

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      A MoMA series shows how the artist pushes the boundaries of cinema in short movies that both delight and baffle.Movies have been around for well over a century, and for roughly half that time, the American filmmaker Ernie Gehr has — playfully, thoughtfully, beautifully — shown us just how far out, exciting and liberating they can be.Gehr makes moving images that open your mind and pleasurably rearrange your thoughts. His movies tend to be short, have sound and, these days, were shot in digital. By conventional standards not a lot happens; they don’t tell stories per se, even if they say a great deal. What interests Gehr is light, energy, shape, color, rhythm, time, space and the medium’s plasticity. He chops the image up, twirls it around, makes it sing. You could call his work abstract, experimental or avant-garde, but a more fitting description is that it’s just, well, cinematic.A contested, oft-abused word, cinematic can be fuzzy shorthand to describe images that look and move the way we think movies look and move (or should). Gehr challenges such thinking, which is exemplified by one of his most significant early works, “Serene Velocity” (1970), a silent color film that doesn’t have a single soul or any camera moves in it. Instead, partly by changing the focal lengths on a zoom lens, Gehr created an illusion of movement in which a precisely centered shot of a college basement hall becomes a trippy, propulsive, at times eyeball-popping inquiry into film form. He’s still challenging conventions just as trippily.On Friday, the one-week series “Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic” opens at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Francisco Valente, this dynamic sampler includes both newer work and restored rarities that have been arranged into six programs. Gehr, who is 82 and lives in New York, is scheduled to appear at each show. MoMA is a fitting place to check out his movies, which in their formal rigor, aesthetic concerns and sheer visual pow make them ideal counterparts to the abstract and nonfigurative work hanging on the museum’s walls.Gehr started making films in the 1960s after serving in the Army and landing in New York, where he chanced upon the work by the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, a titan of the art. Although Gehr ended up going in a different artistic direction, he was excited both by Brakhage’s work and by the very idea that he, too, might make movies. In an era in which most of us have a video camera in our back pocket, it is impossible to overstate just how mind-blowing it once was for many aspiring filmmakers to realize that they didn’t need to be in Hollywood or have stars, crews and astronomical budgets.Instead, if a would-be filmmaker like Gehr was lucky enough to be in New York in the 1960s — then an epicenter of off-Hollywood cine-adventurousness — he could even borrow a camera. That’s exactly what Gehr did after he visited the Millennium Film Workshop, which was then run by the filmmaker Ken Jacobs and lent equipment for free. Gehr soon had a camera in hand that used 8-millimeter film (a precursor to Super-8), a cheaper alternative to 16-millimeter. Lightweight and easy to use, these cameras made making movies on your own entirely doable.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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      Did This Couple Inspire Edward Albee’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’?

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      A newly preserved Andy Warhol film documents a combative artist couple the playwright knew. The movie is premiering in MoMA’s To Save and Project.Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton put their marital demons on film in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966). But neither they nor their director, Mike Nichols, can take credit for being the first to try to bring Edward Albee’s 1962 play to the screen, or even for being the first movie couple to draw on their own real-life discord in that context.In April 1965, Andy Warhol shot what the writer Sheldon Renan described as a “remake” of Albee’s drama, according to the Whitney Museum’s catalog of Warhol’s early film work. The stars were married artists — the underground filmmakers Marie Menken and Willard Maas — and the concept was consistent with some Warhol films of the period: Set the camera in a fixed position; shoot two reels of 16-millimeter stock as the personalities in the frame engage in a mix of self-dramatizing and simply being; then let those two reels, totaling around 66 minutes, run unedited.The result was titled “Bitch,” and it will receive what is probably its first-ever public presentation on Saturday as part of To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art’s annual program of film preservation work.Warhol never made a print of the movie, Greg Pierce, the director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, said in a phone interview. “There is a hierarchy to Warhol’s films,” he explained. There are those in the canon, the titles that Warhol stood by, including “Empire” and “Chelsea Girls,” that were printed and shown. But there are dozens of others that Warhol felt didn’t work; in those cases, he simply moved on.Yet he also didn’t discard those failures. “There is very little footage that is quote unquote ‘lost,’” Pierce said. “Warhol saved everything.” And before his death in 1987, he gave all his physical film material to MoMA, where “Bitch,” in a new digital scan, will screen on a double bill with Nichols’s drama.Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”Warner Bros.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?  More

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      ‘Shadows in the City’ Review: A Sleazy Slice of 1980s No Wave

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      The director Ari M. Roussimoff’s black-and-white homage to the downtown crowd gets a raw screening at the Museum of Modern Art before its restoration.The visual artist and performer Ari M. Roussimoff and his camera crew — including the cinematographer and director Ellen Kuras — crept about the lower depths of 1980s Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens shooting an underground horror movie in 16-millimeter black-and-white film. The thing he assembled, “Shadows in the City” (1991), is an astonishing and often queasiness-inducing curio of No Wave cinema.This week the Museum of Modern Art is displaying its collection’s print — with the scruffy look and distorted audio — before its restoration. Aficionados of late-20th-century New York City scuzz may want to check it out in its raw form, which runs until Oct. 11. After all, it’s a movie for which too much cleanup may be inapt.The movie’s very loose story follows Paul (Craig Smith), who wanders around the city mourning several deaths in his family, soliciting prostitutes and contemplating suicide. From Times Square, he visits Lower Manhattan, and the West and East sides. There’s a terrifying biker bar in the meatpacking district, and some possibly undead high jinks for him in Alphabet City.The cast is replete with avant-garde artists. Taylor Mead, the wise fool of microbudget classics by Ron Rice and one of Andy Warhol’s regulars, is here a skid row wet brain. The documentarian Emile de Antonio plays a mage. The “Flaming Creatures” auteur Jack Smith is “the spirit of death.” And Nick Zedd, Joe Coleman and Kembra Pfahler represent the younger side of No Wave.The story, such as it is, borrows from both the experimental short film “Scorpio Rising” and the classic B-movie “Carnival of Souls.” (Bruce Byron, who appeared in “Scorpio,” also has a role here.) But the movie is mainly driven by a nightmare anti-logic that spews forth gnarly imagery pitched between the art house and the grindhouse. An end credit shows a dedication to Forrest J. Ackerman, the editor of the horror fan magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. The movie could be alternately titled “Famous Monsters Go Downtown.”Shadows in the CityNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Video Games at MoMA: Do They Belong There?

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      “Never Alone,” which closes Sunday, was an important first step in breaking the firewall between art lovers and game designers. When the Museum of Modern Art began collecting video games a decade ago, curators boldly asserted that games were an artistic medium. Now contemporary culture is dominated by them.The MoMA exhibition “Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design,” which runs through Sunday, represents the museum’s cautious advance into the gaming world at a time when digital culture has overtaken its galleries. Refik Anadol’s algorithmic homage to art history still twinkles in the museum lobby; an exhibition about the importance of video swallowed the sixth floor until July 8; and galleries for its permanent collection include contemporary artifacts like the Google Maps pin and a massive schematic devoted to the interlaced chain of resources needed to create an Amazon Echo as an artificial intelligence system.However, the museum could do more to break the firewall between art lovers and game designers. After all, this is the same institution that began a film library in 1935, exhibited utilitarian toasters and cash registers as “Machine Art” in 1934 and presented modular houses in the 1950s. Curators need to unleash that same passion for games, which struggle in the current exhibition to convey the profundity, and complexity, of their designers’ thinking.On the first floor, old computer monitors cantilevered above visitors are drawn from the museum’s collection of video games. Eleven are playable; 35 games in all are viewable. Jamming buttons on their keyboards, users were hard-pressed to crane their necks to see the flickering displays above them — a series of digital experiments from the 1990s by John Maeda, a graphic designer who now serves as Microsoft’s vice president of design and artificial intelligence.MoMA’s standards for assessing the cultural importance of video games require an upgrade worthy of the medium, whose revenue is projected to reach $385 billion in 2023 and technologies contribute to the ongoing A.I. revolution.For the curators Paola Antonelli and Paul Galloway, gaming is a psychological act that has defined an era when many of our relationships are mediated through screens.SimCity 2000, from 1993, an open-ended city-building video game designed by Will Wright.Electronic Arts; via Museum of Modern ArtAnd the vision of designers like Will Wright is letting players choose what lessons they want to learn — or nothing at all. One player might experience Wright’s most popular game, The Sims (included in the MoMA exhibition), as a gateway into the worlds of architecture and interior decorating; another might focus on its family-planning aspect or its staging of murder mysteries and ghost encounters.The decision to allow games into the museum has been debated since the 2010s, when critics like Roger Ebert and Jonathan Jones declared that the medium would never rise to the status of art.“Chess is a great game, but even the finest chess player in the world isn’t an artist,” Jones opined in The Guardian, “She is a chess player.”At the center of these critiques was a belief that playtime belonged to children. A similar logic harmed performance art until museums started making the genre a staple in their programming, coincidentally, around the same time that MoMA started collecting games.“People want to be taken to a new place,” Donna De Salvo, a Whitney Museum curator said of performance art in 2012 during an interview with The New York Times. “In the age of the digital and the virtual and the mediated experience, there is something very visceral about watching live performance.”The same could be said for gaming, which embraces immersion by allowing players into their virtual worlds with the touch of a controller. The simplicity of that relationship is evident in the exhibition “Never Alone,” where Zen games like Flower ask players to weave petals through the wind on a journey across an imaginary landscape. But the concept flows through the veins of modern gaming, ever since Super Mario 64 tasked players with jumping into paintings stored within a museum-like castle to progress through its story.The video game Flower, from 2012, designed by Jenova Chen.Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC; via Museum of Modern ArtSo what prevents museums from developing more ambitious programming around games? And why has a serious institution like MoMA not staged the first major retrospective of a video game designer when it has enough material for obvious picks like Will Wright or Shigeru Miyamoto?There are a few practical reasons. Designers rarely own rights to their creations, which are held by the publishers financing their games. In an interview, Antonelli singled out other hurdles: legal negotiations, lost source codes and obsolete technology that challenge the acquisition process. And then there are the headaches involved with hard wiring all those electronic systems in the galleries.Yet there seems no better time for MoMA’s curators to show why gaming belongs in their museum and to help visitors to understand the difference between what is scholarship and what is for sale at the Nintendo store a few blocks down the street.Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive DesignThrough Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, moma.org. More

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      ‘Force of Circumstance’ Comes to MoMA

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      Liza Béar’s deadpan anti-thriller returns to the Museum of Modern Art for a limited engagement.A young Moroccan woman slips into Washington, D.C., hoping to provide a journalist with intel on the United States’ clandestine involvement in a war for the contested Western Sahara. Once there, she crosses paths with two clownish compatriots looking to purchase a Washington safe house for the king of Morocco.Shot in 1984, unreleased until 1990, and revived decades later in the Museum of Modern Art’s annual restoration series “To Save and Project,” Liza Béar’s deadpan anti-thriller, “Force of Circumstance,” returns to MoMA for a limited engagement.A triumph of low-budget production design, the movie opens in a North African shantytown, impeccably realized in a vacant East Village lot. Thanks to the film composer Mader’s evocative score and ambient sound that Béar recorded in Casablanca, the scene, which introduces the young courier Mouallem (Boris Major), has a hyperreal authenticity.Cut to Washington, Mouallem peers through a taxi window as the Watergate complex whizzes past. This strange landscape, through which she is shadowed by the royal envoy (Eric Mitchell) and his bodyguard (Filip Pagowski), takes another form when her hotel room TV broadcasts — what else?—“Casablanca.”“Force of Circumstance” can’t sustain this suavely contrived mixture of dis- and reorientation. Still, Béar’s spectacle of downtown artists playing spy vs. spy in an assortment of Washington locations — a descendant of Louis Feuillade’s World War I serials in which fantastic crimes were staged on the streets of Paris — transcends the soggy plot, created in collaboration with the East Village writer Craig Gholson.Mysteries proliferate and evaporate like puddles after summer rain. The envoy and the bodyguard wander through Georgetown searching for a colonial mansion. Mouallem, always wearing a new outfit, is never far away, hoping to contact the feisty journalist Katrina (Jessica Stutchbury), who is having an affair with Hans (Tom Wright), the dissolute rich boy looking to unload his ancestral home.Béar, a central figure in New York’s 1980s art world, has said that her film was inspired by the Casablanca bread riots in 1981. The movie is dated less by its historical references than by its green-character-displaying computer screens and a cast seemingly culled from a Club 57 theme party: Major (a member of Squat Theater); a pre-Hollywood Steve Buscemi; the musician Evan Lurie; the scene-maker Glenn O’Brien; the performance artist Rockets Redglare; and the filmmaker Eric Mitchell, who cast both Stutchbury and Wright in his own downtown movies. Capped with a fez, speaking some sort of French patois, Mitchell brings his own campy aura to the movie, including the portentous punchline: “Choice is a Western concept.”The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin, who had little sympathy for the film, wrote that “the avidity with which Ms. Béar, absorbs and mimics big-budget clichés is a lot more impressive than the way those clichés have been used.” Indeed, “Force of Circumstance,” which appropriates a title used by both W. Somerset Maugham and Simone de Beauvoir, is more an art object than a conventional movie, even ending with a screen full of actual documents, as a conceptual piece from the early ’70s might.This faux “thriller” has a sustained look, an intriguing cast, an entertaining attitude and a propulsive score. Its main flaw is the script — which, given the current Writers Guild of America strike, makes it all the more timely.Force of CircumstanceThrough May 30 at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan; moma.org. More

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      At New Directors/New Films, See the World Through Perceptive Filmmakers’ Eyes

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      “Earth Mama,” “Tótem” and other strong entries offer proof that the art form is flourishing regardless of what’s happening in Hollywood.Like the vernal equinox, New Directors/New Films is a sign that winter and the soul-crushing slog known as awards season have finally ended. Now in its 52nd year, the festival, opening Wednesday, is a great place to recharge and revive. With a slate largely drawn from recent international film festivals — from Berlin and Locarno to Sundance — the 12-day event is also a nice way to travel the world by proxy while previewing work before it begins percolating into art theaters and onto streaming services.Each edition of New Directors — a presentation of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — is partly shaped by the competition from other events. It’s also shaped by its programmers’ tastes and orthodoxies, including ideas about what constitutes a festival movie, which, much as at Cannes and elsewhere, tends to mean gravely serious, non-genre work. That can get monotonous, but at its best, New Directors offers enduring proof of cinematic life beyond the corporate bottom line: The festival’s commitment to film art is a galvanizing article of faith.This year’s program consists of 27 features, about half of which are North American premieres, along with some dozen shorts. Among the strongest is the opener, “Earth Mama,” the terrifically assured feature debut from the writer-director Savanah Leaf, a former Olympic volleyball player. Set in the Bay Area, this contemporary drama tracks the heartbreaking, frustrating, at times exasperatingly self-sabotaging daily travails of Gia (a lovely Tia Nomore), a young, single, heavily pregnant woman, as she tries to regain custody of her son and daughter, who are in foster care. Every conceivable odd has been stacked against Gia, including the degradations of systemic oppression.Anchored by Leaf’s empathy and by her precise, confident visual style, the story unfolds during the last stretch of Gia’s pregnancy. With naturalistic dialogue that largely avoids exegesis — as well as with expressionistic flourishes and subtle camerawork that often reveal what the characters don’t or can’t say — Leaf skillfully engages with larger social issues while steering clear of the kind of sermonizing that too often seeps into similarly themed dramas. In Leaf’s hands, Gia isn’t a case study or object lesson. She is instead a woman who’s both singular and much like any other — a human being, in other words, struggling to find a place and a sense of sovereignty amid the onslaughts of everyday life.Cole Doman, left, and Lío Mehiel in “Mutt,” directed by Vuk Lungulov-Klotz.Courtesy of Quiltro LLC“Mutt,” another festival highlight, this one set in present-day New York, follows its heart-stealing title character across a single exceedingly eventful and emotionally fraught day. Written and directed by Vuk Lungulov-Klotz, it centers on Feña, a young man who has recently transitioned (played by the charismatic Lío Mehiel, who, like the filmmaker, is trans), as he crisscrosses the city and through the labyrinthine complexities of his life, including his tricky, sometimes confusing relationships with friends and family. With fluid cinematography, deft narrative pacing and swells of feeling, Lungulov-Klotz creates an urgent, of-the-moment portrait of a young man who’s at once distinct and movingly, rightfully ordinary.Like most movies on the contemporary festival circuit, the selections in New Directors tend to draw on a hodgepodge of different realist traditions (Hollywood, the European art film, Sundance, etc.). This year, more than a few selections also incorporate fantastical interludes — from brief hallucinations to alternative worlds — that productively complicate and on occasion destabilize their realism. One of the boldest, most extensive uses of the fantastic occurs in “The Maiden,” a dreamy, gentle story of loss and mourning from the Canadian writer-director Graham Foy. Set in the hinterlands of Alberta, the movie focuses on several teenagers, both living and dead — a haunting that feels like a generational cri de coeur.I’m still puzzling through the far-out, what-in-the-what finale of “Astrakan,” a drama from the French writer-director David Depesseville about a watchful 12-year-old, Samuel (the appealing Mirko Giannini), who’s been placed in a foster family that seems supremely ill-equipped to deal with his trauma. For most of its running time, the movie embraces a familiar if somewhat stylized realism only to abruptly veer into full-blown symbolism. Like some of the other movies in the lineup, “Astrakan” owes a conspicuous debt to established filmmakers — the boy at times evokes François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel while the filmmaking nods at Robert Bresson via Bruno Dumont — although at its strongest, it stands on its own.The cinematic touchstones are just as obvious elsewhere in the program, which isn’t necessarily a negative. The influence of the Ukrainian auteur Sergei Loznitsa clearly informs the dramatic tumult, political pessimism and elegantly flowing camerawork of “Pamfir,” a visually striking drama from the writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk about a smuggler who’s recently returned home. There’s certainly some of the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’s DNA in “Tommy Guns,” a far-out tale from Carlos Conceição that opens in Angola (where he was born) during the tail end of that country’s war of independence. The movie opens powerfully and gathers dramatic momentum as it begins to blur the time frame, only to lose its sting (and focus on subjugated Angolans) when it drifts into self-conscious surrealism.Naíma Sentíes in “Tótem,” the second feature from writer-director Lila Avilés.Courtesy of Limerencia FilmsEnergetic, sweeping and feminist to the bone, the Iranian drama “Leila’s Brothers,” from the writer-director Saeed Roustaee, traces its title character through the claustrophobic tumult of her life, family and world. Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti, vivid and grounded) is trying to balance her desires with the competing, clamorous needs of her squabbling brothers and impoverished, traditionally minded parents. Organized around a series of encounters, the movie fuses the personal with the political. It opens with a protest that soon turns violent, an overture that sets the tense, fractious mood and telegraphs the story’s trajectory. Then, scene by scene, it lays bare the complexities of contemporary Iran.“Chile ’76,” Manuela Martelli’s visually and tonally meticulous exploration of political resistance and conscience, takes place in the brutal years after the 1973 American-backed coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. Soon after it opens, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), a doctor’s wife with expensive taste who’s decamped to her family’s vacation home, is asked by a priest for help with a wounded stranger. Before long Carmen is drawn into a shadowy world of passwords and strange noises on the phone, and this unnerving feature has turned into a veritable horror movie. When a body washes up on a beach, Carmen tells her grandchildren to avert their eyes; by then, though, hers have been pried open.There isn’t a false note in the tender Mexican drama “Tótem,” which follows the 7-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes, suitably luminous) as she navigates the chaos and indifference of her sprawling family during celebrations for her ailing father. With intricate staging, lapidary camerawork and an expressionistically warm palette — along charming appearances from the natural world — the writer-director Lila Avilés creates a richly textured, deeply compassionate portrait of a family that’s falling apart as one of its youngest members comes into consciousness. “Tótem” is only Avilés’s second feature — her first, “The Chambermaid,” screened at the 2019 festival — but it’s also one of the finest movies you’ll see this year.“Tótem” is also the kind of movie that I think one of the festival’s early programmers, the writer Donald Richie, had in mind when he told The Times in 1972 that the inaugural New Directors “will introduce deserving films that perhaps otherwise might not have exposure here.” It was an honorable idea then; it still is. If anything, the fragility of the art-film exhibition, which has only been worsened by the pandemic, makes the festival’s support of movies like “Tótem” feel even more necessary than it did back then. And if I haven’t convinced you to get off the couch, then consider that this year the festival has sweetened its offerings with a smartly priced package of five movies for $50 — a cinephile carrot that’s as good as it gets.New Directors/New Films runs from Wednesday through April 9. For more information, go to newdirectors.org. More

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      Claudia Cardinale Gets MoMA Tribute for Film Career

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      Ahead of a MoMA retrospective, the actress reflected on her career, which includes over 100 films and many classics of Italian cinema.On a recent afternoon in Rome, Claudia Cardinale recalled the many heartthrobs she worked with during her more than six-decade movie career, and let out a full-throated laugh.“And they also wanted to make love with me,” she said, “but I always refused.”Over the years, the fresh-faced beauty — who David Niven, her co-star in an early “Pink Panther” movie, once described as Italy’s best invention besides spaghetti — had given the cold shoulder to more than one famous screen Casanova, Cardinale said in an interview. “They tried,” she added. “I turned down seducers.”Then she laughed her mischievous laugh again.Cardinale, 84, was in Rome last month for the Italian presentation of a newly restored version of Luigi Comencini’s 1963 film “La ragazza di Bube” (“Bebo’s Girl”), about a small-town girl who stands by her man, even after he is convicted of a crime and goes to jail.“Bebo’s Girl,” which earned Cardinale her first prestigious acting award, Italy’s Nastro d’Argento for best actress, will be shown on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first in a 23-film retrospective honoring the Tunisian-born Italian actress that runs through Feb. 21. It is one of a handful of times that the museum has presented a tribute to a living actor in its more than 90-year history.“Beautiful actresses come and go,” Joshua Siegel, a MoMA curator, said in video message shown at the Rome screening. “But they usually don’t endure over a period of some 60, 65 years.”Cardinale with Fabio Rinaudo at the opening night of “8 ½,” in Rome, in 1963. Archivio Luce CinecittàCardinale said she would not be in New York for the retrospective; she no longer travels like she used to. It tires her — she now uses a cane to get around — and she prefers to stay out of the limelight.Cardinale was in the public eye long enough, starring in more than 100 films since 1956. For many film buffs, she is best remembered for her roles in Italian cinema classics: as the young wife Ginetta in Luchino Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers”; as Angelica, a commoner whose vitality and beauty seduces Sicilian aristocracy in Visconti’s “The Leopard”; as the enigmatic Claudia in Federico Fellini’s “8 ½,”; or as the feisty Jill, the widow with a ranch to protect in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.”She also has boasting rights from her star turn in Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” a legendarily difficult movie that was shot in the Peruvian jungle and described in The New York Times as a favorite of “connoisseurs of production disasters,” and the movie and its making as “fables of daft aspiration.”Cardinale has said that “Fitzcarraldo” was the adventure of her life, but during an interview last month, she said she had no particular favorites. “My God, I’ve done some many, I don’t know which one I prefer,” she said, and laughed again. “Maybe ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’” she said, “and then so many others.”Cardinale in “Once Upon a Time in The West.”Paramount Pictures, via Everett CollectionThe MoMA tribute, organized with Cinecittà, Italy’s national film company, includes some of Cardinale’s better known performances. But for the occasion, Cinecittà also restored three works less likely to be known to American audiences: “Bebo’s Girl,” but also Marco Ferreri’s 1972 “The Audience,” about a man’s obsession with meeting with the pope, and Pasquale Squitieri’s 1990 “Atto di Dolore,” about a widow whose son is a drug addict.Though Cardinale’s name will forever be associated with classics of Italian cinema, she spoke little Italian when she first set foot there in 1957.Cardinale was born in Tunisia in 1938, into a family of Sicilian immigrants that had settled there decades before. “I still feel a little bit Tunisian,” Cardinale told the news agency ANSA in May at a ceremony to name a street in her honor in the port town La Goulette, near Tunis.In 1957, she won the Most Beautiful Italian in Tunisia contest, which came with what turned out to be her ticket to stardom: a trip to the Venice Film Festival.Cardinale on the set of the film “Austerlitz” by Abel Gance (1960).Archivio Luce CinecittàIn “Claudia Cardinale: The Indomitable,” a book published by Cinecittà and Electa to coincide with the MoMA tribute, the author and critic Masolino D’Amico recalls being at that festival and seeing Cardinale for the first time, “splendid in all her youthfulness,” wearing an emerald green bikini and posing for the paparazzi.“She seemed to think that small shower of camera clicks was like a game,” Masolino writes. “She was not — I understand this clearly now — trying to be sexy, and maybe not even attractive. She was simply happy to be there.”In Venice, she caught the eye of Franco Cristaldi, at the time one of Italy’s most important producers, who, in Pygmalion fashion, transformed the young ingénue into an in-demand movie star. He also became her life partner, adopting her son, Patrick Cristaldi. Now 64, he was initially passed off as her brother so as not to crack her “virginal feel and glow,” or to scandalize society, Cardinale’s daughter, Claudia Squitieri said.Stardom had a price. Cristaldi demanded hard work and discipline, and in 1962 drafted a contract that oversaw every aspect of the actress’s life, professional and private. She accepted, if reluctantly: Her family depended on her, and she had a child to raise.That life ended when she met the director Pasquale Squitieri in 1973 on the set of “I guappi,” (“Blood Brothers”) and the two fell madly in love. Their careers took a hit: Cristaldi was a powerful producer in Italy whom industry people feared crossing.“Claudia Cardinale: The Indomitable,” a book published by Cinecittà and Electa to coincide with the MoMA tribute. via Puntoe VirgolaCardinale would make nine films with Squitieri, even after she moved to Paris and he remained in Rome. Never married, they eventually split, but remained close.Claudia Squitieri and Patrick Cristaldi now live with their mother in a house near Fontainebleau, France, where Cardinale has created a foundation to support two causes close to her heart: women’s rights and the environment. Cardinale has been a UNESCO good will ambassador since 2000, for campaigning work to improve the status of women and girls, and she is the honorary president of Green Cross Italy, an environment advocacy group that sponsors an award for sustainable films at the Venice Film Festival. The foundation is “something to continue her shine,” said Squitieri, who runs the organization for her mother.Cardinale said she was very close to Squitieri. “I am lucky to have this daughter, who I adore,” she said. “She looks after me; she looks after everything.”Because Cardinale won’t be in New York this week, Squitieri will do the honors. On Friday, the “Bebo’s Girl” screening will be followed by “Un Cardinale donna” (“A Woman Cardinal”), a whimsical short featuring the actress, produced for the retrospective by Manuel Maria Perrone.Speaking at the film’s Rome premiere, Perrone said that “dealing with an idol, with such a strong icon, is something extremely difficult, even fragile.”“She’s been doing this her whole life,” he said. “Being an icon is her job.”Claudia CardinaleFeb. 3 through Feb. 21, at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. More