Resurrection (Movie)

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    ‘Stan & Ollie,’ ‘Resurrection’ and More Streaming Gems

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    Wildly original comedy-dramas, hair-raising horror and modest examinations of male tenderness are among the highlights of this month’s off-the-grid streaming recommendations.‘Stan & Ollie’ (2018)Stream it on Max.It’s no surprise that a biopic of the classic comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy didn’t exactly set the box office on fire eight decades after their heyday; their work has been all but forgotten in this what’s-new-and-is-it-streaming era. But the director Jon S. Baird — focusing on the pair’s tour of English music halls in the twilight of their careers — presents a compelling (if somewhat fictionalized) portrait of their affection, resentments and codependence, while Steve Coogan as Laurel and John C. Reilly as Hardy engagingly recreate the comedians’ old routines and characterizations. They’re fun to watch (and to watch together), and the pathos at the picture’s end is genuine, and earned.‘Welcome to Me’ (2015)Stream it on Peacock.Kristen Wiig is at the center of this peculiar and risky character study as Alice Klieg, a perpetually luckless unemployed woman with borderline personality disorder who wins the California lottery and uses her newfound financial windfall to fund her own bizarre daytime talk show. The director Shira Piven and the screenwriter Eliot Laurence could have easily told this story as a broad comedy or a depressing chamber piece. They pull off something trickier, positioning the picture as a serious-minded but frequently uproarious tragicomedy, and it mostly works — thanks in no small part to Wiig, whose characterization is equal parts keenly observed, deeply disturbed and breezily funny.‘Cold Pursuit’ (2019)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.You might assume this is yet another of Liam Neeson’s late-career thrillers, considering it concerns an ordinary man out to avenge the death of his son. But there’s a grim joylessness to this man and his mission, and “Cold Pursuit” gradually reveals itself as a deconstruction of these movies, willing to grapple with the bleakness of death and revenge. Neeson’s snowplow driver just keeps pounding these guys for names, then moves up to the next one, methodically searching for the responsible party. It gets broader (and more obviously “Fargo”-influenced) as it goes, which is unfortunate. But the subtext is fascinating, and Neeson seems to revel in the opportunity to do some honest-to-goodness acting in one of these things.‘Cry Macho’ (2021)Stream it on Netflix.Clint Eastwood had just entered his ninth decade on earth when he directed and starred in this adaptation of N. Richard Nash’s novel, and he looks every day of it onscreen; this isn’t the robust Clint of “In the Line of Fire” or even “Million Dollar Baby,” but a fragile, aged man with a croak of a voice. Yet Eastwood the director has always known how to play up the strengths of Eastwood the actor, and the many miles of road behind him give extra gravitas to the wisdom his character, a onetime rodeo rider, imparts on the young man (Eduardo Minett) he’s been sent to Mexico to retrieve.‘Resurrection’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.Rebecca Hall crafts an astonishing portrait of a woman in the grip of unceasing trauma in this horror-tinged drama from the writer and director Andrew Semans. Hall is the very picture of fierce independence as Margaret, a driven career woman whose carefully calculated life starts careening out of her grasp when a mysterious figure from her past (a devilish Tim Roth) reappears. The genre affectations are effective — particularly the jaw-dropping finale — but the real draw here is Hall’s showcase monologue, an emotionally devastating explanation of exactly who Roth is, and what he did to her.‘Strawberry Mansion’ (2022)Stream it on Mubi.Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney wrote, directed and edited this delightfully demented comic fantasy — a true indie with a look, sound and feel quite unlike anything else on this or any other list. Audley is also the deadpan leading man, a government auditor in a not too distant future, where citizens are taxed for the extravagancies of their dreams. It’s a digital process, so he meets a considerable challenge in the form of the batty Bella (Penny Fuller), whose dreams are still analog, leaving him with thousands of videotapes to watch and log. And that’s when things start getting really weird. Audley and Birney’s wild screenplay adroitly captures the touch-and-go intricacies of dream logic, the special effects are impressively D.I.Y. and the humor is deliriously cockeyed throughout.‘Love Is Strange’ (2014)Stream it on Max.The youthful subjects and ratings-busting sexuality of the recent cause célèbre “Passages” make it feel like the work of a newbie hotshot, but its co-writer and director, Ira Sachs, has been making thoughtful, poignant indies for years. This is one of the best, the tender and sometimes tense story of Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina), who have loved each other and lived together for decades, only to find that finally making their marriage legal turns their entire lives upside down. Sachs’s portrayal of the frustrations of Manhattan real estate rings loud and true, and his entire cast is sturdy. But the real draws here are Lithgow and Molina, who invest their onscreen relationship with a lived-in authenticity.‘It’s Quieter in the Twilight’ (2023)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.NASA launched the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts in 1977, with the goal of gathering data from the orbits of the four outermost planets before continuing beyond our solar system. More than 1,000 people were involved in the project; when the director Billy Miossi shot this documentary about the mission between 2019 and 2021, that number had dwindled down to about a dozen lifers, many of them postponing retirement or declining other opportunities to instead stay with the Voyagers. Miossi’s film is modest, especially considering the grand ambitions of the mission, yet it’s a captivating portrait of these dedicated professionals, their inspiring work and the challenges of aging technology. 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      Pregnant Men Were a Movie Punchline. Now They’re Horror Villains.

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      The idea of the pregnant man has long been mined for Hollywood comedy. This summer, he becomes a menace.When I was four months pregnant, just as my midsection had grown vast enough to convert my pregnancy into a public event, I escaped to the movies. I saw “Men,” Alex Garland’s May horror film about the young widow Harper (Jessie Buckley), who sets out on a restorative countryside getaway only to be terrorized by a village full of unsavory male archetypes — pervy vicar, passive-aggressive nice guy, condescending cop — all played by Rory Kinnear.Near the end of the film (spoiler alert), one of these men spontaneously sprouts a distended belly much like my own. A slimy slit ruptures between his legs, and one of the other guys slithers out of the hole. He grows a belly and births a third guy, who grows a belly and births a fourth guy, and so on, until the film’s full cast of men has replicated at Harper’s feet.A few weeks later, I was beached on my bed at home, watching a screener on my laptop for Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection,” when I was again confronted by the specter of a menacing pregnant man. The thriller, which debuted in theaters last week, follows the tightly wound corporate hot shot Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots David (Tim Roth), a man from her past. Maggie reveals (more spoilers!) that 22 years ago, David lured her into an abusive relationship, impregnated her and ate their baby. Now he informs her that the little boy he gobbled is gestating in his gut and missing his mommy. “He’s moving,” David tells Maggie, handling his middle-aged paunch like a baby bump. “Would you like to feel him?”In Alex Garland’s “Men,” a young widow (Jessie Buckley) is terrorized during her countryside getaway by a village full of unsavory male archetypes (all played by Rory Kinnear).A24Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection” follows a corporate hot shot, Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots a man from her past (Tim Roth).IFC MidnightSo the horror villain of the summer is the pregnant man. He represents the patriarchal domination of women, or maybe the cyclical nature of male violence, or maybe the surreal outer edge of psychological trauma — but whatever he’s supposed to signify, he implicates me. My pregnant state, grafted onto these men, is pitched as the apotheosis of grotesque social commentary, a sight meant to be so bizarre, disturbing and deep that it is preserved for the crowning spectacle of a horror film.Pop culture has long been obsessed with the prospect of male pregnancy, though it has mostly been used as a comedic gambit, as in the dismal 1978 farce “Rabbit Test,” the sentimental 1994 rom-com “Junior,” or the elaborate rollout of Lil Nas X’s 2021 album “Montero,” during which he traipsed around the internet sporting a photorealistic bump before simulating birthing an LP. Of course, some men can and do become pregnant — trans men — but works that exploit the idea of the pregnant man rarely acknowledge the reality of the pregnant man. He must exist purely as a fantasy, a counterfactual, a metaphor. Like a mythical boogeyman, he has stalked the culture for generations, occasionally appearing to impart a lesson on gender relations in his time. Now he has shape shifted from a clown into a creep — a visceral interpretation of male control over women’s bodies.Over the past several weeks, I watched many of the artifacts of the pregnant man genre. I started with “Rabbit Test,” Joan Rivers’s misanthropic comedy in which the aimless bachelor Lionel (Billy Crystal, in his first movie) miraculously conceives after a one-night stand with some pushy broad. Released at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, “Rabbit Test” is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.Its “first pregnant man” conceit is just a setup for a carnival of broadly racist and sexist scenarios that evinces little interest in the reality of pregnancy itself. Lionel hardly looks pregnant, he hardly feels pregnant, and as his due date approaches, he is not concerned about how he is going to become un-pregnant. “Rabbit Test” is so incurious about women’s experiences that it doesn’t even bother exploiting them. It’s just a movie about a guy with a pillow under his shirt.“Rabbit Test,” starring Billy Crystal and Doris Roberts, is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.AVCO Embassy Pictures, via PhotofestThat shifted a little with “Junior,” the 1994 rom-com in which an embryo is implanted into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s musclebound abdominal cavity. “Junior” is from the “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” era — a time when men and women were pitched as fundamentally different organisms, but when men who attempted interspecies communication were praised for accessing their “feminine sides.” Schwarzenegger (playing, naturally, a scientist) literalizes the trend when he is impregnated as a part of a clandestine medical experiment, pumped with estrogen and reduced to a maternal cliché. Suddenly he is craving pickles with ice cream and weeping at Kodak commercials.“Junior” is built on a sight gag: pregnancy as a laughable twist to Schwarzenegger’s herculean form. But pregnancy has the power to render any body ridiculous. And yet, as I trudge down the street, my increasingly preposterous dimensions inspire such affirmational outbursts from strangers that I feel at the center of an immense gendered conspiracy, where the self-evident absurdity of my physical situation is instead pitched as the cheerful apotheosis of my life as a woman.Maybe that’s why, watching “Junior,” I was struck by the sensitivity of Schwarzenegger’s performance. Though he is dropped into a parade of offensive scenarios (there is an interminable sequence of shoddy drag) and fitted with a limited emotional range (pregnancy is uncomfortable and confounding, never degrading or grim), he endures his ludicrous situation with unexpected grace. His pregnancy makes him not into a joke, but a father, and a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson. And when he hurls a rival scientist across a laboratory and fashions an abortion rights slogan into a steely Austrian-accented catchphrase — “My body, my choice” — it feels earned.In “Junior,” Schwarzenegger’s surprisingly sensitive performance as a pregnant man makes him a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson.Universal PicturesIf Schwarzenegger’s baby in “Junior” were real, she would be older than the 23-year-old Lil Nas X, whose own interpretation of pregnant imagery exists on an elevated plane. The campy visual world of “Montero” — which also finds him riding a stripper pole into hell — seems unbothered by gendered expectations at all. Like Billy Crystal’s in “Rabbit Test,” Lil Nas X’s prosthetic belly is just a costume, but this time it’s worn by a queer pop star rapaciously churning cultural shibboleths into internet chum.Now, just as Lil Nas X has chucked the pregnant man into the recycle bin, the movies have reclaimed him and primed him for a heel turn. Hollywood’s comic interpretation of the pregnant man always masked some deeply misogynistic ideas, and now they have emerged from the subtext to define the character himself.“Men” is a film that does not challenge the gender binary so much as wallow in it. Harper’s ill-fated getaway is suffused with dour shots of fertility idols and portentous biblical references; before she is terrorized by a pack of pathetic and violent men, she chomps an apple she’s plucked from someone else’s tree. Garland, the film’s director, has said that “messing around” with ancient masculine and feminine symbols led him to the image of “a guy with a vagina on his chest.” When that vagina births a succession of bad guys, rendering them all as laboring parents and mewling babes, it reads as a kind of misanthropic final judgment, as if men abusing women is a grotesque but ultimately inevitable cycle.The imagery of “Resurrection,” on the other hand, originates from nowhere. There is no mythical antecedent to David smugly carrying his beer gut like a womb. He requires no padding or prosthetics. He just asserts that there’s a baby in there, and he does it with such psychological intensity that Maggie starts to believe him. Watching Roth’s riotously unsettling performance, I felt freed from the reality of my own pregnant body, and also a little bit won over. David’s claims are ridiculous, but so is pregnancy. Though I am of course aware of the biological process through which babies are made, it still feels so supernatural that if you told me that people get pregnant by gobbling up live infants, I might believe it.After plodding through decades of pregnant-man tropes, “Seahorse” — a 2019 documentary that follows Freddy McConnell, a British journalist and trans man, as he conceives, carries and gives birth to his first child — came as a welcome relief. Finally, the image of the pregnant man is freed of the distortions of comedy, horror and metaphor and presented simply as a human experience. As McConnell endures the physical and mental trials of pregnancy, he must also contend with intense social pressures: He feels alienated from other men, patronized by women, ignored by medicine and estranged from his own identity.The backlash against gender-neutral language like “pregnant people” — and the assertion that it somehow “erases” women — is unintelligible to me. It is the coding of pregnancy as the paramount expression of femininity that make me feel expunged. The gendered constructs of pregnancy work differently on McConnell’s body than they do on mine, but I identified closely with him. He describes pregnancy as a process, and that is clarifying. It is not an extension of my personality. It’s just the wildest thing I’ve ever done.For me, the most unsettling image in the annals of pregnant-man movies came at the end of “Men” — not the birth scene, but the one that followed. Throughout her weekend of horror, Harper is in touch with a friend, Riley, who becomes so concerned for Harper’s safety that she drives overnight to find her. When Riley steps out of the car, we get the film’s final reveal: She’s pregnant! If pregnancy represents horror in a man, it is meant to signal the opposite in a woman — she must be nurturing, preternaturally understanding, good. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about that, but I know how I felt: like a punchline to an old joke. More

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      ‘Resurrection’ Review: Mother of Fears

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      A successful single mother encounters a terrifying man from her past in this crazily enjoyable horror movie.Somewhere near the end of “Resurrection,” a sleek, hurtling, ridiculously entertaining horror movie from Andrew Semans, there’s a scene of such gruesomely bonkers intent that I actually gasped. And then I laughed, tickled by how easily Semans and his star, the charismatic Rebecca Hall, had persuaded me to invest in their lunatic shenanigans.But then Hall — as proven in last year’s creep-out, “The Night House” — has a knack for pumping gravitas into somewhat batty narratives. Here, she plays Margaret, an executive in some sort of pharmaceutical outfit, and from the start we notice an intensity that verges on obsessiveness. Whether at work or as the protective single mother to her teenage daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman), Margaret is a model of calculated control. Even her sex life is rigidly regulated, the liaisons with her married co-worker, Peter (Michael Esper), unfolding with more efficiency than pleasure. It’s not that Margaret is cold — more than once, we see her empathetically counsel a young intern to leave an emotionally abusive boyfriend — it’s just that she seems permanently on guard.But against what? Clues start to accumulate. Abbie, who’s about to leave for college, finds a human molar in her wallet. Later, the sight of a mysterious man in a lecture room causes Margaret to blanch and shake, as if she has seen a ghost. More than two decades earlier, she was involved with this man, David (Tim Roth), and the relationship has left her, quite literally, scarred. Now, he seems to want something, showing up randomly without approaching her until, terrified, she accosts him. His vulpine grin reveals a missing tooth.As we’re about to learn, David is more than a heel, he’s a hellion, and what begins as the story of a stalking skids rapidly into depravity and humiliation. And when Margaret’s carefully cultivated life starts to crack — she’s sniping at colleagues and fiercely monitoring Abbie’s movements — “Resurrection” teases a familiar fable of female disintegration. But Semans, who debuted in 2013 with the cheeky psycho-comedy, “Nancy, Please,” is too confident an explorer of twisted minds to settle for cliché. The bargain that David hopes to strike with Margaret concerning a long-ago tragedy is unbelievable, unthinkable, insane. Yet Roth’s eerily still body language and quietly sinister line readings choke the urge to laugh. He’s a magnetic sadist.Encouraged by Jim Williams’s unsettling score, Hall and Roth convincingly sell their characters’ sick psychological bond. So while “Resurrection” harbors more than one theme — empty-nest anxieties, toxic men and the long tail of their manipulations — the movie feels more like an unhinged test of how far into the loonyverse the audience can be persuaded to venture.That’s why Hall’s skin-prickling, 7-minute monologue early in the film is so critical. As the screen darkens behind her and her pale face fills the frame, she recounts Margaret and David’s horrifying history with irresistible sincerity. It’s the perfect setup for an ending of such delicious ambiguity it was all I could do not to applaud.ResurrectionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Sundance Film Festival: ‘Nanny’ Leads a Parade of Scares

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      When a character took a severed human leg out of a fridge in the horror movie “Fresh,” I laughed then hit pause. I had that luxury because, like everyone else this year, I didn’t have to fly to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival but attended this impressively sanguineous edition at home. So I just fast-forwarded to the leg chopper’s grisly comeuppance. As to the movie, it will do fine without my love: It’s already racked up positive reviews and will be released on Hulu, which is owned by Disney because, well, sometimes dreams really do come true.That human shank was part of a colorful parade of body parts on display at this year’s Sundance, which included a veritable charnel house of severed limbs, decapitated heads and disemboweled guts. The specter of the horror maestro David Cronenberg haunts “Resurrection,” a not entirely successful creepfest with an excellent Rebecca Hall, while other movies owed a conspicuous debt to Jordan Peele’s 2017 Sundance hit “Get Out,” notably “Master” (about a Black student and professor at a white-dominated college) and “Emergency,” an entertaining nail-biter about three friends trapped in a white nightmare.A scene from the comedy-turned-thriller “Emergency.”via Sundance InstituteI didn’t love “Fresh,” which uses a captivity freakout to dubious feminist ends, though I may have enjoyed it with more company. Watching horror movies alone isn’t the same as being in a theater filled with other people, including at Sundance. There, the audience tends to be already super-amped-up and excited just to be in the room, seeing a movie for the first time and often with the filmmakers in attendance. The hothouse atmosphere of festivals can be misleading and turn mediocrities into events, certainly, but the noisy clamor of such hype is always outweighed by the joys of experiencing discoveries and revelations with others.This is the second year that Sundance has been forced to jettison its in-person plans because of the pandemic. The festival had instituted sound vax and mask protocols, and the Utah county where Sundance takes place has a higher vaccination rate than either New York or Los Angeles. But Utah also had the third-highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the country as of Monday, as The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported. And, frankly, given how often I had returned home from Sundance with a bad cold or the flu (including a whopper of a mystery bug that flattened me in 2020), I didn’t bother to book another overpriced condo.Rebecca Hall in “Resurrection,” a creepfest with a debt to David Cronenberg.Wyatt Garfield, via Sundance InstituteInstead, I moved into my living room, hooked my laptop to my TV and streamed from the festival’s easy-to-use website. In between movies, I texted some of the same colleagues I hang out with at Sundance when we’re in Park City. In 2020, we had shared our love for “Time,” Garrett Bradley’s documentary about a family’s struggle with the American prison system. (I sat out the festival’s 2021 edition.) This year, we again traded must-sees and must-avoids. “I told you how awful it is,” my friend chided me about “You’ll Never Be Alone,” a shocker about a witch. She had, sigh. We also kept returning to a favorite: “Wow Nanny,” she texted. Oh, yes.A standout in this year’s U.S. dramatic competition, “Nanny” was another one of the selections that I deeply regretted not seeing with an audience, for both its visceral shocks and its lush beauty. In this case, I would have stayed put in my seat, just as I did at home, where pesky domestic distractions can make paying attention a struggle, especially when a movie isn’t strong enough to fully hold you. That was never a problem with “Nanny,” which kept me rapt from the start with its visuals and mysteries, its emotional depths and the tight control that the writer-director Nikyatu Jusu maintains on her material.Set in New York, the story centers on Aisha (the excellent Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant who’s recently accepted a nanny position. Her new workplace, a luxurious sprawl as sterile as a magazine layout, sets off immediate alarm bells, as do the overeager smiles and obsessive instructions of her tightly wound white employer, Amy (Michelle Monaghan). The setup recalls that of “Black Girl,” the Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 classic film about the horrors of postcolonialism. It’s an obvious aesthetic and political touchstone for Jusu, who nevertheless quickly and confidently spins off in her own direction.Like a number of other selections in this year’s festival, “Nanny” is a horror movie with a profound difference; unlike too many other filmmakers, Jusu never becomes boxed in by genre. Instead, horror-film conventions are part of an expansive tool kit that includes narrative ellipses, an expressionistic use of bold color and figures from African folklore, including a trickster in spider form and a water spirit called Mami Wata. Here, clichés like the oppressive house, controlling employer and vulnerable heroine prove far more complex than they appear, having been skillfully reimagined for this anguished, haunted story.Women in peril are familiar screen figures, but this year there was some honest variety in the kinds of directors putting knives to throats. At one point — in between streaming, smiling, grimacing, weeping and occasionally eww-ing at all the blood and guts — I realized that I hadn’t bothered to count the number of women and people of color in this year’s program. I was seeing enough fictional stories and documentaries with a range of different types of people that I hadn’t started compulsively profiling the filmmakers. Yes, there were a few Sundance reliables, the eternally cute and kooky white children of Indiewood, but not enough to trigger you about the old days when the festival was clogged with Tarantino clones.The drama “Call Jane” was one of two Sundance films about the Jane Collective, a group that helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions.Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe auteurist touchstone at Sundance these days is Jordan Peele, whose radical use of the genre continues to feel relevant to the traumas of contemporary life. The preponderance of frightful tales in this program is obviously a matter of availability, cinematic copycatting and curatorial discretion. Given all the onscreen evisceration this year, I would imagine that the festival director Tabitha Jackson and the director of programming Kim Yutani have strong stomachs and senses of humor. That they’re also feminists surely, if gratifyingly, goes without saying and may help explain why there are three movies in the slate about abortion.The two I saw — the well-acted drama “Call Jane” and the solid, informative documentary “The Janes” — aren’t horror movies in the usual sense, but like more conventional examples of the genre, they also turn on the body, and specifically the female body, in peril. Each movie revisits the Jane Collective, a group of women and some men who from 1968 to 1973 helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions before the procedure was a Constitutional right. And while the image of one member (Elizabeth Banks) in “Call Jane” learning how to administer abortions by practicing on pumpkins may not have been a Halloween joke, I laughed anyway.On a conspicuous, quantifiable level, this year’s program reaffirms that a genuine diversity of filmmakers also yields a welcome cinematic multiplicity. It can be easy to think of representation as an abstraction, as a political cudgel, a tedious rallying cry, a bore. Again and again this year, the sight of all these bodies, particularly of women — including Emma Thompson letting it all hang out beautifully in the gentle comedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” — was a reminder that these representations aren’t boxes that were ticked off. They are the embodied truths, pleasures and terrors of women and people of color who, having long served as canvases for fantasies of otherness, have seized control of their own images. More