Sound of the Police (Movie)

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    ‘Mutt,’ ‘Unpregnant’ and More Streaming Gems

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    The complexities of 21st-century romantic entanglements are front and center in this month’s roundup of hidden gems on your subscription streaming services.‘Mutt’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s micro-budget New York drama is everything indie movies are supposed to be: keenly observed and modestly executed, telling us a story and showing us a world we don’t usually see in mainstream cinema. In this case, it’s the world of Feña (Lío Mehiel), a transgender man and a semi-desperate pseudo-hustler whose life goes momentarily topsy-turvy when he accidentally reconnects with a former boyfriend from before his transition. Every performer is on point, natural and credible, and the screenplay is lived-in and mostly devoid of histrionics (Feña gives a big speech to his dad about how difficult it all is, and it’s the single false note, the only scene that feels like a scene from a movie instead of a scene from real life). This is a small film, but a mighty one.‘Unpregnant’ (2020)Stream it on Max.When this Max original debuted in 2020, its story — of a young woman (Haley Lu Richardson, “The White Lotus”) inviting her former BFF (Barbie Ferreira, “Euphoria”) on an impromptu road trip to a state that doesn’t require parental consent for an abortion — felt a bit less urgent. In this post-Dobbs world, in which such journeys have become necessary even for some adults, the picture’s light tone and comic beats could seem to make light of a serious situation. But the co-writer and director Rachel Lee Goldenberg balances these trick tones with aplomb, primarily focusing on the splintered (but repairable) friendship between these disparate women, without trivializing the motivation for their reunion. The result is a sharp but likable road movie, and a fine showcase for two charismatic performers.‘Crush’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.The filmmaker Sammi Cohen, who had a popular hit on Netflix with last year’s Adam Sandler (and family) vehicle “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” directs this delightfully frisky queer teen sex comedy. Rowan Blanchard is Paige, split between two potential romantic interests: the popular Gabriela (Isabella Ferreira) and the introverted AJ (Auli‘i Cravalho), who also, inconveniently enough, happen to be sisters. Though contemporary in its setting and sexual politics, “Crush” betrays Cohen’s love for ’90s teen comedies of the “Clueless” ilk, borrowing their candy-colored aesthetics as well as their knowing and occasionally adult-oriented sense of humor. Blanchard is a charming anchor, Ferreira a memorable counterpoint and Cravalho, currently brightening up “Mean Girls” and best known to younger viewers for voicing “Moana,” is one of the most exciting young actors on the scene.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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      ‘Sound of the Police’ Review: The Silence and the Fury

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      This documentary dives into the nation’s outrageous history of the policing of Black citizens by touching on the 2022 killing of Amir Locke.It is not the first image in “Sound of the Police,” a documentary about the chronically vexed relationship between Black people and police officers, but it is its most chilling: the ominous hush of the police at a front door, signaling the horror to come.In February 2022, a SWAT team entered an apartment in Minneapolis. Body camera footage, released by the city’s police, shows a key being quietly inserted into a lock during a no-knock search warrant operation. Seconds later, Amir Locke, 22, who had been asleep on the living-room couch when roused by the officers, was mortally wounded. Footage shows him, groggy and confused, under a blanket holding his legally owned handgun.The director Stanley Nelson’s freighted film opens with family and friends gathering for Locke’s funeral, a celebration of his life, followed by interviews with his parents. The movie also concludes with them. In between those sad but cleareyed bookends, the filmmakers have packed a necessary history of policing. That Locke’s death came after the killings of Breonna Taylor (also a no-knock warrant) and George Floyd, underscores the movie’s argument: Reforming policing remains a life-or-death matter.For viewers who’ve digested the bitter lessons of the documentaries “13th” and “MLK/FBI,” as well as more recent social-justice portraits of the activist Rev. Al Sharpton (“Loudmouth”) and the civil rights attorney Ben Crump (“Civil”), many of the images of brutality and insights about the abuses of institutional power will be familiar, though no less outrageous. Some early police forces in America were formed from slave patrols, and their violent tactics descend from post-Civil War attempts to control and contain Black people, engendering a justified mistrust.The film boasts a formidable collection of interviewees — among them the legal scholar James Forman Jr., the historian Elizabeth Hinton as well as David Simon, the creator of the police procedural “The Wire.” Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, dissects the social conditions that have enabled police departments to rebuff oversight and have emboldened white citizens to imagine a personal relationship to the police. (The montage of white women making 911 calls to report Black citizens — bird watching, lemonade selling, just tending to life — might be amusing, were it not so pathological.) If you need a refresher on what “systemic” looks like, these thinkers offer it.Sound of the PoliceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and on Hulu. More