Manohla Dargis

In the documentary “The Kingmaker,” Lauren Greenfield trots out the plunder and of course the shoes — those notorious emblems of Marcos’ excess — but also examines the appalling costs of that luxury. It’s an ugly story shrewdly told, with a sense of humor and also a deeper feeling for history. In the years since Marcos and her husband, Ferdinand (who died in exile, in Hawaii, in 1989), were ousted after the People Power Revolution, too many journalists have called on her to gawk and dish. Greenfield, a fine-art photographer turned filmmaker, has something else in mind, as telegraphed by the aerial shot of ramshackle Manila shanties that starts the movie.

This opener introduces Greenfield’s dialectic approach, which emerges slowly. Under her scrupulous gaze — the directors of photography are Lars Skree and Shana Hagan — Marcos, aka the Iron Butterfly, floats through her homes, tended to by anxious aides. She chats under a Picasso, poses before a Michelangelo. She displays reams of legal documents from her many court battles and drifts down memory lane, at one point showing off photos of herself with the woman she calls Mrs. Mao (Jiang Qing) and with Richard Nixon. When Marcos accidentally knocks over some photos, shattering the glass in the frames, the moment vibrates with metaphoric force.

Greenfield doesn’t explain how she secured her remarkable access, though she clearly has a gift for wrangling the self-obsessed. Her documentary “The Queen of Versailles” (2012) centers on a billionaire couple (primarily its title subject, Jackie Siegel) who planned to build the largest privately owned house in the United States. Perhaps Marcos saw “Queen of Versailles” and liked what she saw. Or maybe she simply wanted the attention to stoke her political ambitions, specifically from a respected chronicler like Greenfield. It’s hard not to wonder if Marcos regarded the filmmaker as another would-be courtier or even an acquisition (a mistake).

Whatever the case, as Greenfield quickly reminds you, one way into a narcissist’s heart is to turn on a camera and microphone, and let vanity take over. From the instant that Marcos appears in “The Kingmaker” — gliding through the streets of Manila in a van as if in a mobile throne — it’s obvious that she remains ravenous for attention, whether from the camera or from the indigent people clamoring outside her window. It’s unsurprising that she rarely appears alone here, though it’s unclear if she needs all her helpers or is simply accustomed to armies of servants. This is, after all, a woman who apparently had a maid whose sole job was to care for her jewelry.

Despite the early images of conspicuous poverty, Greenfield initially seems to be going somewhat easy on her subject. “During my time, there were no beggars,” Marcos says soon after the movie begins, while cruising past destitute people and rundown streets. Greenfield doesn’t overtly challenge this assertion, perhaps because it’s so ridiculous. Instead, she cinematically builds a case against Marcos by folding in increasingly tough interviews with brutalized anti-Marcos activists and by deploying a surgical attention to detail: images of grasping hands are contrasted with manicured hands holding money; stuffed animals are set against images of real abused wild ones.

Marcos, who turned 85 in 2014, the year that Greenfield started shooting, continues to look remarkably robust as the years pass by, never more so than in front of the crowds that swell in size and intensity at the political rallies she attends. As the throngs burgeon, the movie’s tone grows ominous. Marcos’ children enter and exit, flexing their own political power. Her son, Bongbong, runs for vice president. An alliance emerges between her daughter Imee (also a politician) and the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, whose violent, so-called war on drugs has resulted in the deaths of an estimated 20,000 people and international condemnation.

As Greenfield opens “The Kingmaker” up, the Philippines’ past and present move uneasily into alignment, and the movie becomes more interesting and far more disturbing. Notably, it also becomes less about one woman, her malevolent charms and quirks, and develops into an unsettling look at imperial power. That said, there are moments when you wish that Greenfield had pushed harder in “The Kingmaker,” say, by taking a closer look at American intervention in the Philippines. But when she interviews an old friend of the Marcoses who chortles about American support for despots, the movie — like his comment — becomes the tragedy it was meant to be.

‘The Kingmaker’ is rated R, for images of murdered people. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes.

This article originally appeared in

'The Kingmaker' Review: The Power and Vainglory of Imelda Marcos

It was always a little too easy to laugh at Imelda Marcos. The gold and the kitsch, the fine art and the tchotchkes, the rows of bedazzled shoes and the towering dome of shellacked hair — it was all so very much, so very vulgar, so very, very expensive. During the roughly two decades that Marcos was the first lady of the Philippines, she became famous for lavish habits that make the Kardashians seem like skinflints. Even after the Marcos family fled the Philippines in 1986, her extravagance o...

A stubborn testament to the cinematic experience, Cannes continues to maintain its hold on the international art and the industry, no small thing in the age of streaming.

If nothing else, Cannes affirms that there is more to see and think about than Disney and Netflix, the twinned behemoths that increasingly dominate screens and the attention of the entertainment media.

This year’s selections were greeted with a predictable lack of critical consensus.

Among the best received was Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory,” a fictionalized self-portrait starring a deeply moving Antonio Banderas as a filmmaker struggling with his health, his past and his artistic vision.

Somehow Almodóvar has never won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor.

That prize went to another critical favorite, “Parasite,” a scabrous, often very funny social satire from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho about colliding families, both destitute and wealthy.

Bong was here in 2017 with “Okja,” which was overshadowed by a controversy involving its distributor, Netflix. The streaming giant wasn’t at this year’s event perhaps because of the French law that requires movies to play in theaters for three years before going to streaming. The law may seem dated, but it helps keep French cinema alive in a Disney-and-Netflix world.

In December, the French Ministry of Culture cut the time between theatrical release and airing on broadcast television and may shorten that window for streaming services that agree to participate in the country’s financing program, which helps pay for film and audiovisual content.

In France, movie love is a matter of pride and heritage, not just dollars and market-driven sense, and the country pours money into both French and foreign productions.

Movies at this year’s festival that received French state money included “The Orphanage” (from Afghanistan) and “Port Authority” (the United States).

In time, these movies and many others will find their way into theaters or onto a digital platform.

Among those to look out for is Kantemir Balagov’s “Beanpole,” a devastating, brilliantly directed and acted drama about two female friends — played by the equally extraordinary Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina — who reunite amid the ruins of Leningrad after World War II.

The movie was partly inspired by the novel “The Unwomanly Face of War” by Svetlana Alexievich, who in 2015 was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

“Beanpole” is one of a number of titles here that turn on female friendships, including among Muslim women, some of whom cover their heads and others who don’t, as in Mati Diop’s appealing Senegalese drama “Atlantics.” In “Adam,” a grief-hardened Casablanca baker reluctantly takes in a young unmarried pregnant woman, a kindness that changes both women’s lives.

Moroccan writer-director Maryam Touzani, making her fiction feature debut, creates a persuasive, intimate world, and while she edges close to sentimentalism, the feelings ring true.

In “Papicha,” an Algerian student pushes against encroaching fundamentalism. Set in the 1990s civil war, the movie creates an intense sense of escalating threat as religious hard-liners chastise female students for putative immodesty; among the most terrifying sequences are women in black headscarves and cloaks who storm the school.

Writer-director Mounia Meddour occasionally slips up tonally. But her vision of a brutally closing world is harrowing and often indelibly sad, as when an older woman reminisces about how the country’s women helped win independence from the French by hiding guns under the long traditional dress, the haik.

One of the most divisive movies here is Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life,” which is based on the story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), a conscientious objector who was executed by the Nazis in 1943 and later beatified by the Catholic Church.

Running nearly three hours — during which there is no direct mention of the Nazi persecution of the Jews — it tracks Franz from pastoral bliss with his wife (Valerie Pachner) to his arrest.

It’s hard not to feel for Franz and his spiritual struggle, and all too easy to enjoy the flowers, sweaters, sheep and sky shots, but Malick’s prettification of this world is as appalling as is his lack of interest in history.

As I watched Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo,” I kept wondering how it would be received by the women on the main jury, including directors Kelly Reichardt and Alice Rohrwacher. What would they make of the festival giving one of the prestigious 21 slots in the main competition to this 3 1/2-hour ode to the female rear end? In 2013, Kechiche won the Palme d’Or for “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” sharing the prize with its stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. It was clear then that he had a thing for women’s posteriors, a fixation that has reached its nadir in this epic of jittering, bopping butt.

The movie is divided into drifty sections and opens with 45 minutes of young women on the beach who twerk in the water; rub sunscreen on one another; yammer blandly. This is followed by a mind-numbing three hours in a dance club, including an explicit oral-sex scene in a bathroom. This interlude is mostly notable for its uncomfortable-looking gymnastics and its tireless female performer (Ophélie Bau). Wearing nothing but sneakers and a shirt, she must continually rearrange her body so she can present her vulva or rear end to the camera, a display that is familiar from hard-core pornography.

There’s nothing new about an art-house director working with pornographic imagery. But Kechiche’s fetishization of the female body here is as tedious as it is insulting, and the actual filmmaking is flat-out bad; it’s uninterestingly, unproductively ugly, boring and repetitive. It is possible to imagine that the programmers felt compelled to include “Mektoub” because of Kechiche’s Palme; he’s their guy, in a way, and this event helped establish his international reputation. Then again, one thing that Cannes reminds you is that quality is rarely the only reason movies play in festivals; slots need to be filled, quotas met, backroom deals made.

Whatever the reason that “Mektoub” was programmed and no matter how many scathing reviews it receives, the result is that the festival has reaffirmed Kechiche’s stature as a Cannes-anointed auteur. It’s dispiriting. Cannes has been rightly and regularly criticized for its lack of gender diversity, though recently it has made good-faith efforts to rectify its reputation for venerating male auteurs while making a spectacle out of young, beautiful female stars. Last year its programmers signed a “pledge for parity and inclusion” with the activist group 5050x2020, a French group that formed after the Weinstein accusations.

The festival is clearly trying to change — partly because of outside feminist pressure — but it needs to do better. One easy symbolic fix would be a complete reconsideration of the red carpet, which is at once the festival’s global brand and a continuing, very contentious emblem of gender inequality. The festival’s official policy is that women are not required to wear high heels, but this year Claudia Eller, the editor-in-chief of Variety, had a showdown with guards over her (nice!) flats. That there’s a continuum between the kind of religiously enforced clothing restrictions in “Papicha” and the dress code on the red carpet is unfortunately obvious.

At Cannes, the heartfelt and the scathing exist side by side

By the time the 72nd Cannes Film Festival ended Saturday, hundreds of new movies had screened and thousands of exhausted attendees crawled toward home.

CANNES, France — On Tuesday, Quentin Tarantino returned with a bang and much critical love to the Cannes Film Festival with “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” his finest in years. A dream of a movie, it follows a handful of Hollywood types living in smoggy, starry Los Angeles in 1969, the year the Manson family went on a frenzied murder spree.

Among the victims was actress Sharon Tate, then married to Roman Polanski. In Tarantino’s Hollywoodland, Tate and Polanski live next door to Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a struggling, self-doubting TV actor. His best friend is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), a stuntman whose glory days are probably behind him. Rick could be another Clint Eastwood; Cliff should have been another Steve McQueen.

On Wednesday afternoon, I sat down for a brief chat with Pitt and DiCaprio in a suite at the Carlton Hotel, one of the grand hotels overlooking the Mediterranean. The two were in the midst of a massive publicity operation that day, giving interview after interview. Presenting a movie at Cannes can be big business, and the army of Sony Pictures employees handling this offensive had the air of people worried about fumbling the most delicate of rarities. Their famous charges, by contrast, seemed wholly relaxed. Each man was affable, direct and seemingly happy to talk, but, then, they have been in the business a long time. They know how to do this.

Here are excerpts from the conversation.

MANOHLA DARGIS: Did Tarantino show you movies to prepare for your roles?

PITT (to DiCaprio): More you than me.

DiCAPRIO: We had a screening of a multitude of B films that I had never heard of, a lot of 1960s television with actors like Ralph Meeker and Ty Hardin. These guys could have been McQueen-esque but didn’t make the transition from black and white television, especially westerns, to career-makers like “The Great Escape.” So it was almost like a love story to them. Did they get that one opportunity? No, that may have passed them by. So let’s start talking about your character, what he might have been, what he’s struggling with as a working-class guy in the industry who has been playing the heavy from television show to television show. What that does to his psyche and his confidence?

PITT: I (remember) a lot of that television. In fact (Tarantino) reminded me of much of it that I had forgotten. We did watch “Billy Jack,” some Tom Laughlin, just for fun. We were pretty much weaned on the same television and film. We talked a lot about the stuntman-actor relationship. I got to meet Bud Ekins, who was Steve McQueen’s. This was a legendary relationship. He did the jump for “The Great Escape,” got Steve McQueen into motorcycles. And, then, Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham. We got to talk to Burt. Originally he was going to play George Spahn. We had rehearsals before he passed. I was surprised what a joy that was and how giving he was, and I was really moved by it. But then I realized that so much of my childhood was watching Burt Reynolds — he was the biggest thing around in the late 1970s.

DARGIS: Did you two hang out so you could develop your flow together?

DICAPRIO: You come to Hollywood and you’re basically isolated and left to your own devices. (Rick and Cliff) rely on this friendship for everything. We immediately fell into those shoes. We understood that relationship (laughs) so quickly that on the first day, we were those guys.

PITT: It was pretty automatic. We both came on the scene around the same time, we have crossed paths many times, we have the same reference points. I’ve always felt that you don’t understand the deal you’re making when suddenly you’re that lone gazelle on the plain and the herd’s gone, so to speak. And, you know, my friend here [he gestures toward DiCaprio] has been the same. So there’s automatic comfort in having experienced the same thing in that way. That’s not a complaint in any way, I say that merely as fact. We have mutual respect, and I know when an actor elevates a scene, so we carry that respect.

DARGIS: Obviously Tarantino’s movies are very written and his voice is very strong. Does it take awhile to shake his voice out and fill in yours?

DICAPRIO: And hear your own, is that what you’re saying? (Laughs) I suppose so. He is such an absolute powerhouse of a personality, of course, and an artist as well. But, look, he gives you real ownership. (There are) beats that you need to hit. But there are plenty of opportunities where once you get into the groove, there can be a completely improvisational scene. And you’re almost making reference points from his dialogue and his voice and the multitude of talks that you’ve had with him about who this character is and what kind of movie he wants to make. They sort of bloom sometimes, and that’s happened quite a few times.

PITT: You know when you have an altercation in public or you put your foot in your mouth, and you’re driving home and you think of that witty thing that you wished you would have said? His dialogue is that witty thing.

DARGIS: Rick Dalton is kind of like the Clint Eastwood who doesn’t happen.

DICAPRIO: He is the guy who almost got that shot — and that’s what’s torturing my character. I grew up in this industry, I have a lot of friends who are actors, and there’s so much talent out there. But it really boils down to being at the right place at the right time.

PITT: We talk about this with streaming. With streaming, we see so much talent that was always there. There are so many more opportunities. We’re seeing this wealth of actors, writers and directors. And it just reminds us how lucky we were to land where we landed.

DICAPRIO: Mm-hmm.

DARGIS: I worry that so much seems disposable.

PITT: It may be. I’ve been really interested in younger generations that cannot just sit in a chair for the length of movie. They want their information quicker. That may just be the changing of the times. I don’t know

DICAPRIO: I see positives in the fact that things and ideas and story lines that normally studios might not take a chance on, through these new streaming services, will see the light of day. So cream may rise to the top. What were people saying about the transition from silent films to talkies and the advent of television? There were all these changes, but great art is going to be spoken about and, hopefully, we don’t get so inundated that we become confused.

DARGIS: I found “Once Upon a Time” surprisingly moving.

PITT: Absolutely, you can see it in the script, you can feel it.

DICAPRIO: The only thing I’ll say is that I know what the Manson murders sort of represented, being a native of Los Angeles and having parents who are still hippies to this day.

DARGIS: Real hippies?

PITT: I met his dad on set and said, “How nice, he’s going to be an extra in the film.” And he goes “No, that’s him every day.”

DICAPRIO: They talked about this loss of innocence, this real turning point where they had these ideals about what the future could be. And then all of a sudden this one long-haired guy — and how he manipulated these kids to do what they did — it changed the world forever.

PITT: I walk away (from the film) with a hopeful reminder of what it can be, what we can be.

DARGIS: What was the hopeful part?

PITT: Taking care of each other, that’s what I feel at the end. It really endears me to Quentin. I could be projecting, but I see a kid who was home by himself a lot and found his —

DICAPRIO: — solace —

PITT: — solace and direction in these heroes on the screen, big and small. I find that in his dialogue. I find that in the scenarios. I find this one really endearing. He’s exposing his own self-doubts. (DiCaprio starts mm-hmming.) I just see this real innocent kid who wishes life could be this way. Maybe it’s because I know Quentin I find it hopeful and endearing. I was really, really moved at the end.

DARGIS: I find it’s interesting that he’s gone back to the past again.

PITT: He’s going back to his childhood.

DICAPRIO: Yeah, I agree. What Brad said is very pertinent because cinema and television and all this stuff, it’s in (Tarantino’s) DNA. He puts things in historical context, but he also creates a fairy tale. This whole idea of him re-creating history — like what he did in “Inglourious Basterds” with Hitler — much like Scorsese, too, where in their childhood, cinema became part of their DNA and their language and their ability to converse with others —

PITT: — their spiritual grounding —

DICAPRIO: — yeah, it’s embedded in who they are as human beings. You rarely find people like that. Like Brad was saying, this is his homage and his reminiscence of 1969 where everything changed culturally and cinematically. It’s incredibly imaginative.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e23295b6-f342-4e8a-95a4-0f1f5bd011c5" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/movies/dicaprio-pitt.html">The New York Times</a>.

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio talk Tarantino, stardom and what might have been

Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Biracial French director Mati Diop, 36, made the movie in Dakar, Senegal, where her uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty, set his landmark postcolonial film, “Touki Bouki” (1973), about two young lovers who dream of leaving for Paris.

Diop, who identifies as French Senegalese, has the distinction of being the first black female director in the festival’s main competition and speaks sensitively about the complexities of identity. On Friday, she traced the genesis of “Atlantics” to a decade earlier, during a mass exodus out of Senegal, primarily to Spain. “At the time,” she said, “I had spent 10 years without going to Senegal.” It was a painful period, she said, and the exodus and her own burgeoning desires to become a filmmaker helped create what she described as a collision. “My cinematic research was very connected to the re-exploration of my African identity.”

In “Atlantics,” the yearning to leave Senegal remains fraught, a desperate reaction to the burdens of the new global economy and neocolonialism. The story opens on a construction site where Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) works helping to build an incongruously situated, strangely futuristic tower. A sign with Arabic suggests that the building is being bankrolled by foreign investment. But the workers haven’t been paid in months. And soon after Souleiman meets his girlfriend, Ada (Mama Sané), he and a group of young men set off for Europe on a small open boat, joining the recent mass exodus from sub-Saharan Africa.

After Souleiman leaves, “Atlantics” takes a radical turn. Rather than follow the men, Diop stays with Ada and other women who remain, upending the usual course of the outward-bound heroic narrative. Diop explained that she wasn’t interested in charting the men’s journey, partly because she didn’t want to produce a spectacle or what she called “the attraction of destruction.” She instead wanted to create a character who is defined by waiting yet not passive, all while avoiding “the cliché of the strong African woman who is strong because she’s African.” For that, Diop looked to Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, the archetypal waiting woman.

“My project was to write the Odyssey of Penelope,” she said.

In “Atlantics,” Diop shows that the act of remaining is as profound, as narratively rich and urgent, as leaving. This is a reversal of the familiar male-driven movies in which a woman waves goodbye to a man — who departs on his far-flung adventure, taking the story and the viewers with him — and later welcomes him home before the end credits. Diop sees flipping the narrative in terms of heritage and the necessity of making “the collective and mythical stories yours” and “in your own time.” She also looked to what she called “the Muslim imaginary” for inspiration, folding the supernatural figure of the djinn into an otherwise realistic milieu.

In a quiet hall of her hotel, Diop seemed tired but energized. “Atlantics,” which grew out of a 2009 short about a young Senegalese man, had been well-received. She spoke in English, often in long, winding sentences, only occasionally turning to a translator for help. She offered a brief biography, explaining that she had been born in Paris, where she still lives, to a French mother and Senegalese father. After her parents split up, Diop’s mother, who is white, regularly took her to Senegal so that her daughter would have contact with her African family. “I know where I come from, unlike a lot of mixed people.”

After high school, Diop tried different jobs, like waitressing and creating sound landscapes for theater. She also began making short movies, and entered art school only to drop out when she was cast in Claire Denis’ 2008 family drama, “35 Shots of Rum.” Diop played the daughter of a widowed train driver (Alex Descas, a Denis regular). Diop said that she already had an affinity for Denis but that working with the director was life-changing. “I could identify with her, see what it was to be a filmmaker as a woman,” Diop said. “I could totally see myself doing that.”

Being cast in “35 Shots of Rum” proved transformational in other ways for Diop, who was in her mid-20s when it was made. “Playing the daughter of a black man in Claire Denis’ film reminded me that I was also black,” she said. At the time, “my environment was French, obviously, but also very white. Most of my friends were white, I was listening to very white music, mostly rock, and without realizing it, I was kind of losing touch with my Africanity.” This was unconscious, she said, but easy to do in France, which has what she described as having a “strange relationship” to universality.

“You’re not really invited to explore your differences,” Diop continued, as if “we’re all the same, we’re a big family — yeah, sure.” So, she said, “you think it’s OK — well, I’m French, I’m not more black than white, I’m French.” She also straightened her hair, calling this “the cliché of the black mixed girl,” adding, “we all do that until we realize it’s” messed up, using blunter words. Diop laughed gently as she talked about her younger self, whom she views with tenderness.

“It’s hard because the system that makes you think you should have white hair is super-heavy,” she said. “It’s a huge, huge, huge thing.” It is hard to figure out, “but when you do” — and here Diop paused and emitted a classic French pfft, a kind of genteel Bronx cheer — “bye-bye.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="b90c0c1c-62f9-49f6-8772-2272deef0d99" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/arts/cannes-film-festival-black-director.html">The New York Times</a>.

The first black woman to compete at Cannes finds her voice in Africa

CANNES, France — The dead keep returning at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, eerie emissaries of deeply troubled times. Nowhere is that return more haunting than in “Atlantics,” a poetic ghost story about trauma, loss and the persistence of love.

Inside, there was more horror, more titillation: “Flattery, fear and sex lured his girls into a sisterhood of exploitation.” Manson was the star — the mythic monster, the devil among us, the dark side of the American id — but just as fascinating were the pretty young women with the flowing hair and big, blank smiles who formed the eerie nucleus of what was called the family.

In her powerful and deeply affecting “Charlie Says,” Mary Harron revisits the Manson cult in a dramatization largely told from the perspective of his female followers. It’s a tough, difficult story that, anchored by Guinevere Turner’s script, Harron recounts with lucid calm, compassion and intelligent interpretive license. She revisits some of the familiar locations, including the dusty California ranch where the Manson family set up house, and she carefully restages some of the murders. For those familiar with the horrific details of those crimes, the movie may seem wholly uninviting, but bear with Harron — she has something to say.

One of the smartest things about “Charlie Says” is that, as the name telegraphs, it isn’t really about its title character, who can feel like a blank even when on screen. (He’s played by British actor Matt Smith, from the television shows “Doctor Who” and “The Crown.”) The movie instead narrows in on three female followers who, under his sway, compulsively repeat what he says, invoking him like a deity. Their idolatry begins shifting in prison when they meet Karlene Faith (the empathetic Merritt Wever), a graduate student who cracks open the door to their consciousness — and, by extension, their autonomous selves — by asking something that hasn’t been asked in a while: What do you think?

Karlene is teaching in a California women’s prison where, after their conviction, the women have been isolated from the main population. Answering the invitation of the enlightened warden (Annabeth Gish), she starts engaging with the women, just by talking. It’s a modest first step in what becomes a complex attempt to rehumanize and reindividualize them. To themselves and the outside world — in real life, they were often referred to as the Manson girls or Charlie’s girls, and seen as part of his harem — these women remain under his shadow, an extension of him, his property.

This then is about a struggle for freedom, a liberation of the mind and the spirit that is fought for in prison visits and through consciousness-raising and mind-expanding reading. Karlene gives the women copies of Robin Morgan’s feminist landmark “Sisterhood Is Powerful.” Over the course of the story, she also peels away their defenses and smiles, digging into their past with Charlie, which is glimpsed in elliptical flashbacks. As the three begin responding, they become recognizably human, at times uneasily likable, which only deepens the horror of their crimes. It is, the movie argues, easier to label someone a monster than to acknowledge that ordinary people can be monstrous.

Leslie, aka Lulu (a quietly affecting Hannah Murray, from “Game of Thrones”), becomes the main portal to the family’s past. (The character is based on Leslie Van Houten, who, with Manson, was found guilty of murders, along with the other two featured women: Susan Atkins, aka Sadie, played by Marianne Rendón; and Patricia Krenwinkel, aka Katie, played by Sosie Bacon.) Leslie first meets Charlie when she’s brought by a friend to the Spahn Movie Ranch, the rundown location and tourist attraction where the family has set up ramshackle house. There, amid the dust and scrub and sagging old-timey wooden buildings, Charlie lords over a gaggle of hangers-on, mostly women.

The flashbacks are smoothly integrated with the prison sequences, which visually underscores that these spaces have more in common than it might seem. Harron often uses dissolves to further blur past and present; as things fall apart on the ranch and Charlie’s eccentricities grow progressively more frenzied, the interiors grow dimmer and seemingly smaller, more claustrophobic. There are different ways to imprison someone, including with love and instilled dependence. Leslie loves Charlie and has surrendered to him. Part of what is so tragic and ghastly about the Manson family is that sometimes this surrender looks like liberation.

There’s a feminist argument to be made about the dangers of an all-consuming dependence that feels inescapable, even desirable. But Harron and Turner aren’t engaging in polemics; they’re telling a complex, nuanced story about power and how it is both taken and surrendered. And while Leslie, Susan and Patricia are victims, they are also victimizers, which the movie reminds you as it creeps toward the murders and toward a harrowing, mercifully brief scene with the family’s most famous victim, Sharon Tate (Grace Van Dien), then married to Roman Polanski. Harron, best known for “American Psycho,” handles the violence here brilliantly, rightly keeping the focus on Tate.

At first, Smith, who’s fuzzed and scuzzed for the role, seems miscast. His Charlie isn’t especially attractive and doesn’t read as remotely charismatic. The further the story develops, the more this lack of conspicuous magnetism reads like a deliberate choice, a strategic way of taking away some of the odious star power and fame-burnishing mystery that Manson accrued over the years. It’s hard to imagine this cult leader inspiring the interest, even adulation (ironic or not), that the real figure did. Manson was an aspiring musician and former convict; in this telling, he is also a two-bit lunatic con man, the kind who recurrently pops up in American history selling a dream that becomes a nightmare.

Rated R for disturbing, graphic murder. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="491bd5aa-1f1c-4a89-8555-a62bb03edf08" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/movies/charlie-says-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Charlie Says': Complicating those Manson family values

(Critic’s Pick): Soon after Charles Manson was indicted on murder charges in 1969, his dream of celebrity became a reality. Life magazine put him on a cover with a headline — “The Love and Terror Cult” — that read like a trashy film poster.

Crammed with funny performers — starting with Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph and Rachel Dratch — “Wine Country” looks like an easy, obvious win. Longtime friends, who decades earlier worked in the same pizzeria, travel to Napa, California, to celebrate a milestone birthday. Rebecca (Dratch) is about to turn 50, which has inspired the group celebration-retreat. Abby — Poehler, who also directed and helped come up with the story — is the event’s engineer and also the story’s real fulcrum. She hasn’t just hatched the itinerary, she’s also created dossiers for her friends filled with precision-timed commitments more suggestive of an armed invasion than a collegial reunion.

The brisk opener is promising, with a series of quick introductions that sketch in each woman’s identity and suggest the hurdle each will soon confront. Rebecca is a therapist with an inattentive husband; Naomi (Rudolph) is the overextended mother with no visible help. Abby is packing up her desk at work while making the final arrangements, so seems to have complications. The other friends — played by Emily Spivey, Paula Pell and Ana Gasteyer — also have identities and issues, most tinny or vague. And, unsurprisingly, Tina Fey pops in every so often as the owner of the McVilla that Abby rents, a sprawl that comes with its own driver and (inept) cook (Jason Schwartzman).

Once the friends convene, the movie settles into a lazy, lackadaisical groove. The episodic story — Spivey and Liz Cackowski wrote the script — tracks the women as they hang out, tour Napa, drink, laugh and cry. Repeat. The comedy is situational and confessional, the flat one-liners mixed in with more memorable physical comedy. The scripted lines rarely zing, sing or sting (some seem improvised), but when the performers fall down or screw up their faces, you get to watch them fill in their characters with something like real feeling, as when Naomi drunkenly invades a musical group and grabs the mic. You wouldn’t want to be in that bar or, really, anywhere these women assemble, but Rudolph is a treat.

Poehler pads the drinking and sharing with pallid landscape shots that look like travel ads, though Napa has rarely appeared this washed out. There’s some flirting and an unfunny bit about millennials. Mostly, Poehler focuses on the women in various formations. She also gives herself the best scene, snapping off her twinkle for a killer deadpan that becomes an unsettlingly unreadable blankness. Alas, in other scenes, some apparent and egregious digital manipulation occasionally turns the women’s faces into distracting smears. It’s a baffling choice given that one of this movie’s minor pleasures is that it assumes that a group of middle-age women are worth hanging out with, funny or not.

Rated R for language and some high jinks. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c97e267a-e15a-37c4-a33d-db98b83eda97" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/movies/wine-country-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

Searching for laughs in a midlife Bacchanal

It’s hard not to feel like a party crasher while watching the sloppy comedy “Wine Country,” about a group of close friends on a getaway. You know the feeling: With a hopeful smile, you slide into a clubby, cheery gathering where revelers are grinning and regularly busting a gut, collectively riding the same giddy wave. You think you want in on the joke, but then suddenly, desperately, you’re looking for the nearest exit.

Searching for laughs in a midlife bacchanal

The romantic comedy turns on people who fit together — in bed, on the dance floor — but also talk to each other, exchanging words that stop flowing and faltering only with a culminating kiss and teasing fade-out. The difference here is that unlike a lot of romances, the woman retains her power and identity, and that’s how the movie likes it.

In “Long Shot,” Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron), U.S. secretary of state, and Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen), a struggling journalist, talk a lot. They connect while attending a charity event — Boyz II Men is crooning onstage — spotting each other across a crowded room. It’s a classic meet cute, in the parlance of the romantic comedy, but with a twist. Charlotte used to baby-sit Fred (she’s a few years older), a fact that still looms large in his memory. They haven’t seen each other since, but when they meet again they quickly spark, lighting a long fuse that winds through the story as nostalgia turns into something sweeter and then heavier.

It’s preposterous: She’s a giant, a goddess and he’s ... Seth Rogen. It doesn’t bode well that the movie initially seems more interested in Fred than in Charlotte, an apparent imbalance that suggests this will be another weak chuckle-fest in which the female lead is a convenience or decoration, on hand mainly to vouch for her guy’s heterosexuality. The opener, though — with Fred undercover in a roomful of neo-Nazis — proves tactical. It sets a strangely uneasy mood for a comedy, one that’s funny ha-ha but also unsettling. More to the story’s point, it also places Fred in the most toxic of man caves imaginable: a homosocial world of booze-chugging, chest-thumping, sieg-heiling bros.

Of course Fred escapes — taunting the enemy, he briefly turns into a self-proclaimed Jewish superhero — and his adventure is folded into a subplot. It’s a shrewd introduction, one that establishes Fred’s ethical principles and willingness to take risks; it also gives him an early, crucial triumph. Just as important, it offers a semi-comic glimpse at a culture that fetishizes manliness and devalues women. When Fred flees, he breaks away from baddies but also from the ultimate in masculinity cults. It’s in keeping with a character who may have a best dude on speed dial (the amusing O’Shea Jackson Jr.) yet doesn’t suffer from the usual movie male maladies, including fear of women.

Charlotte soon enters, effortlessly dominating every scene and room while juggling and suffering assorted fools, including the president (Bob Odenkirk in peerless form). Theron, a natural screen presence who has developed into an undeniable one, is wonderful in “Long Shot.” She’s a fascinating performer with a watchfulness that can make her seem detached. She seems supremely and confidently alone onscreen, which in moments can create an internal tension with her physical superfluidity, her outward, inviting flow. It’s an ideal combination for this character who never breaks stride as she agilely evades obstacles, most of which are men (Andy Serkis, Alexander Skarsgard).

“Long Shot” humorously skitters over these and other hurdles, including the imperative that powerful single women must have men by their side, mostly to make everyone feel comfortable with all that female power. That’s a tricky idea for any romantic comedy to take on, one that “Long Shot” doesn’t solve but instead slides over after Charlotte hires Fred as a speechwriter. Much of what happens isn’t surprising, but Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah’s script is consistently, genially funny, filled with patter and nonsense, and spiked with sincerity and a few gross-out flourishes. And while the director, Jonathan Levine, doesn’t do much visually, he pulls off the occasional, well-timed sight gags and often puts Charlotte and Fred in the same shot — they even share the frame — rather than loading up on the usual TV-friendly close-ups of single heads.

Movies have long segregated men and women by genre, but at some point we seemed to enter a new age of his-or-her cinema. Straight men and women went their separate, generally unequal ways and stopped talking, really talking, to each other in movies. Men retreated into buddy pictures à la Butch and Sundance or swooned into bromances; for their part, women prepped for weddings that felt like battles or indulged in a hangover-inducing hurrah. The romantic comedies in which men and women hook up have often been excruciating (“The Ugly Truth,” “The Proposal”), fueled by sexist stereotypes and gender policing that suggested women’s lib had given Hollywood a permanent headache.

Yet we just can’t quit romantic comedy, even if contemporary American movies as a whole are more comfortable making war than peace, much less love. The reasons are cultural, social and industrial, at once obvious and obscure. One problem is the current business model in which big studios pour tremendous resources into globally salable male-driven blockbusters. The other problem is the industry’s deep-seated, long-maintained fear of female power. In a business long defined by aesthetic and economic conservatism, and that has a bad habit of selling the same stories, women — including those who are sexually desirable, desiring and sovereign — remain a puzzle and a threat.

It’s no wonder that after decades of putting women in rigidly circumscribed roles the industry has had a tough time figuring out what to do with them. If things have started to shift it’s partly because heroines like Katniss Everdeen and creators like Amy Schumer are helping redefine the female lead. Like Mindy Kaling and other funny women, Schumer is doing it with laughs and stumbles, but also with an earnestness that affirms something real is at stake: love, hearts and maybe, possibly, a gender-fluid happily ever after. “Long Shot” mostly just toys with some of these ideas; it’s awfully straight, in all senses. But it doesn’t just put a woman on top, it also leaves her there, blissfully.

“Long Shot” is rated R for some minor violence, adult language and bodily fluids. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e962f468-cd97-4671-b20e-dbe5f89ddb52" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/movies/long-shot-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Long Shot': Beating the odds for love and bliss

“Long Shot” isn’t going to save the romantic comedy, but it’s an adrenaline shot of pure pleasure to the genre’s failing heart. The outline is familiar: Two people meet, retreat and then circle each other, all while talking and talking.

“Long Shot” is rated R for some minor violence, adult language and bodily fluids. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/movies/long-shot-review.html" id="474a13c5-1c58-3994-a437-ec9326d86f54">The New York Times</a>.

“Long Shot” isn’t going to save the romantic comedy, but it’s an adrenaline shot of pure pleasure to the genre’s failing heart. The outline is familiar: Two people meet, retreat and then circle each other, all while talking and talking. The romantic comedy turns on people who fit together — in bed, on the dance floor — but also talk to each other, exchanging words that stop flowing and faltering only with a culminating kiss and teasing fade-out. The difference here is that unlike a lot of rom...

'Long Shot': Beating the Odds for Love and Bliss

The big draw of the exuberant documentary “Knock Down the House” — about four women who ran for Congress in 2018 — is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. The former bartender turned first-time congresswoman is the most high-profile member of the freshman class of 2019 and scarcely needs an introduction. Her social media presence alone shows why she has crossed over into pop celebrity, whether she’s tweet-storming or livestreaming on Instagram while eating popcorn, talking about staying grounded and assembling Ikea furniture: “Boom! I did it.”

Director Rachel Lears has said in interviews that after the 2016 presidential election she reached out to progressive groups Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, which ran unknowns (or what one organizer in the documentary describes as “non-career politicians”) in the 2018 midterms. From this pool, Lears chose four female Democratic candidates — Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Paula Jean Swearengin and Amy Vilela — each with an appealing backstory, a seemingly unbeatable opponent and a progressive platform. (Lears and her husband, Robin Blotnick, wrote and produced “Knock Down the House”; she served as its cinematographer while he took on the role of editor.)

The women’s stories emerge piecemeal in “Knock Down the House,” which follows them on the campaign trail up to election night and, in one case, beyond. Some are more sharply delineated — what makes them run and why — than others. Vilela, who ran in the Democratic primary in Nevada, seems the most personally invested, having been driven into politics by an agonizing family tragedy that she speaks about with raw, heart-heavy candor. Both Bush (from Missouri) and Swearengin (West Virginia) largely appear fed up with the establishment Democrats representing their districts. “We’re coming out of the belly of the beast kicking and screaming,” Swearengin says.

Ocasio-Cortez quickly, and unsurprisingly, emerges as the focus. She’s a ready-made camera presence: sharp, young, emphatic and a tremendous, blazingly confident public speaker. Nothing seems to throw her off her game, whether she’s smiling at passers-by oblivious to her campaign leafleting or vigorously cleaning the clock of her very surprised-looking opponent, Joe Crowley, who had been in office since 1999. By the 2018 midterms, Crowley — who had originally been put on the ballot by his predecessor, Thomas J. Manton — was the fourth-ranking House Democrat.

He never saw Ocasio-Cortez coming; few did, other than these filmmakers. Because of Lears’ early access to the candidates, she and her camera seem to have been in the war rooms right from the start. Quickly and efficiently, and with the aid of some concise on-screen text and talking-head interviews, she sketches in how Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats operated. A lot of this is fascinating but could be clearer; it’s hazy how the groups coordinated their efforts in 2018, how they actually run candidates and what running someone fully entails. There are atmospheric backroom scenes with the candidates and their teams, but who hired whom?

The timeline jumps around a bit, not always helpfully. Ocasio-Cortez is already running when the movie opens on her delivering an amusing gender analysis while putting on makeup. Soon, the movie cuts to Kentucky nine months earlier where a group of young people with laptops (one ornamented with a “Bernie for U.S. President” bumper sticker) are discussing an unnamed potential candidate. There’s talk and a call for a vote: “All those in favor of moving her to the next round, raise your hand.” Cut to Corbin Trent, of the Justice Democrats, who says that the “biggest shared goal” of his group and Brand New Congress is “removing the corrupting influence of money in politics.”

These two organizations, Trent continues, are offering an alternative path to Congress, one free of lobbyists and special-interest groups. “Right now our Congress is 81 percent men,” Trent says. “It’s mostly white men; it’s mostly millionaires; it’s mostly lawyers.” This peek at outsider organizations is fascinating and could easily be spun into a separate documentary, as could the story of Jo-Ann Floyd-Whitehead, a community organizer who in 2008, with her husband, helped Barack Obama win the Democratic primary. “The Whiteheads are legendary,” says Ocasio-Cortez as people pore over her petition to get on the 2018 primary ballot. “This is the war room for every insurgent campaign in Queens.”

This particular insurgency, of course, was part of a larger national shift that “Knock Down the House” (and the Bernie Sanders stickers and T-shirts) makes clear was only partly in reaction to the Trump presidency. Lears doesn’t dig into that shift as deeply as she could (this is the rare time that you yearn for a movie to be longer), but it’s there as the candidates push forward, and their races and the documentary both develop great urgency. These women are running for office — while driving, walking, talking and walking some more — to win hearts and minds and votes. Often, it feels as if they’re running for their lives. They are also, as Ocasio-Cortez says forcefully, “running to win.”

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters and streaming on Netflix.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/movies/knock-down-the-house-review.html" id="adafd8fd-a5d3-396c-ac6b-39acc13ba0d6">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

Running to Win Hearts and Minds and Votes

Ralph Fiennes, who directed the movie, doesn’t tell you, and neither does the face of Oleg Ivenko, the ballet dancer playing (and dancing) Rudy. The character is transfixed by the painting, and as his eyes — and the camera — sweep over the images something meaningfully seems ready to emerge. It doesn’t, creating an unmet expectation that becomes familiar in “The White Crow,” a fictional take on the early life of Nureyev that hits its biographical marks dutifully. As handsome and self-serious as its subject, the movie focuses on his young adulthood, glances back at his early struggles and gestures at his later fame. Every so often during the dance sequences, it also shows you beauty.

These moments are a balm, the very thing that you impatiently wait for while Rudy pouts and practices and repeatedly demonstrates that the young Nureyev — or the film’s conception of him — was more of a vital and engaging presence onstage than off. It makes sense that any great dancer, perhaps especially one of the most renowned of the 20th century, would fascinate when he’s leaping and nearly levitating across a stage. The problem is that while there are dance performances scattered throughout “The White Crow,” as well as interludes with a sweaty Rudy practicing and striving, the offstage scenes tend to feel like filler, the bits stuck between the barre and the theater.

Written by David Hare, the movie opens around 1961, after Rudy has defected to the West. It’s a promising start because of Fiennes’ presence as Alexander Pushkin, Rudy’s teacher and mentor in Leningrad. Pushkin, his face gray and hairline in severe retreat, looks defeated, almost deflated, as if every atom in his body has surrendered. He and a government type are discussing Rudy (the kid’s gotta dance!), a scene that activates the story by turning back the clock. From that point on, the timeline jumps around, perhaps in imitation of its high-flying subject, landing in different moments in Rudy’s life.

A lot of what follows is drowsily watchable. Soon after Pushkin’s entrance, Rudy makes several of his own: on a Soviet train, where he’s born in 1938; as an adult on a plane; as a boy in a colorless childhood filled with snow and Ashcan browns; and as a teenage student. Though Fiennes keeps changing the aspect ratio, the movie settles down once Rudy lands in Paris smiling under a beret. At the height of the Cold War, the Kirov Ballet has gone west to perform at the Paris Opera House (Palais Garnier). Rudy embraces Paris, visits the sights, dazzles audiences and hangs out with a dreary crowd. In time, he defects. (The cast includes the exasperatingly limp Adèle Exarchopoulos as an heiress.)

Nureyev certainly seems an ideal candidate for big-screen memorializing: He was sternly beautiful, wildly talented, feverishly acclaimed. But if you didn’t know why he was considered a transcendent dancer or a transformational figure, you still won’t know after the final credits roll. Rudy’s dances are well-shot — Fiennes emphasizes the entire body in motion so the viewer can trace its line — but they’re pretty and bloodless instead of thrilling, which doesn’t encourage off-screen oohing and ahhing. Like most movies about great art, “The White Crow” only points at the sublime without ever expressing it.

One flaw that Fiennes never transcends is Ivenko, a dancer with a Russian company who slides off the screen when not onstage. The busy, mosaic structure doesn’t help, while the emphasis on Nureyev’s origin story seems a mistake, particularly because his name no longer means what it once did. In a 1962 review, the year after Nureyev defected, British critic Richard Buckle announced the arrival of the “pop dancer,” writing, “What the telly did for art, what Billy Graham did for religion, Nureyev has done for ballet.” Rudy the pop dancer is missing, as is the global star who dabbled as a matinee idol (“Valentino”), was a casualty of the AIDS crisis and still inspires veneration, however artfully muddled.

‘The White Crow’ is rated R for some casual male nudity and some language. In Russian, English and French, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/movies/the-white-crow-review.html" id="b20b9715-3451-3599-ab73-c64d6128b1cd">The New York Times</a>.

“The Raft of the Medusa” is a large, foreboding painting filled with drama and writhing male bodies. Painted by Théodore Géricault in the early part of the 19th century, it shows a tangle of men crowded on a raft after an accident. Some appear dead, while others signal toward some unseen sight, perhaps salvation, their ropy muscles tense with effort but also with beauty. In “The White Crow,” young Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev visits this painting at the Louvre. What does he see — death, life,...

He's Dancing Around the Subject

Like the others in the series, this one largely takes place in the not-too-distant past, which lends a little atmospheric exoticism to the tale. (Also: no handy smartphones for emergencies.) The main story unfolds in a smog-wreathed Los Angeles in 1973 — cue the flare jeans and Curtis Mayfield. Anna (Linda Cardellini), a widow with two kids, works in social services. She’s still mourning for her husband while trying to keep her family together and do her job. This includes investigating some serious weirdness at the Alvarez home, where the wild-eyed mother (Patricia Velásquez) has locked her sons in a closet decorated with eerie markings.

As the title announces, there’s a curse hanging over this story, one that soon bedevils Anna, forcing her to deal with weirdness closer to home. She discovers that whatever haunted the Alvarezes has invaded her life and is threatening her children, Chris (Roman Christou) and Sam (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen). That threat has a name, La Llorona (Marisol Ramirez), a weeping woman in white with an ugly past and insatiable malevolence. Plucked from Mexican folklore (and beyond), this jealous Medea-like figure, whose love turns into consuming hate, has echoed through the ages. She never gets old and she also doesn’t get more interesting, as this movie reminds you.

More efficient than ambitious, “La Llorona” is basically a maternal showdown with shock cuts and billowing curtains. Director Michael Chaves, making the most of his silkily mobile, at times predatory camera (he likes to shift the point of view mid-prowl) delivers the horror classics nicely. Every floorboard and door in Anna’s sprawling house seems to get a solo, with squeaks that become shrieks. By the time La Llorona is a regular visitor, Anna’s house has become a haunted world unto itself, each room — bathroom, attic, basement — a stage, complete with a flamboyant entrance and exit.

Movies that turn on violence against children can swerve into uncomfortable terrain because kids are such obvious prey but also because the off-screen world is filled with so many real horror stories. There are a few moments, especially in scenes of near-drowning, when Chaves embraces the spectacle of child endangerment a little too lustily. For the most part, though, the movie avoids unmotivated sadism. Like the better titles in this series, it leans on primal fears — the unknown, the certainty of death — and solid actors who can deliver the silliness straight. Even better is how it explores and exploits the divide between comedy and horror.

Again and again in “La Llorona,” Chaves creates setups that are so obvious that you giggle, only to turn the dial a bit — and amp the creepiness — so your laughter abruptly cuts out. (The script is by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis.) Much like the prowling camera and the editing that smacks you around, this intentionally unstable tone adds to the spookiness as do the syncopated performances. Anna and her children may spend much of the story in near-hell, but when a stern shaman (the excellent Raymond Cruz) delivers the phrase “ta-da,” he and this movie show you a little bit of horror heaven.

Rated R for supernatural violence, including a lot of child peril. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/movies/the-curse-of-la-llorona-review.html" id="88e132e7-bdd5-3db2-a6b0-55e4261c803e">The New York Times</a>.

The scares are plentiful and sometimes ticklishly funny in “The Curse of La Llorona,” an enjoyably old-fashioned ghost story. It’s the latest installment in a rapidly expanding horror series that started with “The Conjuring” (2013) and now includes the “Annabelle” flicks (about a devil doll) and “The Nun” (a demon nun). The connective tissue among these titles can be very thin; here, the most obvious link is Father Perez (Tony Amendola), who’s on hand again to explain that, why, yes, evil exi...

Floorboards Creaky? You Need a Priest, Not a Repair Man

Much of the story takes place while Ollie is striving to set her life right. Shortly after the elliptical opener — a time-blurring grabber of a scene that soon finds her racing away from an oncoming truck — the movie settles into the difficult now. Ollie is barely squeezing out a living selling coffee and food to oil workers, which isn’t enough to deal with the foreclosure notice on her door. She’s estranged from her sister, Deb (a miscast Lily James), who has a young boy and troubles of her own. (Ollie was adopted, a detail that’s casually shared.) The sturdiest presence in Ollie’s life is her probation officer (Lance Reddick), a benevolent paternal figure who’s an overly neat script contrivance.

Writer-director Nia DaCosta, making her feature debut, efficiently sets the bleak scene with striking landscapes, a wandering camera and a desaturated palette. She also sticks in one too many pretty faces, which stand out amid the area’s ominous desolation, its industrial sites and penumbral rooms, bare trees and gray skies. (The movie was mostly shot in Texas.) These faces can be distracting and would be more so without Ollie, a focal point that holds the center amid the warring personalities, escalating drama and larger injustices. Here, in a region burbling with oil, people grapple with predatory banks as well as inadequate health care that once led Ollie to smuggle drugs from Canada.

DaCosta is better at setting scenes than digging into them. She’s mapped out a realistic, coherent world, complete with casual race relations and everyday complications that get busier once Ollie and Deb reconcile. Deb opens the story further, as does her volcanic ex (James Badge Dale) and a threatening dealer (Luke Kirby). Each sister gets story time, but only Ollie’s consistently holds you, including during the tale’s quotidian lulls. Thompson’s soft, open face — which tenses into watchfulness that can border on panic — conveys much about Ollie, her decency and burdens. Thompson lets you see her character’s struggle, even when the movie simplifies its tough ethical questions.

If some of this sounds familiar it’s because “Little Woods” owes a debt to Debra Granik’s 2010 drama “Winter’s Bone,” which is a fine model. Each movie pivots on a young resilient woman on a journey (inner and outer) that takes her over occasionally forsaken locales while hauling heavy personal baggage, including needy relatives and drug-driven traumas. “Winter’s Bone” is often best remembered as Jennifer Lawrence’s breakthrough. But what resonates most strongly is Granik’s worldview. She has a feeling for hard people partly shaped by often-unforgiving circumstances, yet she never succumbs to meanness in her telling, an ethic that DaCosta also shares here.

Both “Little Woods” and “Winter’s Bone” exist on a continuum with other regional, independent movies about essentially alone women who navigate a world not altogether of their making, whether they’re scratching out a legal living or breaking the law. Part of what ties together these sometimes very different movies (like Victor Nunez’s “Ruby in Paradise” and Courtney Hunt’s “Frozen River”) is that by complicating the idea of who gets to be the hero of the story, they also complicate the idea of female sovereignty. In “Little Woods,” men cling to the edges, sometimes viciously and impotently, yet without overwhelming the movie. They’re part of Ollie’s life, but they are also not its point.

Rated R for drug trafficking, some violence and language. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/movies/little-woods-review.html" id="be9669dd-aa05-3a8e-abf9-a8b36ba9d01d">The New York Times</a>.

Actress Tessa Thompson emotionally expands “Little Woods,” turning a small movie into something more than its textured parts. She plays Ollie, short for Oleander, a daughter in mourning for a mother who has recently died. Junk clutters the yard of the modest North Dakota house they shared; inside it’s clean and homey, though scattered with the evidence of a brutal illness. Ollie still sleeps on the floor of her mother’s room, clinging to a past — and a caretaker identity — that threatens to b...

A Complicated Choice of Hero

“Dogman,” Garrone’s latest, again takes on Italy and its enduring discontents, this time in a coastal town that appears as if it hasn’t fully recovered — but from what: war, the economy, organized crime, the government? That question lingers each time the camera holds on the story’s principal setting, a depopulated stretch of beach flanked by squat anonymous buildings, many seemingly derelict. In the sandy center are the remains of what looks like an abandoned amusement park, including a swing set and a ride ornamented with a dragon, a proud emblem of better or maybe just busier days.

Not far from the swings and the dragon is a tiny shop with a large “Dogman” sign where Marcello (Marcello Fonte) patiently waits in his smock, ready to serve. Somewhat improbably, this slight, smiling, simple man ekes out a living as a dog groomer. The town may be dramatically unpeopled, but everyone seems to have mutts and the means to keep them coifed. And, as his endearments attest — his favorite is “sweetheart” — Marcello loves his work and his furry clients, his compatriots and his daughter. He has found his place here, and when he sits down to eat at a trattoria, where men garrulously greet each other over heaping plates, it is as if he were nestling into an embrace.

Like the few other pinpricks of light scattered throughout the movie, the trattoria is a vestige of a resilient communal spirit that has survived despite conspicuous neglect and abuse. Something has been gnawing on the bones of this place, and it isn’t long before Garrone introduces a possible suspect, Simone (Edoardo Pesce). A former boxer who still keeps his fists up, Simone is the local bully. He doesn’t seem to have a job beyond an occasional heist; his only apparent interest is brutalizing anyone who gets in his way. For some reason, he tends to gravitate to Marcello, or at least to the snorts of cocaine that the little man eagerly procures for him.

It’s a worrisome relationship — something has got to give — and Garrone teases this volcanic threat for much of the movie. Simone is a brute, a monster with bared teeth. But much like the slavering, ferocious-looking dog that enters barking in the opening shot, and which Marcello gently soothes into submission, Simone seems containable. And for a long while, Marcello manages to keep him and his violence in check. Mostly, he just goes along with Simone’s persistent demands, an acquiescence that shapes the episodic narrative as Marcello unhappily takes the wheel during a robbery, tags along to a dance club and reluctantly joins Simone on a cocaine run.

Garrone likes big, bold, graphically precise images that grab the eye and do the work that’s often done by dialogue in other movies. The snarling dog announces Simone, who in turn embodies an unchecked malignancy. Simone, it’s clear, is terrible. Yet there’s nothing that he does, including beating others to a pulp, that is as horrific as the scene in which Marcello sits with neighborhood men who discuss having Simone assassinated. One has recently been assaulted by him; others soon will be. Seated at their usual trattoria table, the men seem so calm, sober. And as they discuss their problem and a potential remedy, you see how easily rationalized violence turns a group into a mob.

Social realism in a symbolist key, “Dogman” is at times more pleasurable to look at than to experience, because it’s so deterministic and because there’s so little ordinary feeling beyond Marcello’s uncomplicated love for his daughter, neighbors and dogs. Garrone is a virtuoso of pain and terror, which can be overwhelming, despite the flourishes of comedy. He also likes to go loud, and he consistently pushes into hyperbole, as when he comically emphasizes the difference between Marcello’s size and a much larger dog he grooms. The contrast is funny. But what makes the image linger isn’t how it fits into the movie’s controlling metaphor but the everyday gentleness of one creature tending to another.

“Dogman” isnot rated. In Italian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/movies/dogman-review.html" id="c2a19383-cb14-350c-ac73-860087485938">The New York Times</a>.

The worlds that director Matteo Garrone creates on screen sometimes seem as far out and darkly mysterious as an alternate universe. Best known for “Gomorrah,” a blistering story about a people under siege by the Neapolitan mafia, Garrone looks at an Italy that is dramatically at odds with its touristic image, its charming hill towns and bourgeois niceties. In the satirical “Reality” (2013), a fishmonger loses himself in his desperation to become a reality-TV star, an aspiration that Garrone s...

'Dogman' Review: In Italy, a Man-Eat-Man World

That Lars may not be up to the convoluted operation that he has set for himself is evident from his get-up, which looks straight out of “Easy Rider” (1969). “I’m the outlaw,” Lars announces to himself, making the movie’s audience his mirror. His black motorcycle jacket and pants evoke Peter Fonda’s cool cat from “Easy Rider,” but his cowboy hat and comical Little Lord Fauntleroy wig suggest that he is also tapping into his inner Dennis Hopper, Fonda’s more demonstrably zonked-out co-star. Lars’ enthusiasm for the Steve McQueen action classic “Bullitt” (1968) further suggests that he’s playing a role (or aspiring to one), but, for the viewer, also perilously evokes other, livelier movies.

Drowsy in feel and muted in color, “Stockholm” is lightly amusing and watchable — mostly thanks to Hawke — but never makes the case that this is a story that needed to be told, with or without laughs. Once Lars hits the bank, an incursion executed with gun waving and mouth flapping, he takes hostages, including two employees, Bianca (Noomi Rapace) and Klara (Bea Santos). In time, the police and Lars begin talking and negotiating. Lars wants his pal, Gunnar (Mark Strong), released from prison. And so Gunnar joins the fray, as does a third hostage. Together, robbers and hostages hunker down and, as grimaces turn to smiles, form a shaky, unconvincing connection that’s reinforced by the ineptitude of the police and apparent callousness of the prime minister.

Stockholm syndrome seems more widely diagnosed in journalism and in pop culture than in medical offices, and is perhaps still most associated with Patty Hearst, whose defense lawyers argued that the heiress hostage turned accused bank robber had gone along with her captors because she was under duress. The jury didn’t buy it, and Hearst was convicted (and later pardoned); the American Psychiatric Association seems similarly skeptical and doesn’t officially recognize the syndrome. It’s unclear what writer-director Robert Budreau thinks of it, although given the attention he bestows on Lars — in camera love and in the dialogue — he seems to think raffish charisma explains a lot.

He gets a great deal of help from Hawke, who takes hold of the movie from his first scene to last. Once Lars starts shedding his disguise, a clearer picture of him and his desires emerges. He sweetly hangs onto the increasingly skeptical Gunnar while also creating an implausible bond with Bianca, who remains a sketch at best. Lars’ manic energy starts to look a lot like vulnerability; his febrile charm feels like the real thing. By the time he is staring soulfully at Bianca — Hawke widens his eyes and drains his face of its earlier warring emotions, leaving a look of childlike, near-saintly awe — it’s hard not to wonder if this is a movie about Stockholm syndrome or an advertisement for it.

“Stockholm” is rated R for gun violence, mostly performative. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/movies/stockholm-review.html" id="ce20d004-87be-3901-ada6-7358a85f0e55">The New York Times</a>.

Ethan Hawke is the best thing about “Stockholm,” but the moment he strides into a bank things begin going haywire. With strained comedy, unearned sobriety and Bob Dylan on the soundtrack, the movie revisits the 1973 Swedish robbery that inspired the coinage Stockholm syndrome. That term is often used when hostages — or victims of any kind, including of relationships and of long novels — develop an identification with their captors. Hawke plays Lars, the robbery’s would-be mastermind, who appe...

'Stockholm': When You Find the Hostage-Taker Captivating

Varda showed up late for the dinner, hurrying into the restaurant in a state of agitation. While at a Starbucks, her bag had been stolen — wallet, passport, tout. Her greatest concern was the digital video camera that had the images she’d shot earlier that day of her friend Sharon Stone. Dazed that Stone and Varda occupied the same corner of the universe, I got it together and took her to the police station, where she filled out a report and murmured doubts about the young desk officer.

We returned to the restaurant for our dinner, the first of many encounters that we had over the next decade, sometimes for a leisurely meal or at a festival where invariably she was being honored. The last time I saw her was in May at her house on the Left Bank in Paris, an area that became part of her identity. Varda was routinely called the mother or grandmother or godmother of the French New Wave, and often grouped with its Left Bank flank, alongside her friends Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. She wasn’t always comfortable with the maternal moniker though she later embraced it — and why not? She had shown the way.

A longtime feminist, she was acutely sensitive to oppression and many of her movies center on women. In a 1975 interview with a French magazine, she said she didn’t have any more problems than her male cohort; making movies is difficult for everyone. At the same time, she was aware of her standing as the lone female director in the New Wave and how her presence could be used — as she put it — as an “alibi assuaging the consciences of the men.” But there were also rules. “As long as I was ‘little Varda,’ ‘little Agnès,’ the exception,” and she didn’t get in anyone’s way, she said, she was “helped out, supported and appreciated by my colleagues and companions.”

Varda was in her mid-20s when she shot “La Pointe Courte” in 1954 and a photographer for the Theatre National Populaire in Paris. It was some years before she made her second feature, “Cléo From 5 to 7” (1962). In between those two movies, she made short films, had her first child (a daughter), met her husband, the director Jacques Demy (a son followed much later), and traveled to China. “Cléo” was a great success, and she continued to make excitingly adventurous, insistently political work. Among the most unsettling is “Le Bonheur” (1965), a shocking, pitiless evisceration of the romantic vision of heterosexual marriage in which women are fundamentally disposable and replaceable.

“Le Bonheur” was criticized, including by those who wanted Varda to wag her finger at patriarchy and female oppression, doing the audience’s work for it. But hers is not a cinema of the obvious. One sustaining pleasure of her films is that they don’t neatly fit into boxes, including feminist ones, even while being unmistakably feminist. She wasn’t creating ideals or role models, but specific women in specific places (villages, streets, beaches) who are navigating a world in which the very definitions of women, of the feminine and of femininity are in upheaval. She was after the contradictions, a word that appears in many of her interviews, between clichés and “the images of lived life.”

This wasn’t necessarily what the industry was interested in, and sometimes Varda directed short movies “to keep alive in my own research” as she once put it. The latter-life acclaim and honors were overdue and welcome — she clearly enjoyed being feted — but she didn’t always have institutional and critical support. In the early 1980s, she spoke about being omitted from history books and from special issues of Cahiers du Cinéma dedicated to French cinema. “I was just plain forgotten,” she said. She kept going even if, as she admitted in 1986, with each film she had “to fight like a tiger.”

That year, one of her most critically and commercially successful films, “Vagabond,” about a dangerously unsettled woman, was released in the United States. I distinctly remember being freaked out by “Vagabond,” which opens on the corpse of Mona (a blazing Sandrine Bonnaire), a drifter who freezes to death in a country ditch. Raw, opaque yet also deeply moving, the film tracks her as she wanders from place to place, person to person, alone and finally unknowable. She’s a startlingly uncommon cinematic creation, partly because she is a woman who says no, including to other people.

Varda said she didn’t know why Mona repeatedly said no, a refusal that ends in death. I see “Vagabond,” in part, as a tough, unsentimental exploration about the limits of radical independence for women, which is perhaps what gives it the autobiographical aspect that runs through her movies. Varda’s life and work are filled with contrasts between interiority and exteriority, individuals and their worlds, which makes her house on Rue Daguerre, with its pink facade and striped doors, feel like another auteurist creation.

For the past few years, my friend Joan Dupont and I would have an annual lunch with Varda at her home, eating and talking while periodically visited by one of her cats. She was predictably funny and warm and brilliant, but also sharp and strong and willful. During our lunch last year, Varda said she was tired. But she was as voluble as ever and filled with plans. She reminisced about her mother, who loved art, and her father, who didn’t, and spoke about growing old. “Never complain, never explain,” she said. She asked me about Ava DuVernay. The next week, Varda was off to the Cannes Film Festival, where she presented a restoration of her 1977 film “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t.”

At Cannes, she joined DuVernay and Cate Blanchett on the festival’s red carpet, this time to protest gender inequality at the festival. It was gratifying and deeply moving to see her among all these other women, though I wondered how many understood what Varda — through her example, her will and her art — had done to pave the way for them. In very concrete ways, in film after film, she helped show women that there was a place for them in movies beyond that of the inevitably beautiful, inevitably young star.

At the end of “The Beaches of Agnès,” Varda asks, “What is cinema?” repeating André Bazin’s essential question. She is standing in one of the witty structures — a house of cinema — that she had fabricated for her multimedia installations. Cinema is light, images, dark, color, she says, over shots of the edifice with its metal frame and walls of film strips. Soon, she is inside. “In here, it feels like I live in cinema, cinema is my home,” she says. “I think I’ve always lived in it.” In the last shot, Varda is looking directly at the camera — at us — framed in an open door that feels like an invitation.

Soon after I first met Agnès Varda, I drove her to the Hollywood police station. It was 2009 and we were supposed to be at a dinner for the Los Angeles opening of her documentary “The Beaches of Agnès,” a lyrical ramble through her life. At that point, Varda had been making movies for more than a half century, a milestone that then seemed to me as impossible as her death last month at 90 seems to me now.

Manohla Dargis

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