Ben Kenigsberg

“Mike Wallace Is Here” opens with a clip in which Wallace spars with Bill O’Reilly, who criticizes networks like CBS for being too stodgy, but credits Wallace with being the driving force behind his career. The film argues that Wallace was instrumental in creating a tougher style of interviewing on television (as a counterpoint, Belkin shows softball questioning from Edward R. Murrow), and Wallace’s drive to be taken seriously becomes a recurring thread. We are repeatedly shown how the former commercial actor (and pitchman for Philip Morris) was regarded by some news veterans as a creature of show business rather than as a serious journalist — and how he worked assiduously to dispel that idea.

A roll call of Wallace’s famous interviews could go on for many paragraphs. The highlight reel might include his 1957 discussion on “The Mike Wallace Interview” with the gangster Mickey Cohen, who asserted that he had “killed no men that in the first place didn’t deserve killing.” In 1979, Wallace asked the Ayatollah Khomeini about President Anwar Sadat of Egypt’s assessment of him as a “lunatic.” We hear about the potential chilling effect of a libel lawsuit against CBS that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded the United States forces in Vietnam, eventually dropped; and of Wallace’s interview with Brown &amp; Williamson whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand that the network stalled on airing.

Interviews with more peripheral figures often serve to turn a mirror on Wallace. We see how he was able to move the “queen of mean” Leona Helmsley to tears by probing her on the death of a son, an experience that Wallace shared. Wallace’s interview with the former Eisenhower assistant cabinet member Thomas P. Pike is used to bolster a strand on his own struggles with depression. Wallace is also shown in friendly sit-downs with several of his “60 Minutes” colleagues, with whom he sometimes seems less guarded.

Belkin allows most of the clips to speak for themselves, at least visually; almost everyone shown is recognizable on sight, although there are identifications in the closing credits for viewers who want them. There are times when you wish Belkin wouldn’t cut away so quickly and would allow answers to tough questions (or Wallace’s own words) to play in full. The musical scoring — the Chromatics’ widely used composition “Tick of the Clock” alludes to the opening of “60 Minutes” and provides an insistent, paranoia-inducing backbeat — has the effect of providing goosing where none is needed. This isn’t a thriller; Wallace’s life offers enough drama, self- and otherwise.

Additional Information:

Rated PG-13. Language unfit to air. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/movies/mike-wallace-is-here-review.html" id="5c1c064a-ce69-3524-aa2c-84c5a7dca1f0">The New York Times</a>.

In TV terms, the biographical film “Mike Wallace Is Here” is effectively a feature-length recap. Using only archival footage, the director Avi Belkin distills more than five decades of the longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent’s career on camera to an hour and a half. Presenting Wallace with relatively little mediation is a natural way to tell this story, even as it creates a limitation. Documentary as autobiography, the movie shows a man who is always cultivating his appearance for an audience...

'Mike Wallace Is Here' Review: A Ticktock of a Newsman's Life

This review of “The Great Hack” is the first article that I’ve felt mildly concerned about emailing to my editors. Why am I even using the internet? Why is Twitter open on another tab? Wouldn’t it be smarter to disconnect, move to the woods and live off the land?

These are some of the questions inspired by the movie, an eye-opening new documentary from Jehane Noujaim (“Control Room”) and Karim Amer that explores how our personal data has become a commodity that is collected, analyzed and then spit back at us in the form of targeted messaging, with the hope of changing our behavior, as one of the movie’s subjects puts it. You can see the movie in theaters or watch it on Netflix, but if you watch it on Netflix, Netflix might know and then direct you to other alarming documentaries.

If that seems harmless enough, the film explores how such tactics might have played a role in the 2016 presidential election. The target is squarely on Cambridge Analytica, the defunct political data firm backed by Republican donor Robert Mercer. According to Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica executive turned turncoat who emerges as the documentary’s principal figure, the firm’s strategy was to target voters whom it called “persuadables” in swing states and then to bombard them with content supposedly pushing them to vote for Donald J. Trump.

That assertion is one of several unsubstantiated claims in the film. In 2017, The New York Times reported that the “psychographics” technology that ostensibly set Cambridge apart from other firms remains unproved, and that Cambridge executives admitted that the technology had not been used in the Trump campaign.

But if the paranoia level could probably withstand a slight reduction, much of the movie feels utterly credible. Other interviewees include journalist Carole Cadwalladr, one of the authors of the collaborative report by The New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer of London that exposed how Cambridge Analytica harvested information from the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users. David Carroll, who teaches media design at Parsons, has tried to use the laws in Britain to obtain whatever information the firm had on him. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, shown testifying before a committee of the British Parliament, compares cheating in the democratic process to doping in the Olympics.

But most vexing is Kaiser, whose motives for speaking out — not least to the filmmakers — are never entirely disentangled. She is shown luxuriating in a pool “somewhere in Thailand.” A former social-media worker for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, she comes across as a selectively savvy, status-conscious opportunist with flexible politics who is remorseful for her work with Cambridge Analytica, but only to a point. (After all, she says, in theory these voters were on the fence. “In the end,” she says, “they’re the ones that go to the ballot box and make their decision.”)

That Kaiser has turned into an advocate for owning your own data makes “The Great Hack” seem vaguely uplifting, the story of her education. But she is still not someone you would trust with your data.

‘The Great Hack’

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/movies/the-great-hack-review.html" id="328a7166-8b3a-3a67-aee5-18e2b26c4d9e">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

'The Great Hack' Review: How Your Data Became a Commodity

But in “A Faithful Man,” the director-star, Louis Garrel, plays with the premise’s surface egotism in funny, understated ways. Although Garrel is French-cinema royalty — his father is Philippe Garrel, a director who also specializes in autocritique — the movie delights in the spectacle of seeing the actor rendered powerless. His character, Abel, is cuckolded, manipulated and misled, but Garrel rarely deviates from his signature gaze, which makes him look adrift and slightly vacant.

In the first scene, Abel’s girlfriend, Marianne (Laetitia Casta), with whom he lives as a freeloader, informs him that she is pregnant with his friend Paul’s child, and that she plans to marry Paul on the 26th. (“Of this month?” asks Abel, unruffled, considering the circumstances.) And by the way, it would be best if he moves out by then.

Nearly a decade later, when the never-seen Paul drops dead, Marianne becomes available again, an opportunity that Abel hopes to seize. Marianne’s young son, Joseph (Joseph Engel), a mystery buff who uses an iPhone recorder to keep tabs on intimate goings-on in his home, suggests to Abel that Marianne has gotten away with murdering Paul — a theory that Abel investigates without ever quite resolving. Complicating matters, the funeral puts Abel back in touch with Eve (Lily-Rose Depp), Paul’s younger sister, who has nursed a crush on him for years and is prepared to announce as much to Marianne.

Although Abel is the movie’s fulcrum, Marianne and Eve also participate in voice-over duties — a destabilizing choice that seems perfectly in keeping with the characters’ one-upmanship and the movie’s off-kilter comic tone. Garrel finds visual ways to emphasize a lack of balance. (Indeed, given who is holding hands in the closing scene, asymmetry may be the film’s overriding theme.)

Conversations are often shot in uncomfortable close-ups, and cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky’s unobtrusive shading hedges against the potential for talky drabness. In some respects, the film resembles Éric Rohmer’s moral tales, but amorality — all three principal characters are effectively dancing on a man’s grave — seems to be the order of the day. In this low-key, engaging comedy, a protagonist must become unfaithful to prove his fidelity — and turn selfish to prove that he cares about people beyond himself.

‘A Faithful Man’ is not rated. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/movies/a-faithful-man-review.html" id="6494b94c-4703-326f-a721-5a32d15a0715">The New York Times</a>.

It takes confidence and a healthy amount of narcissism to direct yourself in a farce about two women who engage in competitive psychological gamesmanship for the pleasure of your company. That is true even if you are not the script’s sole author (and the other is veteran screenwriter and longtime Luis Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière).

'A Faithful Man' Review: Low Key. Low Fidelity.

A video game is, in fact, what “Detective Pikachu,” directed by Rob Letterman, is based on, but its sense of cinematic history extends at least to the long-long-ago of 1988 and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” to which it owes what might be called a debt. Tim (Justice Smith) has a deep-seated dislike for Pokémon creatures, just as Bob Hoskins’ private eye did for ’toons in “Roger Rabbit.” That aversion is tested when he teams up with Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds), his father’s detecting partner, after the father appears to have been killed in an accident. (Pikachu became a gumshoe for Nintendo, but the character, as seen in other Pokémon adventures, is the cute little critter with rosy cheeks who causes storms of electricity.)

Detective Pikachu has amnesia,though. As if inviting the viewer to pick up a controller, he laments aloud that he can’t solve his own mystery. He can, however, talk to Tim — everyone else simply hears “pika, pika” — in dialogue that sounds like Raymond Chandler filtered through the children’s game of telephone.

Their stomping ground, Ryme City, incorporates elements of London, Tokyo and New York but makes them all look like their theme-park equivalents. The town is half paradise and half dystopia: Humans and Pokémon live side by side, even while gamblers egg on vicious Pokémon battles in the city’s underworld and an unpaid journalism intern (Kathryn Newton), sick of listicles, snoops around for a story. (OK, maybe that last part feels real.)

The narrative seems designed to be followed by even those with the shortest attention spans; plot points get repeated in case you’ve decided to look down to send a text message. (“That must have been how Mewtwo escaped,” Tim says of the movie’s menacing catlike villain — right after a hologram has shown us that very escape.)

“Pokémon Detective Pikachu” has been shot on film, a nostalgic touch that’s now unusual for a movie that combines live action and cartoons. But the imagery lacks weight and texture. (Anyone who dismissed the technical mastery Steven Spielberg brought to “Ready Player One,” a similar combination of real and virtual worlds, ought to feel pretty sorry now.) This is 1 hour and 44 minutes of Pikachu short-circuiting your brain.

Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/movies/pokemon-detective-pikachu-review.html" id="523d7f9b-2b6b-34eb-a8cc-743e8e2dac4a">The New York Times</a>.

“Pokémon Detective Pikachu” is the first feature to pivot on a pairing of animated characters from the Japanese merchandising juggernaut and real live actors. But why even bother? The human stars barely look like they have pulses. The plotting proceeds with the one-mission-then-the-next logic of a video game, and even the notion of film noir feels bogus. When we see a clip from a gangster picture on screen, it’s the fake movie from “Home Alone.”

'Pokémon Detective Pikachu' Review: A Cat and (Electric) Mouse Game

Geopolitics has never been high on Werner Herzog’s list of concerns, at least in his documentaries. Even when he glances toward current events (“Lessons of Darkness,” “Into the Abyss”), the thrust tends to be philosophical — his interests run more to quixotic quests and humanity’s insignificance in the vastness of nature. That makes him an odd fit to interview Mikhail Gorbachev, whose leadership of the Soviet Union helped bring the Cold War to an end.

Then again, if the moral of “Meeting Gorbachev,” directed by Herzog and André Singer, is that contemporary politicians have ignored the lessons of Gorbachev’s leadership, then perhaps the former Soviet president’s push for peace makes him right at home in Herzog’s gallery of underheralded visionaries.

Herzog suggests to Gorbachev that the international mood is returning to a Cold War atmosphere. He replies, “I just wanted to say that Cold War cannot be a form of international relations. People who don’t understand the importance of cooperation and disarmament should quit politics.” (Subsequent to the film’s premiere last year, he criticized President Donald Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.)

The meat of the documentary consists of three sit-down interviews Herzog held with Gorbachev over half a year. Herzog begins by noting the cultural tension between them, given their home countries’ adversarial relationship in World War II. “The first German that you probably met wanted to kill you,” the filmmaker says, though Gorbachev denies it.

The two men appear to like each other immensely — in narration, Herzog calls Gorbachev “one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century” — but Gorbachev can be a cool customer. He sometimes seems guarded in his assessment of what he might have done differently. He says he believes the Soviet Union should have given its republics more rights instead of dissolving entirely. As for Boris Yeltsin, who became the first president of a post-Soviet Russia, he says, “I should have sent him off somewhere.”

But if “Meeting Gorbachev” finds its subject mostly staying on a pro-peace, anti-nuclear message — and it’s a script that’s hard to argue with — Herzog shapes the film into a study in how world events often come down to quirks of character and circumstance. To another leader, glasnost or perestroika would not have seemed like obvious policies. A thaw might never have happened.

In a rundown of Soviet history before Gorbachev’s ascent, Herzog turns the successive funerals of the much older Soviet heads of state who preceded him into a grimly humorous recurring joke. (Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko all died within a three-year period.) Herzog suggests that even before his rise, Gorbachev was different in style from other Soviet leaders. Miklos Nemeth, who was prime minister of Hungary starting in 1988, says that when Gorbachev came to study Hungary’s agriculture, he was all business, with no interest in favors.

Now 88, Gorbachev is still pithy, clear and direct in his answers. Herzog seems less in his element as an interviewer than he is when parsing historical footage, including musing on a brief handshake between Gorbachev and Reagan at their 1986 summit in Reykjavik. Herzog is particularly interested in Gorbachev’s legacy in Germany, where — according to the director — he is revered for allowing the country’s reunification to happen peacefully.

Gorbachev pushes back at the notion that the Soviet Union’s end was somehow a triumph for the other side. “Americans thought they’d won the Cold War, and this went to their heads,” he says. “What victory? It was our joint victory. We all won.” Well, maybe not entirely — Vladimir Putin, pointedly absent from most of the film, is glimpsed in footage of Raisa Gorbachev’s funeral — but you come away from the movie agreeing with Herzog’s assessment, and yearning for Gorbachev’s brand of diplomacy.

Not rated. In English, German, Russian and Polish, with English subtitles.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/movies/meeting-gorbachev-review.html" id="9e16c7ce-9ef8-38ad-ae76-17032f773025">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

'Meeting Gorbachev' Review: Sitting Down With the Last Soviet Leader

In Danny Boyle’s “Yesterday,” the closing-night feature at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, a musician awakes to a world in which no one else has ever heard of the Beatles. While it’s unlikely in the extreme that the festival, which opened Wednesday, will produce an artist as enduring as the Beatles, talented filmmakers can go overlooked in so large an event. Several dozen selections are both world premieres and feature debuts, which means they offer an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with a potentially major new director. Here are nine highlights from that group.

‘Burning Cane’

At 19, Phillip Youmans is surely the youngest director in this year’s American dramatic competition, and probably the most experimental. Claiming inspiration from the blues, he tells his story in an elliptical style that looks a lot like recent-vintage Terrence Malick. The film teems with lived-in details from its rural Louisiana setting (like the lengthy discussion of how to cure a dog of mange in the film’s opening) and springs to life whenever Wendell Pierce is onscreen as an alcoholic preacher. The movie is tough going, but coming from a 19-year-old, it shows a startlingly expansive understanding of what movies can be.

‘CRSHD’

Your mileage may vary on the visual barrage of Facebook and emoji jokes and the use of words like “obvi” in dialogue, but the aggressive Generation Z trappings don’t make writer-director Emily Cohn’s college raunch-com any less winning or sweet. With her studies for a looming astronomy exam on the back burner, Izzy (Isabelle Barbier), a college freshman, prepares to attend a “crush party” — all guests have been invited anonymously by a crush — and lose her virginity. Barbier is very funny, as are Deeksha Ketkar and Sadie Scott as Izzy’s cohorts.

‘Lucky Grandma’

Sasie Sealy’s dark comedy — partly financed by the festival through an inclusion initiative — revives a strain of 1980s after-hours madcap. The veteran Chinese-born actress Tsai Chin plays the grandma in question, who, on the bus back to New York from a casino, discovers she’s sitting next to a dead man who was traveling with a pile of cash. Others soon try to claim it. Going right up to the edge of stereotypes — it turns out the woman’s stubbornness serves her well in the Chinatown underworld — “Lucky Grandma” and Tsai pull off a tricky balancing act of tone. Corey Ha steals scenes as Grandma’s kindhearted (and very large) bodyguard.

‘Noah Land’

Cenk Erturk’s Turkish-language feature has the sort of delicate ambiguity we associated with the films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The ailing Ibrahim (Haluk Bilginer, from the Palme d’Or-winning “Winter Sleep”), accompanied by his son (Ali Atay), travels to the village where he grew up, hoping to be buried under a tree he says he planted as a child. But pilgrims believe that Noah planted the tree, and another family has tended it for 50 years. Is Ibrahim mistaken about the location? Could he have other motives? Erturk uses this situation to illuminate the father-son relationship.

‘Red, White &amp; Wasted’

“The Florida Project” captured one kind of poverty in the shadow of Disney World; “Red White &amp; Wasted” depicts another. Embedding in a culture where the term “redneck” is used proudly, the documentary follows the family of Matthew Burns, who, with the nickname Video Pat, was a tireless chronicler of the off-road revelry at an Orlando-area mudhole — a site where locals would drive their trucks through the muck and engage in gone-wild-style partying. The directors, Andrei Bowden Schwartz and Sam B. Jones, follow Burns and his daughters through a period of transition, including an unexpected pregnancy and certain evolving attitudes. (This is a movie in which people say things like, “I’m not fully racist. I’m not racist at all, really.”) The result is an oddly poignant portrait of family and of the wisdom that comes with aging.

‘Scheme Birds’

Credited with their own cinematography and sound, Swedish directors Ellen Fiske and Ellinor Hallin take a frank look at life in a Scottish housing project. After a pregnancy causes a rift with the grandfather who raised her, Gemma begins settling down with the boyfriend he disapproves of, Pat. The filmmakers capture changes both abrupt (one of Gemma’s friends is the victim of a sudden act of violence) and slow-simmering (as Gemma’s relationship with Pat disintegrates) and emerge with a heartening portrait of resilience in a setting where parental abandonment and prison time are treated as regular facts of life.

‘See You Yesterday’

Stefon Bristol’s movie, based on a previous short, tips its hat to other time-travel films (Michael J. Fox appears briefly as a teacher at Bronx Science). But with an ideal balance of matinee zip and social critique, it finds a fresh angle on the genre. Eden Duncan-Smith and Dante Crichlow star as two teenagers in Brooklyn who invent an apparatus that allows them to take short hops back in time, for 10-minute intervals. They soon find themselves using those powers to prevent an unjustified shooting by police. Produced by Spike Lee, the film will be available on Netflix next month.

‘17 Blocks’

This one’s a bit of a cheat: It’s the first feature as a solo director by the “This American Life” contributor Davy Rothbart, but he and Andrew Cohn won a News and Documentary Emmy in 2015 for another film, “Medora.” This latest movie, a chronicle of a family in Washington — the title refers to the distance from their home to the Capitol — began filming far earlier, in 1999. It covers two decades of hardship and heartbreak, and includes unshakable scenes of violence and redemption.

‘You Don’t Nomi’

Misunderstood by critics, audiences and perhaps even certain people who made it, “Showgirls” (1995) continues its journey toward full reclamation with this pleasingly wonkish, clip-heavy deconstruction from Jeffrey McHale. Even “Showgirls” partisans see the film in different lights: It’s portrayed as grist for drag shows and bad-movie nights; as the inspiration for a book of sestinas; and as a sophisticated satire whose craft and layered meanings have been revealed over time. Elizabeth Berkley’s performance in particular is singled out as an unfairly maligned tour de force.

Tribeca Film Festival

Through May 5 at locations around the city; tribecafilm.com.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/movies/tribeca-film-festival.html" id="80ff7175-591d-3392-adfe-00560465b5be">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

Tribeca Film Festival: 9 Filmmakers Who Should Be on Your Radar

All hail Laika, then, for making a movie in which it’s a pleasure to ponder the sharpened contours of a pointy schnoz or the tufts of an animal’s fur, which, in the case of Link (voiced by Zach Galifianakis), as the gentle simian man comes to be known, resembles hair-colored plumage. The imagery is not nearly as eccentric or demented as that in Laika’s “Coraline,” probably the studio’s high-water mark. But even so, the sculpting gives the characters a tactility that lines of coding have not yet matched, and the jerkiness of the movement — only slight in this case — affords the film a warm, organic feel.

The evident care put into the film’s design has not, alas, been matched with similar inventiveness in storytelling. Directed by Chris Butler (“ParaNorman,” with Sam Fell), “Missing Link” is a throwback in more ways than one, with a plot that tips its hat to Victorian literature, frontier town Westerns and a 1930s creation, Shangri-La. Sir Lionel Frost (voiced by Hugh Jackman) is a quixotic adventurer who longs for acceptance from a stuffy British geographical society. In the opening sequence, he and a put-upon assistant try to capture evidence of the Loch Ness monster. Frost makes the mistake of relying on one of those newfangled photographic cameras.

Never mind, though, for a letter soon summons him on a new expedition to Washington state, where he encounters the talking Link, who wants to track down his surviving relatives. There are funny running jokes involving the 8-foot Link’s proportions — a poor fit for a bar stool, a train and a plaid suit — and his habit of taking all of Frost’s pronouncements literally. Over the course of their travels they team up with Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana), the brassy widow of one of Frost’s colleagues, and are pursued by an assassin (Timothy Olyphant), hired to kill Frost by his rival (Stephen Fry).

The setup is satisfactory. The payoff is somewhat less so, especially once the film begins dealing in platitudes about friendship and the action moves to the Himalayas. The icy land of lost yetis proves, visually, a lot less exciting than the more intricately art-directed details of human civilization. (Emma Thompson, as the queen of that hidden enclave, gets in a few biting lines.)

What’s missing from the movie, for all its technical skill, is simply inspiration — that extra touch of wit or imagination that might elevate it from a pleasant diversion to a rare sighting.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/movies/missing-link-review.html" id="cf9ab785-b86b-30cb-a87c-62bc10462e4f">The New York Times</a>.

It’s fitting that “Missing Link,” which concerns a lovable creature a step behind on the evolutionary ladder, has been made with stop-motion animation, the painstaking process by which models and puppets are photographed to create the illusion of movement. In form and content, it’s a movie about fighting obsolescence. The perfection of the computer animation would simply be wrong.

Hmm, There's an 800-Pound Beast in the Room

Emilio Estevez wrote, directed and served as a producer on the film; he is also its star. Inspired by an essay that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2007, the movie isn’t the actor-filmmaker’s first brush with earnest Americana. (His ensemble piece “Bobby” (2006) tried to capture the optimism at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 as admirers of Robert F. Kennedy awaited his arrival.) But it may be his most substantive.

At what other physical institution can you learn about virtually any topic? Where else are the homeless welcomed as equals, at least until they are not? (A subplot deals with the fallout from a patron’s eviction for body odor.) And if libraries are microcosms of democracy, what does it mean that they are sometimes closed?

The bulk of the movie takes place inside a public library in Cincinnati as the city braces for a cold snap. Estevez plays Stuart Goodson, a librarian on easy conversational terms with the homeless who camp out there every day. Then one night, during the potentially fatal arctic chill, Jackson (Michael K. Williams) informs Stuart that the city’s shelters are full. He and a large group of other men simply won’t leave.

Estevez does an elegant job with this setup, creating a low-key, uncondescending portrait of lives on the edge. Stuart has his own checkered past, as does the building manager for his apartment (Taylor Schilling), a recovering alcoholic and new romantic interest.

The standoff is when the eye-rolls begin. Alec Baldwin is brought in as a police negotiator, who, incidentally, is looking for his son on the streets. Christian Slater is a prosecutor and mayoral candidate who senses an opportunity — and has already rebuked Stuart after the city faced legal consequences for the body odor episode. Most egregiously, Gabrielle Union plays a TV news reporter determined to portray the protest as a hostage situation. At the film’s nadir, Stuart, on the phone with her during a broadcast, stops making his case and begins quoting from “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Despite having internet and cellphones, the protesters have surprising trouble getting their message out. Yet in other respects, “The Public” seems overly thought through. Even small details — a song selection, the price of pizza — return as crucial plot points later on, often in silly ways that undermine authenticity. So, too, perhaps, does the contrived character of Big George (rapper Che Smith, aka Rhymefest), a gentle giant and a newcomer to the library’s homeless scene who proves crucial to events.

The movie’s literary virtues, in other words, are up for debate. Its sincerity, though, is not.

Additional Information:

‘The Public’

Rated PG-13 for indecent exposure — to cold weather and otherwise. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/movies/the-public-review.html" id="733de1a7-5f3d-3aa9-a8a4-53a7938427e8">The New York Times</a>.

Apart from Frederick Wiseman’s “Ex Libris: The New York Public Library,” few movies have celebrated book-lending institutions as havens of fair-mindedness and pluralism, so it’s tempting to give a pass to “The Public” as a rousing, lovingly made civics lesson, even if its screenplay does not seem fated for shelves.

'The Public' Review: Emilio Estevez Takes Us to the Library for a Civics Lesson

Constructed almost entirely from archival sources, the documentary “Apollo 11,” which opened on Imax screens March 1 and will expand to regular theaters March 8, condenses nine days of the moon mission into roughly 90 minutes, beginning with preparations for the launch and ending with the astronauts’ safe return. It interweaves a variety of perspectives, including those of the space travelers, of mission control, of onlookers anticipating the liftoff and of naval officers awaiting the capsule’s splashdown.

The result is a film that drew spectacular reviews at its Sundance premiere. In The Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang called it “a stirring companion piece to Damien Chazelle’s recent ‘First Man.'” Reviewing it Friday for The New York Times, Glenn Kenny called it “entirely awe-inspiring.”

For documentarian Todd Douglas Miller (“Dinosaur 13”), using original materials without voice-over or interviews seemed like a natural approach. In the audio recordings, public affairs officers explaining the mission to viewers at home “just sounded like narrators,” Miller said.

Drawing on written documentation for clues, Miller and his team pieced together a variety of materials: 16 mm and 35 mm films that have long been available in some form; a treasure trove of 177 rediscovered 65 mm Panavision reels found at the National Archives and Records Administration; and audio recordings from mission control and other technical outposts.

With help from Stephen Slater, a TV documentarian and space buff in Britain who became the movie’s archive producer and who, as a passion project, synced audio with footage from Apollo 11’s descent, the filmmakers assembled those components into a remarkably fluid whole. Image and sound were fitted together like a puzzle. At points, onscreen text links the footage before our eyes with facts such as Apollo 11’s precise velocity, distance from Earth and fuel level.

The sequences filmed in space — which earned Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins honorary memberships in the American Society of Cinematographers — have been seen before. Some of the most stunning images in the movie, like a shot from the lunar module as it descends toward the surface of the moon, can be found in degraded clips on YouTube (although they look far better restored here).

What has gone largely unseen until “Apollo 11” is the material shot on the ground, much of which was filmed in 65 mm Panavision, a high-quality format that would have been familiar to 1969 moviegoers from, well, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Whether the camera is racing by technical consoles or engaging in Frederick Wiseman-style people-watching of bystanders gathered to witness the launch, it produces imagery that has a startling vividness.

This footage remained buried until now because of financial, technical and institutional limitations. Daniel Rooney, a supervisory archivist at the National Archives who discovered the 177 reels, noted that NASA had photographic and film operations at sites across the country. NASA’s movies of the Apollo missions eventually made their way to the National Archives.

But while NASA had “a very meticulous process” for collecting and cataloging footage from all those centers, Rooney said, “for some reason that never happened with these particular reels.” Those reasons aren’t necessarily mysterious. These were original color negatives, he said, and it would have been difficult to know what was on them without processing the film, which was and is expensive. When Rooney investigated a future for the archives’ 65 and 70 mm holdings in the late 2000s, processing of those formats had been declining for years.

And so it happened that Rooney, digging for film in 2017 after speaking with Miller, stumbled across the Panavision negatives that concerned the Apollo program. More than half the reels involved the preparation, launch and recovery of Apollo 11. “Those are sort of the big key areas,” Rooney said.

Although some of the film was shot by NASA itself, much of it was made for a movie called “Moonwalk One,” a strange combination of educational documentary and blissed-out philosophizing that opened in New York at the Whitney Museum in 1972.

Filmmaking and photography were integral to space exploration from the moment NASA started launching rockets, said Todd Gustavson, curator of the technology collection at the George Eastman Museum. John Glenn was the first astronaut to carry a camera on a mission, said Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian; Glenn had bought the camera in a Florida store and adapted it so he could wield it in a spacesuit for his 1962 Mercury voyage. In 1966 and 1967, special cameras that Kodak had designed for NASA mapped the surface of the moon, ensuring that Armstrong and company would know a safe spot to land.

Miller discovered from watching the launches of Apollo 8, 9 and 10 that the camera operators had flubbed a move they needed. “Everything was a dress rehearsal for 11,” he said. “When 11 came, they just nailed every single shot.”

His documentary draws on some footage that was captured specifically for engineering purposes. Extreme close-ups of the launch were filmed on a special 70 mm format, which made digitally scanning them even more complicated.

And almost all of the footage Miller’s team had was silent. Luckily, specialized tape recorders in Houston captured key voices from those nine days. “NASA keeps records of everything,” said Gregory Wiseman, an audio engineer at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “On any given day, this audio that’s recorded is not significant, but if there’s any sort of anomaly in space, then they will go back and review all of these different conversations.” This would have been useful, he noted, with Apollo 13 and the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

The filmmakers also had crucial help from Ben Feist, who works part-time at an advertising agency in Toronto and also does research for NASA. (His sister is singer-songwriter Feist.) In what began as a hobby, he took 11,000 hours of digitized recordings from Apollo 11, improved the audio quality and mapped them by minute and second. Using his programming, the filmmakers could listen to technicians’ voices separately or in concert at any moment of the mission.

Although NASA approved the release of all the audio, and those heard speaking were government employees, the approach did raise ethical questions. “There are private phone conversations and things like that that occurred, between husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend,” Feist said. “I haven’t come across anything untoward,” he added, although there is a discussion of booze quantities at splashdown parties. In one of the most striking moments in the movie, technicians are overheard discussing the fatal accident on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, involving a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy, which was in the news at the time.

Feist plans to post all 11,000 hours of audio on apolloinrealtime.org before the mission’s July anniversary, allowing armchair historians to hear audio as if they were sitting in any seat at mission control. They could come across “something that, possibly, they’re the first person to hear it in 50 years,” he said.

Miller was focused on keeping the re-creation as to-the-minute as possible. “We did have kind of our own mission rules,” he explained. “We said, if it didn’t happen on that day at that specific time, we’re not using it.”

But he occasionally broke from that purist approach. To show a solar corona phenomenon that the astronauts speak of, Miller said, he used a shot from Apollo 12. During the moments showing the translunar injection maneuver — the propulsive push that sent Apollo 11 toward the moon — Miller used a shot from Apollo 8. He hopes to document these liberties and other aspects of the filmmaking process in a production journal.

The filmmakers are still hunting down names of camera operators, and the digital scans used for the movie will be made publicly available at the National Archives.

“I don’t think it ever will end with Apollo,” Slater said. “I can’t really see how you could improve on this, but in 10 years maybe there will be another film with more uncovered footage. That would be great, wouldn’t it?”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/movies/apollo11-documentary.html" id="82ff2f7a-4b9c-306a-a9a8-a89a01531951">The New York Times</a>.

By NASA’s estimate, 530 million people watched Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon in July 1969, making it one of the most widely seen television events in history. Now a new film allows moviegoers to experience the Apollo 11 mission from unexpected angles through mesmerizing footage and recordings that were never intended for a large viewership — or even necessarily for the public.

Piecing Together the Visual and Audio Puzzle of 'Apollo 11'

The New Zealand comedy “The Breaker Upperers” adds some welcome irreverence to the homogenized mix of Netflix comedies. This collaboration between Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami — who wrote, directed and star together — exhibits their fairly irresistible comic chemistry, even if the conceit of the movie wears a bit thin.

Their characters, Jen (Van Beek) and Mel (Sami), operate an agency that helps clients too wimpy or sneaky to end their own relationships. Each case requires its own form of deception. The two are introduced posing as police officers who tell a woman (Celia Pacquola) that her husband — who is about to flee to Rio — has disappeared.

This is not an airtight line of work; for starters, as the movie acknowledges, it relies on Jen and Mel’s never running into anyone they deceive. But the business does supply Sami and Van Beek with a steady stream of gags until it becomes clear that the film’s real subject is their friendship. Mel has too much empathy to be a good liar, while Jen has grown wistful over the rocky end of one of her own past relationships. A cloud of mawkishness looms, though it never quite overshadows the rest.

Also funny is James Rolleston, who dryly steals scenes as a 17-year-old rugby player who seeks out Jen and Mel’s services. Not only is he probably too young to be experiencing such a baggage-laden breakup, but he is also, amusingly, not the sharpest tool in the shed.

That said, it’s possible the jokes about his bossy Maori girlfriend (Ana Scotney) play well in New Zealand. Here, they lean too heavily on stereotyping to land.

“The Breaker Upperers"Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/movies/the-breaker-upperers-review.html" id="ceeb253a-7f4d-3107-ab65-8f01d99f6101">The New York Times</a>.

(Streaming Movie Review)

'The Breaker Upperers': Calling It Off, With an Assist

The movie, directed by Charlie Minn, is unbearable to watch, yet its centering of first-person testimony — supplemented with floor plans of the building and phone footage from that day — makes the massacre immediate in a way that sometimes gets lost in news coverage or political debates. As you watch teacher Ernie Rospierski say he’s been avoiding thinking about could-haves and should-haves or hear descriptions of how precariously positioned student Maddy Wilford was after being shot, it’s impossible to avoid the sense that their survival came down to chance. These could easily be other shootings or other survivors.

In fact, Minn has also made documentaries (presumably with the same approach) on the Pulse nightclub and Las Vegas shootings, and at times this hasty, low-budget production gives off an unfortunate air of ambulance chasing. Music cues provide unnecessary goosing; cheap re-enactments trace the shooter’s whereabouts; and the director, who is sometimes on camera, intersperses good questions with manipulative prods to his grieving subjects.

But the subjects are there, and to the extent that “Parkland: Inside Building 12” is a memorial, not a documentary, it has a raw power.

“Parkland: Inside Building 12”

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/movies/parkland-inside-building-12-review.html" id="dbc2f6c9-8b17-3e73-aaa4-7d089b7f4c8d">The New York Times</a>.

'Parkland: Inside Building 12' Review: Recounting the Attack in Painful Detail

For roughly the first 50 minutes of “Parkland: Inside Building 12,” students and teachers recall last year’s attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in harrowing detail: who heard what and when, who hid where, which doors were locked, who was bleeding or killed. Much of the second hour is then devoted to remembering the 17 dead, one by one. At the close, when Emma González is shown reciting their names at the March for Our Lives rally, we have a mental image of each person.

Natalie (Rebel Wilson), an architect whose colleagues treat her as a doormat, disdains romance and hates it in movies. Her appearance is played for laughs. (A halal vendor implores her to stop his runaway cart with her body.) Then, in the process of foiling a mugger, she smacks into a metal beam in a subway station and wakes up to find herself in a romantic-comedy version of New York, filled with clean air, flowers and cupcakes.

She has a meet-cute with a Hemsworth (Liam). Her dog is suddenly obedient. Her newly capacious apartment looks like the 21st-century equivalent of a Doris Day pad. (The title’s nod to Rodgers and Hart notwithstanding, “Isn’t It Romantic” mostly operates on the assumption that rom-coms were invented in 1990 with “Pretty Woman.”) And her mousy best friend, Josh (Adam Devine), who was always encouraging her to be confident, has his own meet-cute with a woman who is both a yoga ambassador and swimsuit model (Priyanka Chopra).

In short, the movie invites the screenwriters — Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox and Katie Silberman — to do their worst, cliché-wise, and then to mock themselves. Some of the parody lands, such as arunning joke about how Natalie is trapped in aPG-13 world, where her foul language is dependably bleeped out by street traffic and prim edits elide her efforts to have sex.

The director, Todd Strauss-Schulson, who had a way with projectile gags in “A Very Harold &amp; Kumar 3D Christmas,” keeps things visually lively whenever the film turns into a stealth musical. (“How did everyone know the choreography?” Natalie asks Josh after a bar crowd joins in her killer karaoke rendition of Whitney Houston.)

Wilson, leaning on her comic persona to compensate for the script’s lack of wit or inventiveness, is a reliable deadpanner. Her one-liners — calling the alternate universe she’s trapped in “'The Matrix’ for lonely women,” for example — are funny enough to carry this featherweight movie as far as it can go, which isn’t far. The film’s reliance on conventions even as it snickers at them gives it the faint air of a con.

“Isn’t It Romantic” is designed to leave viewers feeling lightheaded and forgetful. That dizzy sensation could be love — or a mild head injury.

— ‘Isn’t It Romantic’: Rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned). Isn’t that meta. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/movies/isnt-it-romantic-review.html" id="2ac9aa0d-81d3-3ce8-ab6b-311ac46c5274">The New York Times</a>.

“Isn’t It Romantic” is the second comedy in less than a week, after “What Men Want,” in which a woman gains the power to improve her life following a concussion.

'Isn't It Romantic' Review: Rebel Wilson Mocks, and Obeys, Rom-Com Rules

Directed by Adam Shankman, this comedy flips the script on Nancy Meyers’ “What Women Want” (2000), in which a Chicago chauvinist (Mel Gibson) gets his comeuppance after gaining the power to hear women’s thoughts. This time, the mind reader is an Atlanta sports agent, Ali (Taraji P. Henson), who works at a boy’s club of a company and is repeatedly passed over for partner status. Her boss, Nick (Brian Bosworth), tells her, “You’re doing great in your lane.”

But thanks to either a knock on the head or the laced tea given to her by a psychic (Erykah Badu), Ali begins to hear what men are thinking, the better to get sweet, sweet revenge. Part of the message, of course, is that it doesn’t take a mind reader to see that Ali’s colleagues — who court a star African-American basketball player (Shane Paul McGhie) with a racist video filled with bling and women — are complete boneheads, working in a frat house dressed up as an office.

While “What Men Want” starts off as a stinging critique, it undermines that message with one of Hollywood’s favorite idiotic subplots. Because the star player’s father (Tracy Morgan) doesn’t trust a woman without a family, Ali tries to pass off a one-night stand and his son (Aldis Hodge and Auston Moore) as her husband and child.

Presumably Ali’s ability to hear their thoughts would make that charade easier. So would a simple conversation. But Ali is a bad communicator, and one lesson the movie deigns to teach her is to listen more carefully.

If the original delivered payback to a sexist, the new film ought to let a victim of sexism turn the tables. “What Men Want” doesn’t stick to that conceit, however, despite such barbed moments as when Nick says aloud that he would fire Ali if he didn’t fear a #MeToo outcry. The film insists that Ali, like Gibson’s ad man, receive her comeuppance: She learns to respect her gay assistant (Josh Brener) and to be less selfish in her career and in bed.

Memo to working women: Don’t be ball busters, or else.

The gender politics of “What Men Want” only sometimes play as retrograde, though. The movie covers all its bases, determined to give every segment of the audience what it wants, with dubious success.

‘What Men Want’

Rated R for male lizard brain behavior. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/movies/what-men-want-review.html" id="f413317d-f1f5-3a79-a60b-43191338033b">The New York Times</a>.

“What Men Want” presumes a lot of things about its viewers. One is that they won’t tolerate a satire of workplace sexism if it doesn’t sometimes put the woman in her place. Another is a taste for Fiji water, an object of product placement so frequent that you worry for a drought in the South Pacific.

'What Men Want' Review: A Mind-Reading Woman Flips the Script, Sort of

How he has done this is simultaneously novel and destined to earn the justifiable quibbling of purists. Although the film is bookended by black-and-white footage of men going off to war and then returning home, the battlefield sequences havebeen substantially doctored, with the ostensible goal of making them more immersive and appealing to modern audiences. Given how few films from the 1910s are showing in multiplexes, the intent is at least arguably noble, although you wonder how Jackson would feel about his “Lord of the Rings” being tinkered with 100 years after its making.

Jackson has adjusted the frame rates (the speed at which a film is projected, which wasn’t standardized until the sound era); added color in ways said to comport with the actual hues of uniforms and landscapes; given the film a 3D conversion that can be seen in select theaters; and dubbed in voices for the soldiers, with the aid of forensic lip readers employed to figure out what they were saying.

Most notably, he has added voice-over from real veterans who fought with the British, culled from hundreds of hours of audio interviews. Their testimonies have been smoothly interwoven and linked with appropriate footage.As you listen to the voices in concert, patterns emerge. We hear from multiple men too young to serve who lied about their ages to enlist. For many, soldiering became a job and the only world they knew. We learn of the camaraderie that formed in the trenches, and of the sense that the men had of being shunned and misunderstood after the war.

The sound effects — gunfire, shelling, falling debris — are the movie’s best addition, helping to conjure the sensation of continuous bombardment, day and night. The sonic accompaniment isn’t limited to artillery. We hear squeaks for the rats who invaded the trenches and fed on human flesh. You have to wonder if Jackson popped actual louse eggs to get just the right crackling sound.

The visual alterations are another matter. Your mileage may vary, but to me, the faces in the black-and-white segments looked more detailed, more “real” than the faces in the color segments. The tweaks have made skin look porcelain-smooth; cheeks appear eerily stubble-free, even if these men were young and diligent about shaving. Color techniques did exist in movies during World War I, and what is here looks nothing like them.

These are the qualms of a cinephile, and most viewers listening to such gripping recollections — of seeing a living man with his lung hanging out or of how the deceased came to be regarded as “no trouble, medically” — will probably be too engaged to mind. Even so, it’s tough to escape the sense that Jackson has brought history to life in the sense that Dr. Frankenstein brought things to life, having his way with the dead.

Rated R for gruesome war scenes, shown and described. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/movies/they-shall-not-grow-old-review.html" id="487e6f9d-4327-3594-a527-20660c35b9ea">The New York Times</a>.

Having sold out at event screenings since December, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” which opens for a full run this week, is poised to become the only blockbuster this year that was filmed from 1914 to 1918, on location on the Western Front. Commissioned to make a movie for the centennial of the armistice, using original footage, Peter Jackson has taken a mass of World War I archival clips from Britain’s Imperial War Museum and fashioned it into a brisk, absorbing and moving experience.

'They Shall Not Grow Old' Review: World War I, in Living Color

Directed by Karim Traidia and Pankaj Sehgal, the movie unfolds during the weeks leading up to Gandhi’s death, mingling fictional and real-life figures. It posits that authorities knew in advance that the murder would happen and could have stopped it but didn’t, believing that making Gandhi a martyr would bring unity to feuding Hindus and Muslims in the wake of India’s independence.

It pins the skulduggery on a fictional intelligence officer, Sunil Raina (Stephen Lang), who carries out his plan with the helpful and conflicted inaction of a policeman, Jimmy (Luke Pasqualino). Raina explains his theory of how Lincoln’s death brought the United States together after the Civil War.

It is difficult to take “The Gandhi Murder” seriously as “JFK"-like speculative paranoia with the former Guy Ritchie heavy Vinnie Jones (in a “special appearance”) and an American-accented Mark Moses (Duck Phillips on “Mad Men”) playing posh Brits — to say nothing of Lang’s presence as an ethnic Kashmiri. It seems best to accept the musical numbers (“I am not Hindu or Muslim/Just let me live”) and occasional lapses into martial arts as characteristic of a generous Bollywood-style aesthetic.

Not rated. Running time: 1 hours, 58 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/movies/the-gandhi-murder-review.html" id="16575b91-cc11-35ab-a789-a92b312853b1">The New York Times</a>.

Opening on the 71st anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the conspiracy thriller “The Gandhi Murder” begins with a claim to be “based on verified facts.” Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying.

'The Gandhi Murder' Review: A Muddled Conspiracy Thriller

The adventure plot in the Brazilian feature “Tito and the Birds,” directed by Gustavo Steinberg, Gabriel Bitar and André Catoto, is no great shakes — it wouldn’t be out of place on a Saturday-morning cartoon — but visually, the movie leaves room for the viewer to synthesize, and to dream. Combining work in oil paint with digital artistry, the film is unafraid to let brush strokes or impasto show. It blends backgrounds and effects that look vaguely postimpressionist with character features that suggest a demented, taffy-stretched “South Park.”

In a sense, even the movie’s subject is imagination. The plot finds the world gripped by an epidemic: A virus is paralyzing people with fear, shrinking them into blobs and eventually turning them into rocks (or so we’re told). Although it’s not clear to everyone, the disease’s spread appears to be abetted by a steady diet of news-media scaremongering. A self-interested real estate developer (voiced by Mateus Solano) is pulling the strings.

The only cure rests in the research of an eccentric scientist, Dr. Rufus (Matheus Nachtergaele), who disappears after the prologue, and whose son, Tito (Pedro Henrique), longs to carry on his father’s work with birds. This isn’t the first animated movie to suggest that our feathered friends are trying to tell us something, but it may the only movie in history to suggest there are health benefits from close interaction with street pigeons.

The movie’s pleasures are primarily visual, whether it’s in the thick swirls of paint used to suggest a fiery lab accident; the design quirks (faces with prominent overbites); or the shadowy, often inky-dark palette. “Tito and the Birds” is more macabre than the average cartoon, though it contains nothing that anyone familiar with Tim Burton or Roald Dahl couldn’t handle.

If “Tito and the Birds” falls well short of those lofty comparisons in its narrative invention — the anodyne resolution feels a few drafts short of something haunting — it also feels more timely than timeless. The film, first shown last year, arrives after Brazil’s election of a far-right president who relied on incendiary rhetoricto win. In that context, the movie’s portrait of a society paralyzed by fear packs an added punch, and its imagining of a place that has forgotten its spirit of community seems chillingly topical.

—

Not rated. In Portuguese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/movies/review-tito-and-the-birds.html" id="7a8cbbf5-adf2-306a-aa34-00a96f083011">The New York Times</a>.

As animation has trended toward the precision that comes from working with computers, it has become refreshing to encounter throwbacks to less “perfect” styles.

'Tito and the Birds' Review: Pigeons Carrying a Message

More laughs are all that would have been necessary to prevent the stagnation of “Holmes &amp; Watson”; as the movie stands, smuggling in booze to dispel the sense of dull routine could only help. Sony sneaked this parody into theaters on Christmas without screenings for critics, normally evidence that the film in question is less than the work of a mastermind.

Still, a viewing of the movie doesn’t quite solve the mystery of why the distributor deep-sixed the latest chapter in an enduring partnership — not of Holmes and Watson, but of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. True, the almost Dadaist, apparently improvisational banter they brought to “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” and “Step Brothers” has been tempered this time by familiarity, the constraints of the period setting and the need for the movie to follow of the contours of a lackluster whodunit.

But there is still intermittent joy to be found in their autumnal bromance, which reaches apotheosis here in a late-breaking musical duet from the show-tune veterans Alan Menken and Glenn Slater.

In this version of the story, written and directed by Etan Cohen (who directed the much-worse “Get Hard”), Holmes (Ferrell) and Watson (Reilly) are said to have met as schoolboys after a young Holmes used his powers of deduction to get their bullying classmates expelled. The relationship has grown so close that Holmes can predict Watson’s moves at rock, paper, scissors and Battleship without a game being played. They bond over the dubious wisdom of sending drunk-telegrams and the difficulty of finding Holmes the proper hat. A “Make England Great Again” fez is among the rejects.

Anachronisms give the movie its most obvious yet most effective targets — targets hit more palpably by the Brit playing an American than the Americans playing Brits. Rebecca Hall turns up as Grace Hart, a doctor visiting from Boston who throughout the movie rattles off signs of progress in the United States, from the gender pay gap (not terrible for the time!) to the right to a trial by a “jury of white property-owning men.”

One of the better bits brings her and a smitten Watson together to perform an autopsy, which turns into a re-enactment of a famous scene from “Ghost” with a cake-covered corpse instead of pottery. Lauren Lapkus, as Grace’s mute assistant, who is said to have been reared by cats, raises a few smiles as well, mostly without saying a word.

Comparably, the men’s sparring, to say nothing of the “Weekend at Bernie’s” routine they pull with the queen (Pam Ferris), looks more tired than usual, and the filmmakers haven’t remotely figured out how to use Ralph Fiennes — as either Holmes’ nemesis Moriarty or a look-alike patsy — who appears so infrequently that he could just as well have been left on the cutting-room floor. In this context, it’s not really a case worth cracking.

“Holmes &amp; Watson" is rated PG-13. Artificial stimulants. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/movies/holmes-and-watson-review.html" id="971f2714-f107-3c3b-ad10-6299b5554f99">The New York Times</a>.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s original telling, Sherlock Holmes indulged in morphine and cocaine because the drugs offered him a break from “the dull routine of existence.” His mind, Dr. Watson recalls him saying in “The Sign of Four” (1890), rebelled at “stagnation.” Problems, work and cryptograms: Their inspiration would permit him to dispense with “artificial stimulants.”

'Holmes & Watson': Ferrell, Reilly and the Dull Routine of Bromance

Phil is still getting over a divorce and, it seems, is clinically depressed. Kinnear strains to convey the character’s inner torment while making him outwardly comic — or at least that appears to be the intent, judging from Rolfe Kent’s sprightly laugh track of a score. Like all depressed people, Phil goes to work with his hair uncombed. Soon he becomes obsessed with a patient, Michael (Bradley Whitford), who has written a successful book on Socrates and looks to have life figured out.

In “Phil,” Greg Kinnear acts and directs, which has left him without at least one important person to say “no.” Still, even the most exacting auteur might have labored to help him make sense of this title character. The film opens with Phil, a suicidal dentist, preparing to throw himself off a bridge, then backing off, despite the encouragement of onlookers and the thematically appropriate musical accompaniment of “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden” on his car radio.