Glenn Kenny

This visual approach is apt for the title subject of this film. Cassandro, born Saúl Armendáriz, is a practitioner of lucha libre — Mexican professional wrestling, which he performs in elaborate drag.

Pro wrestling, it could be argued, has always been drag-adjacent — we’re talking about men peacocking in tights here. But Cassandro, with his costumes, makeup and an often remarkably high pompadour, is as much a drag performer as he is a luchador.

Losier’s portrait of the performer takes an intimate, impressionistic approach. It opens with a Skype conversation between the filmmaker and the middle-aged Cassandro. He is nearly mesmerizing as he describes the spell that lucha libre cast on him when he was a misfit boy: At the live shows, he says, “You forget all the stuff that happened to you at home, at school … and of course me being gay, I loved the men.”

The glamour of Cassandro’s presentation is countered by the grunge of his world backstage. Cassandro often speaks to the camera while poised at what looks like the back staircase to a crumbling municipal building. And his home isn’t particularly spacious and filled with clutter; while giving a tour, Cassandro shows off years’ worth of “sobriety tokens,” and talks of how addiction nearly destroyed his life.

His devotion to wrestling — he’s been in the ring since he was barely 20 — hasn’t done wonders for his health, either. He frequently needs surgery, yet he swears to Losier that once he’s discharged from the hospital he doesn’t treat the pain with anything stronger than ibuprofen. The last third of the movie shows the weary wrestler, visibly the worse for wear, attending a spiritual retreat and pondering his future.

“Cassandro the Exotico!” doesn’t stress a linear narrative for its hero, whom Losier clearly adores. This effervescent picture has an often infectious underground-movie aesthetic; my favorite manifestation comes early, in a sequence that juxtaposes Cassandro’s beaming face against a night sky full of fireworks.

Additional Information:

‘Cassandro the Exotico!’

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/movies/cassandro-the-exotico-review.html" id="97e1a859-61b9-312e-a7c4-d70f2d08c49b">The New York Times</a>.

Filmmaker Marie Losier shoots in 16 mm, and she clearly glories in the format. Not just the rich color saturation she squeezes from it, but the image artifacts many other camerapersons would deplore as defects. Frequently in her new documentary film, “Cassandro the Exotico!” individual shots practically bristle with what’s called “hair in the gate” (stray fragments of celluloid that look as if they want to scour the bottom of the screen).

'Cassandro the Exotico!' Review: A Gay Luchador Body Slams Life

In the more than 30 years since he directed his first feature, South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo has refined his seemingly rudimentary style to the extent that it can deliver some surprisingly elaborate effects.

In the opening shot of “Grass,” the director’s latest picture to reach the United States, a young woman with a backpack enters a coffee shop. The door closes behind her; on a bench outside the shop’s front, a middle-aged, unshaven man sits, and lights a cigarette.

Hong cuts to inside the shop. In a medium shot, the young woman sits across from a young man at a table that’s up against a wall. They have an increasingly tense conversation. “I’m not doing so well,” the woman says. The camera does a slow zoom in on the man, who looks concerned; it swivels, deliberately, to the woman. They discuss, and then argue about, a friend who has committed suicide.

The camera cuts to a medium close-up of a young woman, her long ponytail positioned over the side of her face, sitting before a laptop, writing. At first, the sight is bracing for the Hong maven: his pictures often feature writers as protagonists, but they’re seldom shown actually writing. The other effect of the cut is to suggest that the conversation between the young man and young woman is a product of this character’s imagination, that she is working on a short story or a screenplay.

But no. She’s just another customer at the same coffee shop. By declining to show the shop’s interior in a wide establishing shot, the director casually creates a sense of dislocation that hangs over the rest of this short feature, whose title, as it happens, derives from the title of a popular Korean translation of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

The young writer, played by Kim Min-hee (a Hong regular since 2015), observes mostly melancholy people, old and young, who have arrived at turning points in their lives. She can be introverted to the point of defensiveness when confronted about her rather obvious eavesdropping. Not that her interlocutors are aggressive; they show a friendly diffidence, inviting her to drink with them after they bring bottles of soju into the place.

She is less shy when it comes to her younger brother and his girlfriend, who get a relentless tongue-lashing from her in one of the few scenes that leave the coffee shop.

This movie, like most of Hong’s others, doesn’t pass judgment on its largely passive protagonist. In fact, it suggests that observing the people that pass through one’s sight and hearing is an entirely valid mode of living. Despite the fact that she’s writing down what she’s witnessing, you believe her when she tells another character she has no intent to publish or “do” anything with what she types on her laptop. When the writer opts to just let things be, the movie is at its most content.

Not rated. In Korean, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 6 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/movies/grass-review.html" id="3a375641-fd6c-3eb3-ad1d-eb8a74edc4d4">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

She Can't Help but Overhear

Midnight movies are no longer the attraction they were in the late 1970s and early ’80s. This sometimes seems like a shame. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the second feature by Chinese director Bi Gan (whose 2016 debut “Kaili Blues” made an impression in art houses the world over), would make exemplary late-night communal viewing. Very often, and particularly in its second half, watching it feels like dreaming with your eyes open.

This is not just because of the imagery, which, in the first half, is heavy with depictions of water — raining on windshields and inside musty rooms, rippling in puddles, trickling in a tear down a character’s cheek.

The narrative that engulfs the movie’s male protagonist Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) is replete with elements of film noir. There’s a photo with a phone number on the back, hidden behind the back plate of a wall clock. There’s a mysterious woman in a green dress (Tang Wei, of “Lust, Caution”) who frequently asks for a light for her cigarettes. There’s a past filled with secrets.

“I might never have gone back to Kaili had my father not died,” Luo says in voice-over early in the film. If that’s not an invitation to a dark, fatalistic journey, I don’t know what is.

However, Bi Gan’s film elides actual plot elements far more than it articulates them. It’s almost as if the point is to compel the viewer to ask, “Am I missing something?” You are — and you aren’t. The movie’s second half, presented in often-startling 3D, pulls together many of the peculiar threads dropped in prior scenes. But not in a conventional fashion.

This cinematic journey is all about subterranean associations. The movie’s English-language title derives from Eugene O’Neill’s play, but almost nothing in it has a direct relation to O’Neill’s modes of content or dramaturgy. (Its Mandarin Chinese title translates to “Last Evenings on Earth,” the name of a novel by Roberto Bolaño, and it’s the same deal there.) But both halves of the movie are virtual compendiums of references to the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Visual allusions to “Ivan’s Childhood,” “Andrei Rublev” and “Stalker” are carried off beautifully, but do little more than affirm Bi Gan’s aesthetic principles — or, to put it more colloquially, give you a look inside his head.

Not since David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” has a filmmaker in such proximity to what we can call the independent mainstream undertaken quite as radical a challenge to linear narrative. And the achievement is all the more awe-inspiring given that the movie’s second half, a 3D film-within-a-film (of sorts; it could just be Luo’s dream of one) is contained within what seems to be a single continuous shot of nearly an hour in length. What could be more linear than that? And yet its various components defy logical arrangement both as viewed and in retrospect. What they build up to is even more seductive than anything that led up to it — a moment of breathtaking romanticism that’s as intoxicating as it is unexpected.

“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is not rated. In Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hour 13 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/movies/long-days-journey-into-night-review.html" id="9733e760-6765-31f2-a3b2-92d80d82c427">The New York Times</a>.

A Dark and Mesmerizing Chain of Associations

In the opening shot of “Suburban Birds,” the spectacular feature-directing debut of Qiu Sheng, there’s a blurry-edged circle inside the square frame, a far-off cityscape in the distance. A man eventually comes into frame, and the view swivels. The effect can be taken as a reflection of the viewer’s own eye, with the sharp center representing the pupil, and the blurred portion the outer iris.

We soon learn the view is through a surveyor’s level. While the director’s camera does not peer though that device again, the perspectives in this movie shift subtly but distinctly from adult’s eye view, to child’s eye view, to a hushed omniscience and back.

A crew of four male engineers are taking measurements on the outskirts of a growing Chinese city. The area seems to be plagued by craters, or sinkholes — it’s hard to say. The men don’t discuss the work in much detail. One of them, Hao (Mason Lee), initiates a sexual relationship with a female resident of his hotel, Swallow (Lu Huang). Alone one afternoon, he enters a suburban school through a window. The movie initially gives no clues as to why. Inside, he rifles though a desk, and finds a journal.

The film’s scenes then begin to follow the journal’s dates. Its world is now one of school children, including a small boy, also named Hao (Zihan Gong). The kids aren’t terribly engaged in their school work, and like to wander nearby woods looking at birds. They don’t have cellphones, and when one of them doesn’t show up to school one day, the others don’t have access to any present-day tools that might help them find his house. It’s therefore reasonable to infer that their storyline is set in the past. But as the film goes on, it’s harder to be sure.

At a certain point, the kids come across the four surveyors, all improbably napping in tree shade, and one of the kids puts a wad of gum on the lens of a level. The movie keeps visiting the adult Hao, whose relationship with Swallow suffers because of her drunken behavior.

Qiu shows remarkable facility as he patiently adds layer upon layer to a mystery that wants to stay one. This is not a puzzle film, but its ends are elusive. Its observations on the expanding cityscapes of China recall the work of Jia Zhangke (“Ash Is Purest White”), while its near-mystical quietude has accents one recognizes in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. But Sheng is also very clearly his own artist, and this movie is an assured debut.

Additional Information:

‘Suburban Birds’

Not rated. In Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/movies/suburban-birds-review.html" id="8b2097e2-cf14-38bd-aee9-e3328742f04b">The New York Times</a>.

'Suburban Birds' Review: A Spectacular Directing Debut

The Creeds, Louis and Rachel and their young children, Ellie and Gage, move to rustic Maine and find out their property includes a creepy burial ground for pets, and behind that, an even creepier burial ground where the loved ones interred “come back,” as the Creeds’ avuncular neighbor, Jud, puts it. Louis and Jud try it out on the family’s killed-by-a-truck cat. That doesn’t work out well. Then other things don’t work out well.

King’s novel was adapted for the screen in 1989. Directed by Mary Lambert, that “Pet Sematary” was a squirrelly, wild-eyed movie. This version is more Hollywood smooth. It’s very well-acted by Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow and especially Jeté Laurence as young Ellie. Directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, showing puzzling distrust of their strong source material, overload the movie with arbitrary jump scares. And they replace King’s despairing, tragic denouement with something altogether more glib.

But when they settle into a groove that aligns with the novel’s, the movie delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision. I also appreciate the respect and good taste of the filmmakers’ choice of closing song, a blistering Starcrawler cover of the Ramones’ theme from the original movie.

Additional Information:

Rated R. It’s ‘Pet Sematary.’ What did you think it would be rated?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/movies/pet-sematary-review.html" id="9b7d5fcd-c67e-3359-abf7-3be7931494b2">The New York Times</a>.

Stephen King is so monumentally productive, even now, five decades into his career, that it’s hard to nail down the peaks of his bibliography. But critics and fans agree that his 1983 novel “Pet Sematary” was something special, and especially horrific. The story of an attractive American family finding terror in a new home credibly wedded Edgar Allan Poe’s twitchy, stiff-necked dread with the fetid, swampy atmospherics of a 1950s EC horror comic.

'Pet Sematary' Review: An Unsettling New Take on a Stephen King Classic

After the marriage, Claire meets Josh and Olivia on a beach outing and makes a startling confession. She initiates it indirectly, by showing them photos that she’s been holding in a safe deposit box. It’s an odd place to keep one’s past, but Claire has very good reason to have hidden hers.

Not only is the beloved matriarch not a Jew, she was herself a member of the Nazi Party in World War II Germany.

Claire, who remains an anti-Semite but nevertheless also continues to insist that she loves her Jewish children, has brain cancer. She wishes to travel out of New York for an assisted suicide. Some of her family members believe her life deserves a different resolution: They’d like to see her make restitution for her deceptions.

This is not a thoroughly polished movie. Its look has a high-end video sheen that, combined with the mostly flat lighting, is somehow more neutral than what the material warrants. The sound mixing is odd, too. There’s a scene in which Olivia speaks to Josh on a cellphone, and he sounds as if he’s standing directly next to her.

Still: the harrowing outlandishness of the dramatic situation is almost sufficient to emotionally concuss the viewer. And the movie is quite accomplished in the most important respects. Its peculiar rhythms, in which certain characters conduct nearly uninterrupted monologues of over 10 minutes, seem entirely deliberate, as does the sometimes plain affect of the performers.

As the impossible Claire, longtime character actor Rebecca Schull (a 90-year-old playing 92) is spectacular. Her character is lucid in her awfulness, and she almost never shuts up, relating endless anecdotes that don’t just force her family to face awful truths, but rub their noses in them. The movie’s finale is both satisfying and shame-inducing about their situation, which is wholly apt.

Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/movies/the-last-review.html" id="f38abfb3-caea-32a3-a121-c6e41e94df4a">The New York Times</a>.

“The Last,” written and directed by Jeff Lipsky, begins on the first day of Rosh Hashana. In a park, a close-knit family performs a prayer ritual. Two characters in their early 30s, Josh (AJ Cedeño) and Olivia (Jill Durso), are soon to be married. Josh is a Modern Orthodox Jew, and Olivia has converted from Catholicism to Judaism. Josh’s father, Harry, is a sardonic agnostic. Claire, Josh’s great-grandmother, stays mostly silent but is clearly full of affection.

'The Last' Review: A Revelation Leaves a Family Shattered

There’s a good deal of water imagery in “Black Mother,” the new film by Khalik Allah. A shot of a waterfall feeding a stream, verdant trees and plants crowding its banks intermittently repeats. Overhead footage shows a foamy tide coming in and going out. Water is life, and “Black Mother” announces itself as an evocation, invocation and chronicle of birth and life. “First trimester,” a female voice says, as Allah holds on a full-frame view of a naked woman, the vivid life of her skin contrasting with the gray wall behind her.

Allah’s previous film, the staggering “Field Niggas” (2015), was shot in Manhattan, homing in on bedraggled drug addicts and mentally ill people on the streets of East Harlem. “Black Mother” was shot in Jamaica (his mother’s native country, where he has spent time over the years), and in its early scenes depicts deprivation and desperation not dissimilar to what his earlier film showed in such disconcerting focus. Here, Allah’s camera is more mobile than before, following streetwalking prostitutes while we hear the sounds of male voices negotiating with them over prices for specific sexual acts.

But the camera soon widens its travels, mixing film and video formats. In transferring the 8- and 16-millimeter footage, some of which he shot as a teenager, Allah makes it appear as if these visuals are being projected slightly out of frame, with sprockets and the bottom frame line visible.

There are also snippets of family life (Allah’s own, we can infer, but the film never explicitly says as much), with a long section devoted to prayer at a memorial service. Another scene shows a pregnant woman getting an ultrasound, and in the section of the film announced as “Birth,” a childbirth is indeed seen.

In its poetic, elliptical, concise way, this film makes a grand statement: The black mother is the mother of life itself. And the gaze directed at the black faces and bodies in “Black Mother” is not a male gaze, or a documentarian’s gaze. It is a gaze of love. You’ll increasingly find this perspective in works like RaMell Ross’ “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” an Oscar-nominated documentary about two young black men in Hale County, Alabama. And it’s something that today’s cinema could use a lot more of.

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/movies/black-mother-review.html" id="8fcb3c0a-fb77-39a5-aa7f-3fbca3666d51">The New York Times</a>.

'Black Mother' Review: Exploring the Roots of Life Itself

“Mapplethorpe,” directed by Ondi Timoner, is a fictionalized biography of the photographer that is most alive when it’s putting its subject’s pictures on the screen, which it does often. And should have done more, because the movie is otherwise as timid as its subject was bold.

Beginning with young Mapplethorpe in uniform as an ROTC cadet at Pratt, it cuts to some “New York City! Wow!” archival footage before the rebellious Robert meets cute with the poet Patti. The alliance between Mapplethorpe and the future rock star Patti Smith was movingly memorialized and mythologized by Smith herself in the 2010 book “Just Kids.” It came as both a surprise, and maybe not so much of one, to be informed in its pages that Smith was the practical one in the relationship. For all that, the art-worshipping duo were fierce nonconformists.

“Mapplethorpe” does something I thought impossible: It makes Smith and Mapplethorpe kind of boring. The scene in which they dance together to a Tim Hardin record could be dropped into the middle of an episode of “This Is Us” and you’d never know the difference. (Patti is played, with a blandness that’s near-hilarious, by Marianne Rendón.)

The movie soon settles into a conventional “and then this happened” structure. Robert expands his sexual parameters, Robert gets a Polaroid camera, Robert meets Sam Wagstaff, who is to become a lover and patron, and so on.

In its respect for Mapplethorpe the artist, or maybe because of something less salutary, the movie hogties itself into passivity, never bothering to turn Robert into any kind of character. Viewers familiar with Mapplethorpe’s work are expected to sit up and say “Foreshadowing!” when Robert asks Sandy Daley, who gives him that Polaroid, “Can I take a picture of your flowers?”

But other than that, the script, by Timoner and Mikko Alanne (adapted from a prior screenplay by Bruce Goodrich), avoids creative extrapolation with respect to Mapplethorpe’s inner life. This gives Matt Smith, in the title role, not a lot to do. The English actor has a physical resemblance to the film’s subject and is clearly both game and able, so that’s a shame.

‘Mapplethorpe’ is not rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/mapplethorpe-review.html" id="1b719c16-9bac-3dd2-a7dc-7464e90ef02e">The New York Times</a>.

The statement Robert Mapplethorpe made with his photographs was practically self-evident. Every one of his pictures says “I think this is beautiful.” But the statement is followed by a question: “Don’t you?” Seen more than one at a time, his images create provocative, often startling juxtapositions. Consider the spadix of a white calla lily emerging from the center of the flower, next to, say, a man’s penis hanging outside the unzipped pants of a suit. Mapplethorpe’s question became one of th...

'Mapplethorpe' Review: A Timid Biopic of a Bold Photographer

At first glance, Jacques Tondelli (Pierre Deladonchamps) seems to enjoy an unmoored, cushy life in early 1990s Paris. And the early 1990s Paris Christophe Honoré evokes in this film looks to be a good place for that.

We are introduced to Jacques alone at an elegant bistro, giving a pleasant but slightly ironical glance at a male-female couple sitting nearby. In his late 30s, he’s dressed stylishly, mostly in blue, a color that suffuses the film, subtly, as has been Honoré's customary light-touch going back to “Dans Paris” (2006) and “Love Songs” (2007). Soon Jacques’ date arrives: a shabbily dressed young hustler. And it clearly amuses the self-assured Jacques to dine with the fellow in such an upscale environment.

Back at his apartment, Jacques commiserates with an older friend, Mathieu (Denis Podalydès). Jacques’ writing is going poorly, his finances are bad. Little to do but hang out and get high with his pal, although steps are taken not to disturb Jacques’ grade-school-age son, Loulou.

As it peels Jacques like an onion, “Sorry Angel” also develops, in a loping, unhurried style, the narrative of a love affair that is never truly allowed to happen.

The romance ignites when Jacques travels to the small French city of Rennes to oversee a production of one of his plays, an endeavor in which he has little interest. Ducking into a movie theater to avoid work, he happens upon the handsome, intellectually ambitious Arthur (Vincent Lacoste), who’s in his early 20s. They arrange a meeting later that night, but Jacques is hijacked by one of the actors from his play.

Arthur follows them stealthily, almost impishly. He overhears their conversation, during which the actor brings up the fact that Jacques has AIDS.

The revelation does not dissuade the smitten Arthur. In previous scenes, we’ve seen him struggling with how he’s been living a lie of sorts. A young man who can’t wholly help his callowness, he keeps around a girlfriend, with whom he’s clearly discontented, and sulkily cruises for men at night. All the while, he acts as if everything he does is exactly what he wants to be doing.

Jacques and Arthur negotiate their immediate attraction through a mutual wariness that comes from different places: “I can’t face a final romance,” Jacques says at one point. They fall into a teacher/student relationship almost comfortably as they do a sexual one; one of the movie’s best scenes is a phone conversation during which Jacques delightedly gives a lesson on gay history and semiotics, with invocations of Walt Whitman and Chester Kallman.

It took a while for this digressive movie to get its hooks in me, but once it did, “Sorry Angel” didn’t let go. A big part of it is Jacques, who in Delandonchamp’s hands is one of the most layered film characters I’ve experienced in some time. Egotistic, mercurial, erudite, recklessly affectionate, careless, vindictive, impulsive, he can turn from exasperating to heartbreaking in seconds flat.

— ‘Sorry Angel’: Not rated. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/movies/sorry-angel-review.html" id="04ca0384-8a50-3cd7-a894-26aa1ff93656">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

'Sorry Angel' Review: A Love Affair Two Men Start, Knowing the End

While the movie could hardly be called mainstream, it’s more conventional than the usual Lucchi-Gianikian work because it’s a singular personal musing rather than a painstakingly researched assemblage.

Its contents are as the title advertises. A camera above a table shows one of Lucchi’s open diaries. Gianikian says, on the soundtrack, “I’ll read from Angela’s diary,” then announces the date of the entry. He reads, and the film cuts to home-video footage from the period discussed, sometimes the exact day, sometimes a little before or after.

The daily life of these peripatetic artists often looks cozy — bourgeois even. There are a lot of boozy dinners with colleagues and comrades that are indistinguishable in most respects from boozy dinners with well-behaved adults who aren’t artists.

Footage they shot on a 1996 trip to Sarajevo is considerably more tense and affecting. The couple’s guides, speaking English, navigate a car through the city, ruined by the ethnic wars of the ‘90s. The sight of modern apartment buildings that were reduced to hollow husks in the long siege is chilling. The guides point out snipers’ perches, and when the visitors venture outside the cars, they have to tread carefully to avoid land mines. A drive to a new border of Bosnia and Croatia ends on an eerie, mysterious, tragic note. There, the filmmakers are greeted by a couple of pylons partially blocking the way forward, one or two parked cars and an atmosphere of stillness topped with confusion and dread. Nothing to do but turn around.

Back home in Milan, after celebrating a retrospective of their work, Lucchi settles into nonfilm projects, creating a scrolling watercolor painting concerning her experiences in Russia and with Russian literature. The pleasures of home and hearth are conveyed in sequences featuring homemade wine and showing Lucchi cultivating her vegetable and fruit garden. She also recounts more harrowing events, including an accident in which Gianikian was severely burned.

As this movie tells it, Lucchi’s life was her work, and her work was an inextricable collaboration with Gianikian. The diaries yield, in this presentation, no uncomfortable intimacies or expressions of doubt regarding any projects. “Angela’s Diaries” asks of the viewer a kind of patience that may only reside in those already conversant with the couple’s contributions, but its tenderness and straightforwardness are immediately admirable.

Not rated. In Italian, English, Armenian, Russian and French, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/movies/angelas-diaries-review.html" id="1e8a8aa1-40ec-3815-a9fa-4d4892dd1412">The New York Times</a>.

From the mid-1970s until 2013, Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian, partners in life and art, forged an analytical cinematic mode in which they critiqued Western practices of war, colonialism, objectification and more. Their work is better known in the art and academic realms than in mainstream cinematic ones. Lucchi died in 2018, and Gianikian assembled this film as a memorial.

'Angela's Diaries' Review: A Tender Journey Through Memory

In this documentary about siblings in a classical music ensemble, one of the girls, then in her early teens, describes herself as “optimistic and happy.” The all-Americanness of the three sisters and two brothers who came to be known as the 5 Browns manifested itself in a variety of ways. Born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and raised in Utah, they were avatars of well-scrubbed cheer and hard work. Home-schooled, each one practiced piano at all hours.

Their professional performances were both novel and impractical, playing five-piano arrangements of canonical classical music. Doing the sort of thing you don’t expect to see done at all, let alone done well, is also, arguably, very all-American.

“The 5 Browns,” directed by Ben Niles and expanding on a short he made two years ago, is subtitled “Digging Through The Darkness.” The Brown sisters — Desirae, Deondra and Melody — were sexually abused by their father, Keith, from girlhood into their teens.

The idea of the siblings performing together as a unit really came about only after a 2000 New York Times article about how all the children were attending Juilliard simultaneously. After the act got underway, Keith Brown became the business manager and put his children on a punishing schedule, keeping up the abuse for much of the time. Once the sisters revealed what was going on to one another, and to their brothers, Gregory and Ryan, there had to be a reckoning.

And so there was, one that led to further trouble, and one inarguably just resolution: Keith Brown is serving a prison sentence. This story is in a sense confounding. I can’t imagine the bitterness of having to deal with one’s vocation and artistic calling being inextricably linked to a monstrous, criminal upbringing. And yet the movie is framed by scenes of the now adult Browns making a new record. For as much as they suffered, music was able to keep them sane, and united.

The director and his editor, Amanda Larson, construct the movie in a fairly conventional way, but leave a single string dangling, which they pull tight to devastating emotional effect near the end. The five Browns are likable, admirable individuals; two of the sisters started the Foundation for Surviving Abuse, an advocacy group, and we see them at work with eloquence and compassion. Their trauma and their subsequent resolve, as depicted here, are also, finally, all-American.

‘The 5 Browns: Digging Through the Darkness’

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/movies/the-5-browns-digging-through-the-darkness-review.html" id="2cc04c42-8cec-3b0f-a349-c68496fbb743">The New York Times</a>.

'The 5 Browns' Review: United by Music and Scarred by Sexual Abuse

This set a template for what followed. In 2007’s “Terror’s Advocate,” about the slick, serpentine, self-aggrandizing lawyer Jacques Vergès (whose client roster included Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal and perhaps even Pol Pot), and in this picture, “The Venerable W.,” about Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk in Myanmar fomenting racial hatred and violence against that country’s Muslim population, Schroeder lets the men sitting for these portraits have their own heads, so to speak.

In both his fiction and documentary work, Schroeder has long illuminated dark corners of human behavior. His best known U.S.-made film is “Reversal of Fortune,” a fictionalized drama about Claus von Bulow and his own slick lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. “The Venerable W.” begins by digging a little into the contradiction of Buddhist hate-mongering. An offscreen Maria de Medeiros, embodying, according to the end credits, a “small Buddhist voice,” explains that the Buddha is human, not a god, then states “The Buddha is often above good and evil, but his words should help us limit the mechanics of evil.”

Wirathu, now 50, became aligned with Myanmar’s nationalist 969 movement in 2001 and has founded, since that movement was banned, a similarly anti-Muslim organization. His brief is that Myanmar’s Muslim population (which he refuses to refer to as Rohingya, which is how the stateless people refer to themselves) represents a mechanics of evil. To Schroeder’s camera and in public preaching, he pursues this theme with relentless insistence while denying he condones violence. But the words he preaches to his followers go well beyond implication. And the violence he inspires, shown in this film in footage culled from phone videos and other immediate media sources, is horrific.

The monk is perhaps the least showy of the subjects of Schroeder’s trilogy. He speaks quietly, although his mouth often twists into an expression of petulant smugness. But in a sense, this is the most terrifying of Schroder’s portraits. Amin, as heinous as he was, was one person, as was Vergès. Wirathu represents an awful idea, one that cannot be banished, and one he propagates with chilling skill. He speaks of “seeing through the intentions of Muslims,” which sounds ridiculous. But then he talks of ISIS beheadings, and how in footage of these atrocities the perpetrators, after completing their work, raise a finger, to signify that there is only one God. He takes factual examples, distorts them, uses them to slander a whole faith and a whole people, and concludes that the Muslim “cannot be lived with.” And people believe, then follow him.

Schroeder’s approach is calm, almost detached, in keeping with his other work (although the choice of de Medeiros to speak for Buddhism, and with a nonspecific Asian-seeming accent at that, struck me as an avoidable misstep); this makes the bleakness of what he recounts (which is buttressed by an insinuatingly menacing score by Jorge Arriagada) that much more resonant.

‘The Venerable W.’ is not rated. In English, French, Spanish and Burmese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/movies/the-venerable-w-review.html" id="df46a85f-3def-3be2-a583-7a0766ab3c39">The New York Times</a>.

“The Venerable W.” completes what its director, Barbet Schroeder, calls a “trilogy of evil.” The subject of the first documentary in this informal series, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada, was such an enthusiastic participant in the project that the 1976 result wound up being titled “General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait.”

'The Venerable W.' Review: A Buddhist Monk Preaches Hate

The latest, “Bumblebee,” is the sixth in the franchise. As directed by Travis Knight, an animator who made his directorial debut with the striking 2016 animated film “Kubo and the Two Strings,” “Bumblebee” is cleverly plotted, neatly allusive and has dialogue you can envision real people and, um, real Transformers speaking. The screenplay is by Christina Hodson, whose most recent other writing credit is on the bonkers, rather forgettable thriller “Unforgettable.” Which just goes to prove you shouldn’t base all of your expectations on previous credits.

“Bumblebee” is an origin story, and it begins on Cybertron, the realm of the Transformers, where we witness a decisive battle between the car-morphing Autobots and their sworn enemies, the Decepticons. If I were to lay out the whole “Transformers” mythos here, I’d exhaust my word count, so: Autobot B-127 gets shot off to Northern California of 1987; the fireball in which he descends makes a bit of a latter-day Captain Ahab out of an Army dude played by John Cena; and a Decepticon pursuing B-127 rips out the good guy’s robot voice box and pounds him until he loses his memory, and his sense of purpose.

After which the Autobot warrior turns into a Volkswagen Beetle.

Which is adopted by a feisty teenager, Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), who christens the car Bumblebee. The two form an affinity not unlike the one we saw between Elliott and the alien in “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.” (That film’s director, Steven Spielberg, is an executive producer of this film and the whole franchise.)

With nods to “The Thing From Another World” and even “Dr. Strangelove,” along with a Smiths-heavy, “I Love the ‘80s” soundtrack, this movie is playing on a different field than previous “Transformers” pictures, which have generally bludgeoned viewers with chaos-cinema cutting and CGI sound and fury.

But there’s a lot to like here, particularly Steinfeld’s performance. Charlie, a one-time high school diving champion who’s been emotionally sidelined by her father’s death, is the most appealing, maybe the only appealing, main human character this franchise has yet offered.

Of course the film also has oodles of robot-pummeling action, car chases and explosions and such. But the all-animated prologue on Cybertron sets the tone: it’s springy yet coherent, not, like previous films in the series, a digital-image blender set on high.

I attended a paid preview screening of “Bumblebee,” which meant I watched it with other paying filmgoers in my Brooklyn neighborhood, and the crowd seemed to have a great time. On the way out, and I swear I am not making this up, one of my fellow civilians proclaimed, “That was definitely better than Michael Bay,” invoking, of course, the very energetic director of the five very frenetic “Transformers” movies that preceded this one.

‘Bumblebee’ is rated PG-13 for robot-pummeling and mild teen angst with its attendant language. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/movies/bumblebee-review.html" id="c563a831-d826-3b04-a492-3e44265e59a6">The New York Times</a>.

Can a “Transformers” movie be good? It turns out the answer is yes — if the right talent is given enough leeway.

'Bumblebee' Review: Amid Lots of Metal, a Little Bit of Heart

Here, Moxy, the most cheerful doll in Uglyville, wakes each morning just knowing there’s a child for her in “the big world.” Moxy and some of her misfit pals set out to find said big world, only to be obstructed by the Institute of Perfection, a land of pretty dolls presided over by a pert-nosed, golden-haired paragon, creatively named Lou. He and some mean-girl dolls in his thrall will stop at nothing to thwart Moxy and her dream.

These characters are voiced by some of the most prominent names in pop music: Kelly Clarkson, Janelle Monáe, Blake Shelton, Charli XCX, Pitbull and Nick Jonas, to name but a few. Comic talents such as Wanda Sykes and Gabriel Iglesias also feature. Yet every aspect of this computer-animated movie directed by Kelly Asbury seems equally overdetermined and tossed-off, as if it were a caffeinated weekend project for everyone involved.

The neon colors bring to mind what a “Candy Crush” movie might look like, while the never-ending songs are cute, flavorless paeans to self-love. Individual scenes evoking “The Lego Movie” and “Toy Story 3” feel like lifts rather than homages, and are blatant to the extent that your older kids might even notice.

‘UglyDolls’

Rated PG. Edgy as a box of Peeps. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="51cb52c8-b5a4-35f4-a27b-d52cb12b2bef" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/movies/uglydolls-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

Adults who regularly buy children’s gifts will recognize the denizens of the movie “UglyDolls,” the plush toys of the same name. Milder in design than old-school troll dolls, these figures have a message: Idiosyncrasies of appearance and personality are not “ugly,” but rather emblems of awesome individuality. The relentless positivity of this fable is put across with such bounce-house energy that children in the audience may be bludgeoned into submission instantly. (It made this adult’s teeth...

'UglyDolls' review: Stay ugly, friends

Working with writer Len Blum, director Ron Mann (“Comic Book Confidential”) sets the action over the course of a week in the life of the shop, giving the owner, his co-workers and various visitors (some famed in the world of music, others not) opportunities to talk craft and to philosophize about the values of community the shop embodies. While this approach yields results that are sometimes a little stilted, the movie is mostly as sweet as it is informative.

Although one of the many luminaries in pictures on the wall of Kelly’s shop is Les Paul, the design Kelly favors for his own guitars derives from Leo Fender, specifically his spartan Telecaster. “Hard to beat a Tele,” guitar giant Bill Frisell quietly enthuses as he prepares to play a Kelly design. Frisell’s subsequent rendition of “Surfer Girl” is persuasive.

Kelly is shown quietly working with his friend and apprentice Cindy Hulej, who enhances Kelly’s designs with wood-burned art — she’s the one who places the McSorley’s logo on Kelly’s ale house-plank instrument. Midweek, Hulej sees that the building next door is up for sale. Soon after, a friendly real estate agent stops by to inquire about Kelly’s space. In a film full of pleasant harmonies, a note of dread comes in.

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="946e17a5-57f2-4c21-8081-9ab7f3fa42e1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/movies/carmine-street-guitars-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Carmine Street Guitars': A tug at the heartstrings

(Critic's Pick): Carmine Street Guitars, in its current Greenwich Village location since 1990, is one of the jewels of a fast-dissolving bohemian Manhattan. Rick Kelly, its proprietor and luthier, makes his electric guitars from resonant wood he’s snatched from older buildings around town. Several scenes in this warm and affectionate documentary depict him realizing a long-held dream: that of carving an ax out of a plank from McSorley’s Ale House.

But it more than works out with “The Burial of Kojo,” written, directed and scored by Blitz Bazawule, a Ghana-born musician now based in New York who traveled back to his birth country to make this dazzling modern fable.

The movie opens with a simple, striking shot, that of a Volkswagen Beetle on a beach, burning as the tide laps its tires. The film’s narrator, Esi, speaking in English (the dialogue itself is mostly in Twi), talks of her father, and of a “dream that is not a dream.” She guides the viewer over a village built on water, with wooden stilts holding up the houses. She says that her birth “was supposed to bring prosperity and good fortune to my family.”

“The Burial of Kojo” shows Esi as a child — played with an impressive quietude by Cynthia Dankwa — trying to live up to expectations. The action around her is enigmatic and fraught with mysticism.

She is entrusted, by a blind old man, with the care of an ostensibly sacred white bird. But at night she dreams of a crow, or rather, a man in a crow costume, first seen upside-down. These ancient symbolic elements are contrasted with a blurry telenovela (created especially for this film) that Esi sometimes watches idly with her mother, whose presence in the family is irregular.

The loose narrative becomes tighter when Esi’s uncle enters the family’s life and tries to tempt her father with a get-rich-quick scheme. The brothers look with disdain and fear at Chinese businessmen and laborers now exploiting the underground riches of their land. But that’s about the only thing that the brothers see eye-to-eye on.

The movie thrives on the juxtaposition of timeless and modern imagery — the burning car on the shore, a real crow perched on a cellphone tower and more. The frames are often suffused with monochromatic light, washing the characters in red or purple. And while overhead drone shots are becoming a too-easy convention in contemporary film, their use here is refreshingly different, capturing almost surrealistically colorful landscapes.

The family-conflict storyline brings to mind Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger.” The director loves the faces of his actors as much as documentarian Khalik Allah (“Black Mother”) loves the faces of his subjects. And the movie’s bold colors sometimes recall those of African visionary Djibril Diop Mambéty (“Touki Bouki”).

But these are more affinities than echoes. Bazawule has a cinematic voice of his own, one with a very direct relation to musical rhythm. The way he will establish a view with one shot and then cut into a tighter view of the same shot has the poise of a great dance move. The movie’s rare but crucial instances of violence have a heart-skipping impact achieved through a perfect meshing of staging and editing.

The cutting is complemented by the music, which has flavors of Afrobeat and hip-hop but also more conventional cinema scoring. “The Burial of Kojo” is a near-virtuoso work, a feast of emotion, nuance and beauty, and a startling feature directing debut.

Not rated. In English and Twi, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="d3c6bdcd-df09-4233-89ef-46e35a50b908" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/movies/the-burial-of-kojo-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'The Burial of Kojo' review: A dazzling modern fable

(Critic’s Pick): When musicians turn to film directing, it doesn’t always work out. Ask anyone who’s seen Bob Dylan’s nearly-five-hour musical romance “Renaldo and Clara” (although that oddity does have its wary admirers).

Her character, Irisz Leiter, gazes at many grand and grave things in this film set in 1913 Budapest. It’s the second feature from director Laszlo Nemes. And as in his first film, the scarily accomplished and provocative “Son of Saul” (2015), which took place in a German death camp (and which Jakab also acted in), the camera most frequently follows its lead character around from behind. These shots are the longest, and they are always elaborately choreographed; the reverse angle reaction shots are mostly static. It’s the cinematic equivalent of what fiction writers call close third-person: not entirely subjective, but substantively immersive.

That style applied to the endless horrors depicted in “Son of Saul” made it sometimes unbearable to watch, which was the point. Here, the technique is applied to an allegory of nearly suffocating self-seriousness, to much less powerful effect. (The screenplay is by Nemes along with Clara Royer and Matthieu Taponier.)

Irisz is the daughter of the founders of Leiter, a high-end millinery. But she never knew her parents; the store had burned down years before, and the girl was raised in an orphanage. Now an adult, she goes to the store seeking a job.

Oszkar Brill (Vlad Ivanov), the new owner who revived the store’s fortunes after tragedy, rebuffs her gently but firmly, sending her to spend the night in the seedy house where other store employees live. Before her first night is through, she’ll hear of a brother she never knew she had. He is described to her as a radical, a killer, a mystery man who has not been seen publicly in years. She is told not to seek him out, so of course she does. She finds him at the end of a tram line, in a compound full of hostile, angry men. As happened at Leiter, she is told this is not a place for her, and the warning is not hollow.

Irisz is advised not to do something and then does it anyway so frequently in this film that it almost generates dark comedy. But no humor is intended here. And while Nemes’s near-subjective technique can generate genuine tension, it more often yields anxious tedium. In one scene, a character walks away from Irisz to speak to someone about 30 feet away, and he goes out of focus. The shot holds as the man speaks to the other person. He then walks back to Irisz — that’s 10 seconds there — and in so doing comes back into focus. He tells Irisz what he was just told. This is, in part, why the movie is a good chunk over two hours.

The final shot, taking place some time after the main action, seeks a character rather than follows one and is shamelessly on the nose in the allegory department.

—

“Sunset’ is rated R for themes and violence. In Hungarian and German, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 22 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="48e8760d-c67c-4717-a04f-905915062a9e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/movies/sunset-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Sunset' review: Discovering a dark past and a cataclysmic future

Juli Jakab, the star of “Sunset,” has remarkable eyes. The way she holds a gaze suggests not just defiance but potentially supernatural powers of perception.

<h1>The documentary “Apollo 11,” directed and edited by Todd Douglas Miller, is entirely awe-inspiring. Which is something of a surprise. As world events of the 20th century go, Apollo 11, the NASA mission of 1969 that put two men on the moon, has been thoroughly documented. </h1>

It’s also been fictionally dissected, most recently by Damien Chazelle, whose 2018 film, “First Man,” is a portrait of Neil Armstrong, the mission’s commander and, yes, the first man to walk on the moon. In addition to chronicling that triumph, that film examines Armstrong’s emotional reticence.

Miller’s documentary indirectly points out why such a quality is valued in astronauts. Beginning with the shots of a crawler-transporter hauling the Saturn V rocket to the Cape Canaveral launch pad, and Walter Cronkite’s newscast oratory providing the only overt narrative setup the movie will avail itself of, “Apollo 11” dispassionately lays out just how many things needed to go exactly right for this mission to be accomplished. And as many of the things that could possibly go wrong, the movie also implies that it’s only giving you the tip of the iceberg in that respect.

The film consists primarily of newly discovered archival footage, some of which has never been seen before in a film. But Miller doesn’t rely entirely on it. He uses simple but effective white-on-black graphics, graphic animations and, occasionally, footage set up in split-screen to highlight particularly harrowing maneuvers, to convey the complications of the actions the Apollo 11 crew had to so precisely execute. The effect is nearly mind-boggling. On the return-to-earth leg of the journey the crew cuts loose a little more, listening to a weightless cassette player from which emits the folk-country tune “Mother Country” by John Stewart.

Recordings from Houston’s mission control track key moments, including the heart rates of Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins at crucial junctures during the eight-day mission. At launch, according to the flight surgeon’s report, Armstrong’s heart rate is up to 110 beats per minute. Collins’ is at 99, while Aldrin, cool as a cucumber, has a rate of 88.

“First Man” reminded viewers of the complex physical and emotional challenges that come from work as an astronaut. And “Apollo 11” further demonstrates that hardly anyone but an aerospace engineer and a voluminous support team can get close to doing the math required for this endeavor.

For all that, “Apollo 11” is not entirely devoid of romance. Although we know how the mission turns out, the movie generates and maintains suspense. And it rekindles a crazy sense of wonder at, among other things, what one can do practically with trigonometry.

‘Apollo 11’ is rated G. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="1f0896ae-41a9-494f-bf54-c044b0cb7ad7" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/movies/apollo-11-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Apollo 11' review: The 1969 moon mission still has the power to thrill

Miller’s documentary indirectly points out why such a quality is valued in astronauts.

<h1>If you want to see a clever actor having a great time, watch Jake Gyllenhaal in the opening minutes of “Velvet Buzzsaw.”</h1>

He plays Morf Vendewalt — just one of several eyebrow-raising character names — an intimidatingly influential and improbably affluent art critic, in his element as he half-strides, half-minces his way through an exhibition hall at Art Basel Miami Beach. He trades his designer shades for boldly framed eyeglasses, turns his gimlet eye on various sculptures and paintings and drops depth-charged bons mots.

Writer-director Dan Gilroy makes the film’s contempt for the contemporary art world crystal clear from the outset, but puts Morf in an interesting position: As insufferable and pompous as he is, he has his own can’t-be-bought integrity.

He also has ambition, and is quick to exercise it. When Josephina (Zawe Ashton), the humiliated protégée of a powerful gallery owner, discovers a cache of striking “outsider art” in the apartment of a dead neighbor, she enlists Morf, now her lover, to be the artist’s biographer.

It’s here that “Velvet Buzzsaw” itself morphs. Initially a sour satire, it starts to play as if it were an expanded vignette from one of those ‘70s British horror anthology films like “Asylum” and “Tales That Witness Madness.”

Artwork turns murderous: As the grim back story of the neighbor comes to light (he killed a man! he painted with his own blood!), people pushing his work start meeting nasty deaths. Unfazed is the powerhouse dealer Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo) — see what I mean about those character names? — who imperiously stage-manages the buzz as bodies pile up.

I found the horror stylings of the movie pleasantly old-school — oh no! a painting’s wild animals are moving, and they’re coming for you! — but I wonder whether they’ll satisfy contemporary “Saw"-crazy audiences. Gilroy’s pacing is adept, and the movie creates a what-will-happen-next tension, even as he continues to lather bile on his target.

Gyllenhaal and Russo also starred in Gilroy’s 2014 directorial debut, “Nightcrawler,” an elaborate condemnation of broadcast journalism that played like an overheated cross between “Network” and “Taxi Driver.” Paparazzi and contemporary art are two topics apt to bring out sneers from Hollywood types who consider themselves too refined and clued in to be, well, Hollywood types. Nevertheless, a lecture on how the art world needs to disconnect itself from profit motive coming from a filmmaker who co-wrote “Kong: Skull Island” is pretty rich.

Still, the confident storytelling and the bravura acting — Daveed Diggs, Toni Collette and John Malkovich contribute compelling caricatures — carry “Buzzsaw” all the way home. By the end of the picture Gyllenhaal has given us something we rarely see in movies: a credible portrait of a pretentious person’s nervous breakdown.

Also, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that a couple of Gilroy’s jibes do stick their landings; one sequence in which a real corpse is mistaken for an art installation has a zing that Ruben Ostlund’s vinegary 2017 “The Square” never got within a mile of.

“Velvet Buzzsaw” is rated R for grisly art world death and language. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b48945c6-bbcb-48e3-9056-fa1d78567370" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/movies/velvet-buzzsaw-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Velvet Buzzsaw' review: Art snobs get a gory comeuppance

Writer-director Dan Gilroy makes the film’s contempt for the contemporary art world crystal clear from the outset, but puts Morf in an interesting position: As insufferable and pompous as he is, he has his own can’t-be-bought integrity.

Glenn Kenny

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'Angela's Diaries' Review: A Tender Journey Through Memory

'The 5 Browns' Review: United by Music and Scarred by Sexual Abuse

'The Venerable W.' Review: A Buddhist Monk Preaches Hate

'Bumblebee' Review: Amid Lots of Metal, a Little Bit of Heart

'UglyDolls' review: Stay ugly, friends

'Carmine Street Guitars': A tug at the heartstrings

'The Burial of Kojo' review: A dazzling modern fable

'Sunset' review: Discovering a dark past and a cataclysmic future

'Apollo 11' review: The 1969 moon mission still has the power to thrill

'Velvet Buzzsaw' review: Art snobs get a gory comeuppance