Jeannette Catsoulis

Only animals, the film suggests, can resist the killer’s allure, as we watch a whimpering dog back away when Bundy and Liz visit the pound. Even the judge in his televised 1979 murder trial (played, delightfully, by John Malkovich) seems as spellbound as the gallery filled with fluttering young women.

“Bless your heart,” he remarks to the showboating defendant, complimenting his legal skills and passively tolerating Bundy’s impromptu marriage proposal to one of the witnesses.

Scenes like these strike an unfortunate comedic note that undercuts the seriousness of Berlinger’s point: that devils may come disguised as angels. In documentaries like his stunning “Paradise Lost” trilogy, he has repeatedly interrogated our flawed ability to accurately identify monsters, chipping away at our biases to expose their fragility. Yet while Bundy’s well-documented charisma is on full blast here, we only fleetingly feel its chill. And by leaving most of his heinous acts off screen, Berlinger (who also has a Bundy documentary, “Conversations With a Killer,” on Netflix) is apparently relying on unwitting audiences being as devastated by his guilt as poor Liz.

All this makes for a very odd picture, one that purports to care about the women Bundy duped — including Carole Ann Boone (Kaya Scodelario), who married him and had his daughter — while simultaneously marveling at their gullibility. Efron’s smoothly manipulative performance makes a mockery of their devotion, so much so that at times the movie appears less about the psychology of a specific sociopath than a general comment on women who shield such men and even hanker after them.

This longing to touch the flame and tame the dragon could have made for a fascinating thread in the familiar serial-killer narrative, but “Extremely Wicked” (the title comes from the judge’s characterization of Bundy’s crimes) is too unfocused and lacking in imagination to pick it up. Early scenes detailing Liz and Bundy’s 1969 meeting and happy homemaking with her small daughter are followed by years of arrests, escapes and multistate charges for his still-unseen crimes. The final third leaves Liz to her drinking and depression as the movie transforms into a courtroom procedural and a showcase for Bundy’s strutting self-confidence.

Blurring documentary and drama with the overused tic of playing real-life footage over the end credits, Berlinger still leaves Bundy no more than a slick enigma. It’s the same problem that dogged the director’s excessively flattering 2016 portrait of motivational speaker Tony Robbins: at a certain point, we realize that Berlinger might simply be unable or unwilling to look beyond the dazzle.

‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’

Rated R for a lot less violence than you’d expect from a serial-killer movie. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/movies/extremely-wicked-shockingly-evil-and-vile-review.html" id="4e020ee0-e854-39b5-accc-9d95cbe1279f">The New York Times</a>.

Leaning into his hotness with surprising dexterity, Zac Efron plays the notoriously charming serial killer Ted Bundy like someone who has always understood how to weaponize a pretty face. So the problem with the biopic “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” isn’t Efron (or that cumbersome title), but his director, Joe Berlinger. Working ostensibly from the viewpoint of Bundy’s longtime girlfriend, Liz Kendall (an excellent Lily Collins), Berlinger never fully commits. Instead, he appear...

'Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile' Review: Killing Me Softly

“Fast Color” is many things — a dreamlike dystopian drama; a warm celebration of family and female power; a teasing hint of superhero-origin story — none of which fully explains its gentle grip on our attention. What it is not, is speedy, with a narrative that moves carefully, even languidly, and visuals so beautifully patient that we have time to memorize their texture and import. Special effects are all the more so for being used sparingly, and the movie’s few characters feel no need to be constantly explaining themselves. For fairly long stretches, there are no major incidents — which is not the same as saying that nothing happens.

Set in a near-future America parched and wilting from eight years of drought, the movie drops us into a car beside an anxiously fleeing Ruth (a perfectly fraught Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a recovering addict whose sudden seizures can ignite earthquakes. The vibrations alert the G-men on her trail, drawing them too late to the dingy motel where she had stopped to rest and dress the mysterious wounds on her wrists. Her destination is a remote farmhouse where her mother, Bo (Lorraine Toussaint, wonderful) is caring for Ruth’s small daughter, Lila (Saniyya Sidney), who barely remembers her.

All three can see the colors suggested by the title, though their rainbow-hued significance remains shrouded, and all three can use their minds to disintegrate objects then restore them, good as new. (The utility of this becomes clear later, underscoring the movie’s pacifist message.) These uncanny abilities, which Ruth has struggled to control and Lila is refining at a rapid pace, have been passed down for generations and kept the family in seclusion. Feared and hunted by the authorities, the women are shielded only by a kindly local sheriff (David Strathairn) whose investment in their safety is clearly personal.

Moody and strange, “Fast Color” has a solemnity that haunts almost every frame. Shot in New Mexico, Michael Fimognari’s images are wide and graceful, with skies that stretch the edges of the screen and desert landscapes of deep, sweeping barrenness. The movie’s visual boldness is fine compensation for the occasional patches of weak dialogue and rudimentary plotting, the finesse of the camera work a constant pleasure. When Bo pulverizes a lighted cigarette into a smoky swirl of glowing tobacco flakes before delicately reassembling them, the sight is entrancingly magical, its simplicity in keeping with Rob Simonsen’s perfectly calibrated score.

A small, intimate story that hints at much bigger things, “Fast Color” sometimes feels like a prologue, an appetizer for a meal that may or may not appear. The screenplay (by director Julia Hart and her husband, Jordan Horowitz) is unfussy and focused, its gentle ecological warnings woven through a modest tale of familial destiny. Rewarding despite its restraint, the movie has an elasticity that pushes the imagination in any number of directions, offering an expressive allegory for a lineage of powerful black women whose strength, unleashed, could literally shake the earth.

“This is only the beginning,” Bo promises. I hope so.

Rated PG-13 for a handful of weapons and a few strong words. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/movies/fast-color-review.html" id="782907e4-a5f5-3447-ac2f-1d4b9e13e41c">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

Pursued In a Wilted America

Buoyed by a movie lover’s wish list of warmly familiar female faces, “Diane,” the remarkable new film from writer and director Kent Jones, is in part a meditation on dying that feels wondrously alive.

Set in rural Massachusetts (and filmed in New York), the story opens in a hospital where Diane (an astonishing Mary Kay Place) is visiting her terminally ill cousin, Donna (Deirdre O’Connell). Later, she’ll check in on a convalescing neighbor, schlep clean laundry to her adult son, Brian (Jake Lacy, excellent), and, over a meal, respond sympathetically to the familiar gripes of her longtime friend Bobbie (Andrea Martin). By the time we see her volunteer at a soup kitchen, we feel we already know who this woman is.

In a series of carefully constructed scenes, Jones lays out a life of selfless service, of days defined by casseroles and concern. Yet Diane seems to derive little happiness from these ceaseless activities, her weary features suggesting a private hurt eased only by constant motion. It’s there when she flinches before Brian’s anger at her intervention in his latest tumble down the 12 steps; when she’s gripped, momentarily, by the sight of an old man saying grace in the soup kitchen; and when she listens to Donna’s mother (the great Estelle Parsons) talk briskly about loss and regret.

Past indiscretions haunt Diane, and this movie, and the glory of Place’s performance — and that of her co-stars — is how barely these need to be verbalized. Emotions play across faces weathered by age and bonded by long experience, and the wonder is that a story this threaded with sickness and decline is neither tedious nor depressing. Each scene has its own specific energy and tone, conjured by a happy congruence of skillfully vivid acting, naturalistic conversations and a cinematographer, Wyatt Garfield, with a clear grasp of mood. Whether lingering on the candlelit faces of diners during a blackout, or watching calmly as Diane dances, drunkenly, alone in a bar, his camera feels completely in tune with his director’s intent.

Filled with wintry roads and sensible clothing, “Diane” plays out at bedsides and in kitchens where women cheer one another with stories and memories. This is Jones’ first narrative film, and he explains in the press notes that his aim was to make a picture about his great-aunts, a feisty, close-knit group who dominated family gatherings. It makes sense, then, that Brian is the only male character who really registers: Other men mostly come and go in the background.

In the context of the modern multiplex, “Diane” amounts to an act of cinematic bravery, not just in its choice of tough-sell material, but in the patience with which Jones tends it. Parts of his story don’t quite work (especially Brian’s extreme spiritual awakening), but by examining a life from the angle of its final destination, the movie offers a rich and tender study of a woman hollowed out by remorse. For Diane, the past, far from being a foreign country, is where she has lived for a very long time.

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/movies/diane-review.html" id="da49bf21-ea1f-3dab-a293-3d3b835c046d">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

'Diane' Review: A Vibrant Tale of Love, Sisterhood and Decline

With bone-chilling explicitness, the director Nancy Schwartzman lays out exactly what happened to “that girl” at the hands of high school football stars in Steubenville, Ohio, in 2012. Picking at the scab of respectability, she reveals a football-crazed culture of misogyny and entitlement that resulted in the brutal abuse of an unwary teenager too inebriated to recall her ordeal. Fortunately, the cellphones and social-media accounts of her attackers and their friends would remember for her.

Assembling these repugnant posts and videos (cannily captured and published at the time by the industrious crime blogger and interviewee Alexandria Goddard) into a timeline of casual depravity, Schwartzman deepens her dive and widens her reach. What emerges is an infuriating portrait of sports-mad solidarity and victim-blaming that would eventually attract worldwide attention and prompt the investigative reporter Rachel Dissell to wonder if Steubenville was “putting its daughters at risk by protecting its sons.”

A tough but essential watch, “Roll Red Roll” documents how a sexual assault in a declining Appalachian town became an international cause célèbre. Shots of near-empty streets and an abandoned steel mill provide a melancholy frame for behavior that seems horrifyingly incomprehensible.

“I can’t wait for this story to go away,” an unseen radio jock says near the end. Now that part I understand.

‘Roll Red Roll’ is not rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/movies/roll-red-roll-review.html" id="4e719488-2303-357c-a8bd-c36780fa7b15">The New York Times</a>.

“What did they do with that girl?,” an unseen male asks as the peaceful opening shots of the documentary “Roll Red Roll” reveal a quiet, darkening street lined with tidy family homes. The skin-crawling audio continues, others now joining a conversation pocked with callousness and nervous giggles: “She is so raped right now.”

'Roll Red Roll' Review: A Horrifying Assault in a Small Ohio Town

Cutting repeatedly between the play and a rowdy drag show at a thriving gay bar, directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher underscore the parallels in the pageantry. The exuberant drag artists applying their war paint share common showbiz purpose with the actor playing Jesus, smearing himself with fake blood (“It’s edible!”) and proudly displaying the prop room’s selection of whips. Like his queer counterparts across town, his lip-syncing is flawless.

Buffing difference into sameness is the movie’s modus operandi. Helped by a homespun narration and good-natured interviews, the filmmakers lock down a “no rancor here” tone that vigorously asserts itself at every turn. Discord over an anti-discrimination ordinance simmers quietly in the background, and a resident recalls his mother explaining his father’s late-life coming-out as submission to “a sexual disease,” but nothing is permitted to rankle the optimism. A truck driver grumping about permissiveness appears like a humorous aside, and an archive clip of a protester smashing a pie into the face of the anti-gay activist Anita Bryant transforms intolerance into slapstick.

Favoring the superficial over the substantive, “The Gospel of Eureka” keeps skirting opportunities to excavate experience — like, say, prodding longtime gay residents about how the town navigated the AIDS crisis. It is an odd duck on a Bible Belt pond: serene on the surface, but churning underneath.

‘The Gospel of Eureka’

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/movies/the-gospel-of-eureka-review.html" id="c106c256-dd32-3ec9-a88b-b074ea1ee971">The New York Times</a>.

“The Gospel of Eureka” is only 75 minutes long, yet feels much longer. That is partly because this cheery documentary — about the uneasy alignment of LGBT life and avid Christianity in the town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas — refuses to grapple with its glaring contradictions. Mostly, though, it is because of the inordinate amount of screen time surrendered to a tiresome Passion play extravaganza. Watching people watch a stage is just lazy filmmaking, no matter how many donkeys, doves and bleat...

'The Gospel of Eureka' Review: Christianity and Queerness Intersect in a Small Town

After multiple, humiliating rush-week rejections, Justin (an excellent Zachery Byrd), David (Zachary Weiner, who also wrote the script) and Ethan (Phillip Andre Botello) are approached by a slinky coed (Erica Boozer) who invites them to a mysterious off-campus mansion. A night of wild partying with half-dressed honeys and a slew of sexual and pharmaceutical favors persuades our grateful geeks to return for an initiation ceremony. You do not have to be an Eli Roth fan to see where this is going.

Shooting mostly indoors and at night, cinematographer William Babcock conjures lighting that you would typically find in more expensive features, adding a baleful glaze that distracts from the story’s soft spots. An economical, 78-minute running time keeps the gore and sadism at manageable levels, and a fishhook ending hammers home the movie’s “What price brotherhood?” theme.

Easing smoothly from light comedy to sweaty terror, the three leads strive to transcend their beta personas. Their cultlike adversaries, on the other hand, rarely breach toxic-rich-kid stereotypes: obsessively groomed, suit-wearing martinets with perfect bone structure and an affinity for branding irons. Their recipe for rat soup, though, is a keeper.

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 18 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/movies/pledge-review.html" id="c7a00986-aaa7-349b-a40c-536824c400bc">The New York Times</a>.

If you like your torture movies tight, twisty and decently executed, then “Pledge” is for you. There is nothing particularly innovative about its systematic abuse of three nerdy college freshmen seeking membership in any fraternity that will have them. But the director, Daniel Robbins, is willing to move beyond the tease of his setup to deliver a ringing indictment of popularity as the cheese in a deadly mousetrap.

'Pledge' Review: Don't Haze Me Because I'm Different

What sets “Rust Creek” apart from most of its genre predecessors, though, is that its director, screenwriter and cinematographer are all women. Sadly (or happily, depending on your viewpoint), this hasn’t made an appreciable difference to the broadly familiar beats of Julie Lipson’s screenplay, even if Jen McGowan’s direction is as attentive to stasis as action. Midway through the movie, when the lead character, a Kentucky college student named Sawyer (Hermione Corfield), finds herself trapped in a trailer with Lowell (Jay Paulson), a hinky meth cook, her slow transition from suspicion to trust is accomplished with near-subliminal sensitivity.

The sequence, and the uneasy alliance it forges, is the most compelling feature of a plot that could easily have graced a couple of episodes of Graham Yost’s chewy 2010-2015 television series, “Justified” (also set in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky). When Sawyer is stranded on a side road en route to a job interview in Washington, D.C., the arrival of two gun-toting yahoos is no surprise. More unanticipated is Sawyer’s response to their twitchy offer of a bed for the night: Neutralizing both the skeevy Hollister (Micah Hauptman) and burly Buck (Daniel R. Hill), she legs it into the woods.

And that’s the first problem: Sawyer is so resourceful that we never fear for her. A gaping knife wound in her thigh fails to slow her roll until she’s out of immediate danger. Later, she devises an escape from bondage using lye and some barely credible contortions. Though slight of build, she’s a match for every lunk in her path, to the point where I fully expected her to show up at state Police Headquarters with her remaining adversaries trussed like turkeys.

Well-acted and technically sound (Michelle Lawler’s photography is clean and clear), “Rust Creek” falters with superficial characterizations and a cliché sheriff (Sean O’Bryan) who’s as incompetent as he’s crooked. Corfield is fine in a role that gives her little opportunity to do more than run and fight, but a woman this empowered removes the question mark from her survival — and the tension from the movie.

—

Rust Creek is rated R for a face full of lye, a zing of bullets and a meth-cooking demo. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/movies/rust-creek-review.html" id="7de1cc29-0f33-3c40-a332-ac97e3ab6151">The New York Times</a>.

When horror movies head for the woods, their titles may vary — “I Spit on Your Grave,” “Wolf Creek” — but their central dynamic is too often the same: At some point, an attractively trembling woman will be forced to run like the dickens from a yokel who butchers his own meat.

'Rust Creek' Review: A Woman Is Stranded in the Backwoods of Kentucky. What Could Go Wrong?

One of these is Brazilian animator Guy Charnaux’s aggressively simple “Business Meeting,” which works perfectly as a sendup of last year’s infamous Cabinet meeting when President Donald Trump’s underlings lavished praise on him for the cameras. Sticking a dagger in conformity in under two minutes, this sharp, peremptory film turns the tension between its loose, surreal line drawings and rigidly uniform dialogue into zany fun.

Equally provocative is “Grands Canons,” a stop-motion animation by French artist Alain Biet, who bombards us with thousands of his startlingly precise watercolor drawings of everyday items and gadgets. At once dazzling and disorienting, this frenetic montage prompts us to pay more attention to the deluge of objects we’ve ushered into our lives.

A sadder, more confessional mood is evoked by the fascinating German short “Carlotta’s Face,” in which an artist with prosopagnosia — also known as face-blindness — describes the challenges of living without the ability to recognize faces, including her own. Working from the first-person account and self-portraits of the artist herself, directors Valentin Riedl (who is also a neuroscientist) and Frédéric Schuld deftly communicate a journey from confusion and isolation to artistic consolation.

Also from Germany, Veronica Solomon’s wonderfully original and weirdly hypnotic “Love Me, Fear Me” is a stop-motion claymation toying with themes of transformation and pandering. As a shape-shifting, gender-switching performer gyrates across a stage in a desperate dance for the approval of an unseen audience — whose applause or tense murmurs direct each mutation — the movie’s ominous tone is a welcome departure from the cautious inoffensiveness of much of the program.

Again hewing to the darker side, Dutch animator Jorn Leeuwerink’s deceptively childlike “Flower Found!” creates an allusive pastel nightmare of mistaken identity and mob injustice. Digitally animated on painted watercolor backgrounds, the story follows an anxious mouse who learns that enlisting a search party of woodland creatures to find his stolen blossom might not have been the best idea.

Not all the films are content with suggestion or subtlety. In the overly literal and soggily sentimental “One Small Step” — one of three here on the Oscar shortlist — a Chinese-American shoemaker selflessly supports his daughter’s dream of becoming an astronaut. And in another Oscar hopeful, John Kahrs’ “Age of Sail,” a near-suicidal sailboat captain (voiced by Ian McShane) finds renewed hope when he rescues a feisty teenage girl who has fallen from a steamboat. Set in the North Atlantic in 1900 and clocking in at a hair over 12 minutes, the movie features precise artwork that ultimately can’t sustain a story that feels at least six minutes too long.

By contrast, the gorgeously hand-drawn “Weekends,” by Canadian filmmaker Trevor Jimenez (the third Oscar finalist), fully earns its 15-minutes-and-change running time. Set in 1980s Toronto and based on the director’s personal memories, this gently touching story of a domestic breakup is seen through the eyes of the confused little boy at its center. As the child shuttles between two wildly different parents, the soft and poignantly detailed art marks time in passing seasons and the child’s chaotic dreams. Hints of male violence and female pain flutter between the lines; nothing is spoken or spelled out, and yet everything is right there.

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/movies/the-20th-annual-animation-show-of-shows-review.html" id="53c9a810-b59c-3bbc-a542-0a7a0887b0a0">The New York Times</a>.

In my view, at least, the best short-form animation — like the most memorable short stories — is daring in perspective and malleable in interpretation. And while the 15 short films on view in “The 20th Annual Animation Show of Shows” are mostly charming and invariably well-executed, only a handful push outside their carefully drawn lines.

'The 20th Annual Animation Show of Shows' Review: A Charming, Safe Collection

<h1>According to the publicity notes, the decision to film French director Frédéric Petitjean’s “Cold Blood” in English was a no-brainer. Audiences might disagree.</h1>

Yet the general oddness of this snowbound, stagnant thriller isn’t limited to tone-deaf conversations and a United Nations of accents at odds with the Pacific Northwest setting (played primarily by Ukraine). There’s a drained-looking Jean Reno as a grizzled hit man, hiding out in a remote mountain cabin and seemingly too tired to enunciate. There’s an inscrutable Sarah Lind as the mysterious woman who wipes out, seriously wounded, on his doorstep after a snowmobile accident. And there’s a depressed cop (Joe Anderson) fiddling about on the fringes with a cold case that we suspect will eventually yield a clue to the hit man-hottie dynamic playing out in that cabin.

At this point, any hint would be welcome, considering the Delphic nature of the cabin-dwellers’ exchanges.

“Is it necessary for a mountaineer to be so serious when he chops wood?” the woman asks her stoic host while the soundtrack pounds with the drumbeat promise of thrills that never materialize. But if Petitjean’s dialogue is problematic, its delivery is no less so: At times, the discord between a character’s words and lip movements suggests that some line readings had to be dubbed.

All of which leaves a lot of heavy lifting for the cinematographer, Thierry Arbogast, whose considerable talents go some way toward manufacturing a tension that the script lacks. The blinding-white fluency of the snowmobile crash in the film’s opening is an excellent example; but viewers are more likely to identify with the cop’s solitary goldfish, gazing out at a world that’s both familiar and incomprehensible.

Not rated. In French and English, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/04/movies/cold-blood-review.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

'Cold Blood' review: The hit man and the hottie

At this point, any hint would be welcome, considering the Delphic nature of the cabin-dwellers’ exchanges.

Not much is known about that time, after the playwright’s beloved Globe Theatre burned to the ground in 1613 and he returned to his family home in Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s not a peaceful retirement. Reconnecting with his neglected wife (Judi Dench, brilliantly huffy) and two variously troubled daughters (Kathryn Wilder and Lydia Wilson) is challenging, to say the least. But if Ben Elton’s screenplay benefits from dramatic imaginings and factual fudging, I’m content that Branagh — who stars as well as directs and whose devotion to Shakespeare is unarguable — be the one to approve them.

The result is more country soap than biopic, a slow and soothing tale of family secrets and festering resentments. A little soppy and a tad dull — Will putters constantly in the garden, mourning the long-ago death of his young son — the movie is so sedately paced that Branagh’s distracting prosthetic nose can seem to enter scenes well before the rest of him.

Yet while “All Is True” might not brim with excitement, it’s beautifully acted, richly photographed (by Zac Nicholson) and blessedly free of histrionics. Between them, Branagh and Elton have concocted a respectful story of loss, regret and wistful genius. Their Shakespeare is sad and a little weary, but far from beaten down, evidenced by the movie’s most pleasurable scene: An extended fireside chinwag between Will and his longtime crush, the Earl of Southampton (a wicked Ian McKellen). Whether all is true here is irrelevant: just watching these two old hands lovingly quote Sonnet 29 together feels right enough for me.

‘All Is True’ is rated PG-13 for heterosexual scandal and homoerotic longing. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9e7c17a4-3ece-3f4c-a7a1-f0cc7b4846b9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/movies/all-is-true-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'All Is True' review: Regret is the thing, as Shakespeare comes home

With some movies, it’s best not to allow worries over historical accuracy to derail our enjoyment. And there’s plenty to enjoy in “All Is True,” Kenneth Branagh’s fondly poignant look at William Shakespeare’s final years.

Yet underneath the plotting and internecine tussles of the would-be escapees lurks something much more interesting: the story of a seduction.

The seducer is the real-life Larry Marley (a superb Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), an Irish Republican Army prisoner still smarting from the deaths of fellow hunger strikers some months earlier. (At the time, the IRA was engaged in a violent struggle to free Northern Ireland from English rule.) A hard, pale man with intelligent eyes and a deceptively compliant manner, Marley knows that any escape from this fortress will require information only the guards possess. Accordingly, he embarks on a campaign to gain the trust of Gordon (Barry Ward), an officer he instinctively recognizes as more conflicted and vulnerable than the others.

What follows is a slow, sidling dance of advance and retreat as Gordon gradually becomes accustomed to Marley’s helping with housekeeping and hanging around to chat. This charm offensive turns “Maze” into an unusually quiet, watchful thriller: Aside from one early skirmish and the rather chaotic escape itself, Burke’s thoughtful script mostly unfolds without the usual prison-movie tumult. Following his lead, cinematographer David Grennan uses calm close-ups to isolate the two men, zooming in tight even in crowd scenes to elevate the individual over the mob.

Adopting a measured, nonpartisan approach to his touchy material, Burke shows Gordon weathering political pressures and a terrifying attack on his family, while Marley struggles to dissuade his son from following him into a life of political terrorism. In one beautifully lighted scene, as Marley comforts the widow of a hunger striker, this brooding movie takes time to remember the women who were left to carry on.

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="a4b66305-7dda-47b6-b538-0a5d79df9ab9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/movies/maze-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Maze' review: A prison break and a confidence game

(Critic’s Pick): “Maze” is, on its surface, an escape movie, but its true appeal lies elsewhere. Closely based on the 1983 mass breakout from the notorious Maze prison in Northern Ireland, Stephen Burke’s careful drama hits the familiar genre bases with almost soothing efficiency.

<h1>Approaching weighty themes with a very light touch, Benedikt Erlingsson’s “Woman at War” is an environmental drama wrapped in whimsical comedy and tied with a bow of midlife soul-searching. The package is lumpy at times, but not unwieldy, thanks to an engaging central performance and a cinematographer, Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson, whose sweeping shots of frozen heath and lowering Icelandic skies wash the screen — and our minds — of extraneous distractions.</h1>

The movie’s heart and spine is Halla (Halldora Geirharosdottir), 50, a sunny choir director and fearless eco-activist. Intent on halting the construction of a new aluminum smelter outside Reykjavik, she sabotages power lines and demolishes the drones deployed to deter her. So far, she has eluded capture despite increasingly daring exploits, and when we see no partner or family other than an identical twin sister (also played by Geirharosdottir), we wonder if her adventures are filling more than just a need to save her homeland.

The arrival of a letter announcing that her application to adopt a child, filed years earlier, has been approved, strengthens that suspicion. Yet as Halla teeters between motherhood and vandalism — between creation and destruction — her embrace of the natural world intensifies. A dead sheep’s carcass shields her from helicopters, and, later, hot springs revive her frozen body. Often she’s pictured moving through water or clinging to the earth, face buried in gorse and arms flung wide, as if trying to stop her world from spinning.

Surreal touches, like pop-up musicians only Halla can see, give the movie’s politics a playful, fairy-tale cast, but “Woman at War” is more captivated by Halla’s internal struggle. Should she raise a child or change the world? Or can the first achieve the second?

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c2fe40b6-3864-4460-bad7-62927f1744ae" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/woman-at-war-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Woman at War' review: Industrial blight as Icelandic fable

The movie’s heart and spine is Halla (Halldora Geirharosdottir), 50, a sunny choir director and fearless eco-activist.

<h1>“Donnybrook” is a movie about, among other things, bare-knuckle fighting, but it’s the viewers who will feel beaten down. And it won’t take very long, either, as it seems almost every encounter in this lugubrious, headache-inducing drama involves violence.</h1>

Even the announcement of the title, its stark black letters slammed against a blood-red background, feels like an assault. This is a movie that makes its points with a piledriver, the coarseness extending to characters’ names. At the center is Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell), a desperate veteran with two children and a drug-addicted wife. (Back story — any story, really — is so minimal we’re forced to make a great many inferences on our own.) Hoping for a fresh start, Earl plans to enter the Donnybrook (the word derives from Dublin’s infamously rowdy Donnybrook Fair), an illicit cage fight whose $100,000 prize would finance his wife’s recovery and his family’s future.

A gun-store robbery (how else will he find the fight’s entry fee?) kicks off Earl’s, and the film’s, odyssey of brutality. Its main engine is a terrifying meth dealer named Chainsaw Angus (Frank Grillo), a slab of psychosis whose seemingly longtime beef with Earl is never made quite clear. To amuse himself while tracking Earl and managing his meth heads, Angus maintains a revoltingly abusive, possibly incestuous relationship with his deeply damaged sister, Delia (Margaret Qualley). You could feel sorry for her were her behavior not at times as disgusting as his.

Based on Frank Bill’s 2013 novel of the same name (whose paperback cover says it all), “Donnybrook,” set in Indiana and filmed in Ohio, is a one-dimensional wallow in rural Midwestern miserabilism. Ear-shredding to listen to (the soundtrack, between chunks of a comically portentous score, is mostly thrash metal) and soul-destroying to watch, the movie trembles with tragedy. Yet because almost everyone and everything — dialogue, image, setting — is presented in such broad, symbolic strokes, we feel absolutely nothing. A vivid peony of blood on white kitchen tiles leaps from the movie’s downbeat palette (the cinematography, by David Ungaro, is often quite striking), yet the body it came from inspires no feeling. There’s more emotional resonance in a Punch and Judy show.

Filled with poverty, futility and angry white men, “Donnybrook” has feet of lead and not much of a brain.

“You still tweakin’ from killin’ those Muslim babies?” Delia taunts Earl with the pointless cruelty of the chronically stupid. In the press notes, the director, Tim Sutton (whose previous feature, “Dark Night” (2017), was about a mass shooting), calls this film “an American folk tale” and claims “It’s important to try and capture the pulse of society.” Maybe Sutton does have something valuable to say about economic deprivation and lack of opportunity. But with “Donnybrook” — especially the climactic fight scene, complete with a redneck rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” — he risks instead the appearance of condescension to the very demographic he seeks to represent.

Either way, the movie wears you down. At one point, we watch Delia sit motionless in a car, her mouth wrapped around a gun barrel, for what feels like five minutes. I didn’t see a single muscle move, and thought the film had broken down. And then I wished that it had.

Rated R for stabbing, shooting, pounding and pummeling. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9921ba7f-e7a3-456e-bb54-10304467af8e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/movies/donnybrook-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Donnybrook' review: Fighting for survival in the heartland

Even the announcement of the title, its stark black letters slammed against a blood-red background, feels like an assault.

<h1>In “The Prodigy,” a ho-hum horror movie given a mild boost by its credible performances, a small boy named Miles (Jackson Robert Scott) begins to exhibit disturbingly supernormal intelligence. Further red flags include sleep-chatting in Hungarian, abusing his baby sitter and battering a classmate with a wrench. If this isn’t evidence enough of Miles’ bad-seed credentials, he also has one brown eye and one blue — weird eyes being a dead giveaway in the evil-spawn genre.</h1>

Miles might be a little devil, but it’s not the prince of darkness who’s messing with his head. Enter a lanky psychologist with a very particular set of skills (Colm Feore), none of which prepare him for those of his pint-size patient. Yet the movie’s occasional chills do little to obscure the thin plotting, problematic pacing and a central mystery that’s left aggravatingly vague. Jeff Buhler’s script reveals too much too soon in a moodily photographed prologue showing a crazed killer mowed down by police while his latest victim escapes with one hand fewer than when she was snatched.

Directed by Nicholas McCarthy and set in a weirdly depopulated Philadelphia (played by Toronto and its environs), “The Prodigy” features the usual buzzing flies and de rigueur jump scares (the best of which is in the trailer). Taylor Schilling is perfect as Miles’ distraught mother, who catches on so slowly that she seems a little dense. And because fathers are often sidelined in movies like this, Peter Mooney’s restraint in the role, when the camera does find him, is to be heartily commended.

Toying fruitlessly with themes of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, “The Prodigy” gives the audience little to muse on except who will make it to the end credits. And with how many appendages.

Rated R for mutilated bodies, loathsome language and a mangled doggy. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="419168e1-65a6-4bf8-b629-11d28dbf4829" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/movies/the-prodigy-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'The Prodigy' Review: Evil genius, average horror

Miles might be a little devil, but it’s not the prince of darkness who’s messing with his head. Enter a lanky psychologist with a very particular set of skills (Colm Feore), none of which prepare him for those of his pint-size patient.

<h1>For all its flaws — and they are legion — “King of Thieves” wraps you in a fuzzy blanket of familiarity. Like the Cockney-crime-caper genre the movie calls home, its over-the-hill leads are showing their age. Yet there’s something cheering about their refusal to be sequestered in doddery grandpa roles: When you were once known for playing heartbreakers, leg-breakers or wide boys who lead with their fists, the slippers-and-sweaters ghetto must hold little appeal.</h1>

No less than the third film to be based on the 2015 Hatton Garden heist, in which four retired ex-cons masterminded what one prosecutor called “the largest burglary in English legal history,” “King of Thieves” is unabashed old-school entertainment. The tone is jaunty and the patter thick as Brian (Michael Caine), recently bereaved, medicates his loneliness by planning one last job: robbing a vault in the jewelry district. Roping in his old pals Kenny (Tom Courtenay), Terry (Jim Broadbent) and Danny (Ray Winstone) — a geezer jackpot of deafness, diabetes and hip replacement — Brian also includes a young protégé (Charlie Cox) to deactivate the vault’s alarm system.

Communicating in rough insults and rhyming slang, these artful codgers are, for a time, fun to watch. Jokes about knee liniment, disability payments and insulin jabs pepper Joe Penhall’s script, and characters called Frankie the Fence and Billy the Fish bob and weave in the movie’s margins. If you’re in the right mood, this will all go down as easily as a warm brew in an East End pub; otherwise, you’ll begin to notice the sketchy plotting and slack pacing. Relying too often on blasts of on-the-nose vintage pop music from the likes of Tom Jones and The Turtles, the director, James Marsh, struggles to inject an excitement that no one is feeling. And when a vein of nastiness opens beneath the banter (who knew Broadbent could be so wickedly threatening?) as ancient resentments swell and burst, the backstabbing menace feels jarringly out of place.

This darker turn could have worked had Marsh shown us his real-life likely lads in their by all accounts more ruthless criminal heydays. Instead, we get random flashbacks to the actors’ former glories, like 1960s-era Caine and Courtenay in “The Italian Job” and “Billy Liar” — sentimental call-outs to audiences old enough to remember them. In this way, “King of Thieves” reveals its main concern and source of humor isn’t thieving, but aging — which, as anyone will tell you, is no joke at all.

— Event info: “King of Thieves” is rated R for shocking words, brutal deeds and irritable bowels. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="788bc047-8dc5-4cb1-b88e-f013eba54ea1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/movies/king-of-thieves-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'King of Thieves' review: Michael Caine leads a crew of artful codgers

No less than the third film to be based on the 2015 Hatton Garden heist, in which four retired ex-cons masterminded what one prosecutor called “the largest burglary in English legal history,” “King of Thieves” is unabashed old-school entertainment.

<h1>What a difference a cast makes. If the director Neil Burger’s decision to have Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart play the leads in the odd-couple comedy “The Upside” — a remake of the 2012 French film “The Intouchables” — doesn’t erase the original’s sins, it blurs them just enough.</h1>

As a result, this impolitic (some might say offensive) tale of Phillip (Cranston), a wealthy, white quadriplegic, and Dell (Hart), the black parolee who restores his will to live, is surprisingly winning. Some squinting will be required to block out the race and class stereotyping, as well as the puddles of sentiment scattered throughout the highly predictable plot. Yet Jon Hartmere’s script has genuinely funny moments and is blessedly short on crassness: even a scene involving catheters and colon hygiene is less cringey than you might expect.

A warm vibe between the two men goes a long way toward sweetening the sap and contrivances. When the vastly unqualified Dell stumbles into a job as Phillip’s caregiver, he’s rewarded with an eyebrow-raising salary and a depressed patient who needs entertaining more than cosseting. Mutual benefits multiply, as the two share joints, prank the police and bond over Mozart and Aretha Franklin. Later, when Dell’s hostile ex-girlfriend and son resist his amends, a new house and car prove remarkably persuasive.

Inspired by a true story, “The Upside” isn’t shy about turning the travails of disability into punch lines — or Nicole Kidman, as Phillip’s devoted business manager, into a romantic cliché. But Hart (who needs a counterweight to his Oscar-hosting controversy) is less manic and more genuine than we’ve seen him, making Dell more than just a comic device. And Cranston never oversells his hobbled character. Now imagine if the filmmakers had summoned the imagination to swap their roles.

Additional Information:

Rated PG-13 for drugs, depression and an inconvenient erection. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes

This article originally appeared in <a id="aba5d99e-9e44-455e-a362-4f96a7054456" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/movies/the-upside-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'The Upside' review: A billionaire and his buddy find reasons to be cheerful

A warm vibe between the two men goes a long way toward sweetening the sap and contrivances.

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