Manohla Dargis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Critic’s Pick)

Running to Win Hearts and Minds and Votes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He's Dancing Around the Subject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Complicated Choice of Hero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/movies/agnes-varda-memory.html" id="02d97e03-53df-3baa-a31f-22db51fcad14">The New York Times</a>.

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

The Agnès Varda I Knew: Showing Women Their Real Place in Movies

It is an amazing head, its pale skin stretched across bone that is as geometrically distinct as a cubist portrait. Denis, who has a seductive visual style, spends a lot of time focused on Pattinson’s skull in “High Life,” which centers on his desultory character, Monte. He’s one of a small criminal crew of good-looking men and women (Mia Goth, Lars Eidinger and musician André Benjamin are onboard, too) who years ago agreed to participate in a space mission to avoid the death penalty. Their journey ostensibly has something to do with the Earth’s looming environmental catastrophe, but mostly plays out as an excuse for Denis to explore the farther, darker side of her imagination.

Denis’ work can be intoxicating, filled with strong, attention-seizing, mind-bending images that resonate powerfully. At times, beauty seems to stand alone, untethered to meaning; at other times, it underlines a tangible idea or generates significance by proxy. Years after seeing her film “Nénette et Boni” (1996), I don’t remember much about the story. But its startling, playfully erotic, intensely palpable reveries remain embedded in my memory: the white bunny nestled between a woman’s feathery high-heel mules, the baker’s wife with a creamy, teasing bosom who leans over a display of luscious pastries.

“High Life” has its share of striking images that sometimes fit together like puzzle pieces or just float into nothingness, similarly to that errant wrench. The story starts to take shape shortly after the birth of a girl, whose unexpected arrival disrupts the ship’s already fragile stability. Named Willow (and played in turn by Scarlett Lindsey and Jessie Ross), the baby is the first to survive the experimental interventions of Dibs (Juliette Binoche), the ship’s demented doctor. Wearing a long, heavy rope of braided hair, signaling the crew’s many years in space, Dibs has a criminal past, too, but she also has dominion over the other crew members, whom she medicates to keep docile.

Dibs isn’t running things, not at first, but she might as well be. She dresses the crew members’ wounds and tends to the sick, offers unwelcome douching advice to another woman and provides unorthodox if perhaps welcome TLC to a dying man. Her most significant and unusual duty, though, is collecting semen (donors are rewarded with pills) that she uses to impregnate the women. Dibs has her reasons, naturally, though they’re so unpersuasive that you have to wonder why Denis bothered, especially given that narrative logic isn’t much of interest to her. What interests Denis is everything else, including the disembodied exchange of bodily fluids between a man and a woman.

A few other things interest her, including desire, sublimated and unleashed. As is often the case in Denis’ movies, “High Life” vibrates with low-key erotic energy that can feel exciting, a little dangerous. (She wrote it with Jean-Pol Fargeau.) One reason is the obvious seductive appeal of performers like Pattinson, Binoche and Benjamin, whose faces and bodies are alternately flooded with flattering light or eye-straining washes of red and blue. But Denis doesn’t just prettify her actors: She lingers on their forms, their skin, stressing texture that becomes tactile. When her camera pans across a downy arm, you see it but also remember — and feel — the downiness and pleasures of other arms, legs, faces.

Things happen, some ridiculous and exasperating, others effectively and productively surprising (like Dibs’ desperate, lonely sexual writhing). Pattinson’s vivid presence and intimate voice-over help shape a movie that often feels on the verge of disintegrating. He keeps you watching, as do the images of reverberant, often haunting power and beauty, including a fecund garden in which kale, berries and gourds grow in bleak contrast to the ship’s laboratory fetuses. But too often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard — outer and inner space, Pattinson’s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then — more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.

Additional Information:

‘High Life’

Rated R for graphic violence, including sexual, and a masturbation machine. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/movies/high-life-review.html" id="6b8399fa-1d27-327a-a2c0-91de7b68d3fd">The New York Times</a>.

Every so often in “High Life,” the latest from French director Claire Denis, there’s a shot of outer space. A cosmic whatsit, the story largely takes place in a black-velvet void with pinpricks of light. Earth is far away, long ago, a memory. Not all that much happens in this immensity, though sometimes a colorful gassy emanation floods the screen and something — a wrench, a body — floats into the great nothing. Inside a spaceship, by contrast, there’s plenty of action: bodily fluids, spasms ...

'High Life' Review: Robert Pattinson Is Lost in Space

Given this, the bright, popping red of the superhero costume in “Shazam!” is an early warning sign, as obvious as a matador’s cape, that the dreary and crepuscular have given way to something less self-serious and end-of-the-world grim. It’s a nice change of pace for a big-screen mega-comic, if not a revolutionary shift. There are still a lot of brand shilling and the usual tediously overextended fights, ka-pow and ka-boom. But these are delivered via Shazam, a charmingly breezy avenger in tights once known as Captain Marvel, aka the World’s Mightiest Mortal, or as I thought of him going in: Who?

The answer emerges piecemeal in “Shazam!,” another movie about a superhero with dual-identity issues. Here, the divided self begins with Billy (Asher Angel, a relaxed, natural presence), a foundling with pluck, heart and a sob story. He’s on a mission to find his mother (longish story), a journey that — as sometimes happens in male quests — leads him to a surrogate father. This one is an ancient wizard called, ta-da, Wizard (Djimon Hounsou in a comic Halloweenish get-up), who passes his magic to Billy. Once back in his normal realm, Billy discovers that he can tap great powers by saying the word “shazam,” which turns him into a hero with an adult body (Zachary Levi).

If this sounds familiar — the Moses-like savior who learns he’s meant for greatness — it’s because the character was conceived to compete with Superman. Yet because Shazam isn’t as well known as Supes et al., he’s not as weighed down with fan expectations, the fate of the world and auteurist aspirations. The filmmakers (Henry Gayden wrote the script; David F. Sandberg directed) adhere to the heroic template, which means there’s a regulation villain (the reliably watchable Mark Strong) with schemes. But they also fill in the faces and places, and add enough shading and color to Billy’s world that when his inevitable fight against evil happens it feels as if something more than the box office is at stake.

Of course a franchise may be at stake, though considering how often the movie name-drops Batman and Superman, it can’t help but feel as if the entire DC movie world is on the line. And maybe Shazam is a risk, just because he’s an unfamiliar avenger in a wildly overcrowded field. Created in 1939 and originally called Captain Marvel (and physically modeled on actor Fred MacMurray), this one was a hit and earned fans like Elvis Presley, who apparently borrowed his forelock and lightning bolt from the comic. But for legal reasons, Captain Marvel went into storage only to be later resurrected by DC as Shazam. (DC’s longtime foe, Marvel Comics, managed to trademark the character’s first name for the avenger currently played by Brie Larson in “Captain Marvel.”)

The new movie quickly dusts off the Shazam story, first by grounding it in Billy, a sweet, if somewhat melancholic mischief maker who soon becomes an appealing protagonist. The opening scene involving a couple of dimwit cops feels as ancient as a Bowery Boys movie, perhaps intentionally. Things soon settle into an easy, everyday groove when Billy moves into a new foster home, a sprawl populated by kids (Jack Dylan Grazer, among them) who are generally cute instead of cutesy. Tenderly overseen by Rosa and Victor (Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews), the house has a lived-in coziness, a warmth and security that feels as unforced as the mix of ethnicities and races.

Once Billy says that magic word and his supersized alter ego appears, the movie goes to its happy place and comfortably embraces its own identity as a light, jocular, modest entertainment. Levi is best known for his television roles (“Chuck,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”), but he easily scales up for the big screen. He can look like a beefier, tougher John Krasinski; as Shazam, though, Levi is pure cartoon, from his bootblacked helmet of hair to his tumescent musculature. Ken-doll plastic and handsome, he is an ideal, suitably absurd figure on which to hang an old-fashioned hero with a satiny high-collared cape and a fat yellow arrow suggestively pointing down.

The arrow is a winking joke and as subtle as the nod to the Tom Hanks body-swapping comedy “Big.” It’s also a reminder of Billy’s larger human journey, a metamorphosis that remains humorously, identifiably awkward, even as he wills his inner super-adult to heroic life. Angel’s performance lays the groundwork for the character — and keeps him tethered to reality — while Levi lifts Shazam up with an exuberant turn that conveys the delight of Billy’s extreme transformation as well as its lingering adolescent ungainliness and excess. It’s one thing to fight evil, but Shazam’s eye-popping, slack-jawed, discordant physicality is a reminder that it’s just as tough to get a grip on yourself.

“Shazam!” is rated PG-13 for light superhero violence. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/movies/shazam-review.html" id="5d1be29b-8392-3d6c-a38b-6d6e38853b52">The New York Times</a>.

Ever since Christopher Nolan took Batman to their mutually productive dark place, the DC cinematic super-universe has been as somber as a grave. There have been exceptions, shimmers of light amid the doom. Outside the animated realm, though, the stories and mood have been downbeat, matched by hues that range from drab to black amid bilious green, raging purple and watery blue. Even the “S” on Superman’s chest looks drained of cheer, more like dried blood than some candy-colored delight.

'Shazam!' Review: The Right Word Unlocks an Inner Exuberance

'Shazam!' Review: A Boy's Supersized Alter Ego in a Sunny Superhero Flick

It will be appealing, though, partly because of the gray-brown mustang with a dark mane and tail that is being rounded up as the story opens, a helicopter swooping overhead like an aerial cowboy. The mustang is part of a feral herd that’s been captured for a rehabilitation program meant to keep the animal population humanely in check while helping prisoners like Roman (Flemish actor Matthias Schoenaerts) reintegrate into society. The men gentle the horses, and they, in turn, gentle the men. That’s the optimistic idea, at any rate, as well as the bold, obvious metaphor that shapes this seemingly impossible, seductively heartfelt male melodrama.

It shouldn’t work — none of it — not the metaphor, not the wild horse, not what it all means for the wild man at the center. It does. That’s partly because redemption stories exert their own magnetic pull but also because French director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre goes all in, embracing simplicity and sincerity without hesitation or self-consciousness. (She shares script credit with Mona Fastvold and Brock Norman Brock.) “The Mustang” is direct and almost perilously familiar — it draws from both westerns and prison movies — yet it is also attractively filigreed with surprising faces, unusual genre notes and luminous, evanescent beauty.

The story tracks Roman as he reluctantly joins the rehab program (his resistance being a narrative given), goaded by his unfailingly patient psychologist-counselor (Connie Britton). The program is run by another professional instigator, Myles, a classically cantankerous old man with a hard crust and 24-karat core who once upon a time would have been played by a grumbling, muttering Walter Brennan. The patent now belongs to Bruce Dern, who grumbles and mutters and squints into the sun in a performance that is as recognizable as the cover of a favorite song. You know every beat and lyric, and it’s pleasurable to watch Dern interpret each one anew.

There’s no John Wayne, the sun around which Brennan sometimes orbited. Even so, Schoenaerts here brings to mind one of those Wayne swaggerers, the kind who tower over movies and other men. Schoenaerts — who excels at hard-body men who yield, to hurt, tenderness and love — affects a slight bob and weave, suggesting a life in the ring. Unexpectedly, Roman often seems beaten down. He has the hunched shoulders and bowed head of the defeated, though sometimes he looks like a boxer heading into the next fight. Even a bowed head can carry a threat, as everything that we have been taught about men and violence reminds us.

By the time the mustang arrives, Roman is about halfway through his 11-year sentence. Theirs isn’t an easy match, partly because it verges on a romantic meet cute that strains narrative credulity and your tolerance for stacked decks. The horse, locked in a shed, is furiously kicking, pounding out a rhythmic SOS that the curious Roman answers. Soon, the two are warily circling each other in a corral under the tutelage of Henry (winning Jason Mitchell), one of the program’s successes. Roman and the horse — he names him Marquis, pronouncing it Marcus — don’t take to each other, but after a brutal exchange and some more time in solitary for both, they reach an understanding that opens into love.

Now and again, a European filmmaker heads to the American West to re-explore (and of course reconquer) it, often to grim and grimly obvious ends. De Clermont-Tonnerre, by contrast, takes on the western as a milieu and a genre with an appreciable lack of cynicism. Some of her storytelling can be shaky. A predictable death and a resentful teenage daughter (a fine Gideon Adlon) nearly help push the story over the melodramatic edge; and a drug subplot with its easily breached medicine cabinet is distracting.

Yet de Clermont-Tonnerre has an eye for beauty, for swirling dust and resonant silences, and she taps into the soul of this place and its inhabitants even as she reminds you of its terrors. Like Marquis, Roman can sometimes seem like too facile a symbol of the terrifyingly primitive, but he is also never less than effortlessly alive.

Rated R. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/movies/the-mustang-review.html" id="26bb558a-2e14-34e9-abf0-0c057aa9f92b">The New York Times</a>.

There are two furious beasts in “The Mustang,” one a hulking man in a jumpsuit stamped with the letters DOC, and the other the wild horse of the title. The man is an inmate in a Nevada prison set against desert and mountains, but he hasn’t been able to enjoy the scenery lately, having been condemned to an isolation that is at once literal and figurative. He’s an archetypal solitary man of fiction, one of those troubled souls with clenched fists who must be coaxed, at times thrust, into the wo...

'The Mustang' Review: Where the Wild Things Roam. And Sometimes Break Out.

A road movie that opens into a political allegory, “3 Faces” is filled with unexpected turns. It is the latest from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, a master of narrative diversion, who again has taken the twinned roles of director and driver, as he did in the documentary “Taxi” (2015). Here, playing himself, or a version of filmmaker Jafar Panahi, he spends a large part of the movie behind the wheel of an SUV, motoring through the Iranian countryside to help an actress find a missing, possibly dead woman. They succeed but also find other women, including one who’s a ghost in a haunted world.

The story is streamlined, simple and elegant, but the plot is thickly layered. The actress, Behnaz Jafari, has received a video of a distraught young woman, Marziyeh Rezaei, who seems to have killed herself on camera. (The main performers share their names with their characters.) The shaken Behnaz has walked away from her latest role mid-production and enlisted Jafar to help her search for Marziyeh. Their quest takes them to northwest Iran, where he speaks Turkish to Azeri villagers. He and Behnaz easily track down the missing woman, a discovery that enriches and complicates the inevitable gender divide that runs through this movie like a volatile fault line.

Panahi’s storytelling is direct, even obvious, and his visual approach looks similarly straightforward to the point of being utilitarian. But little is as it first appears in “3 Faces,” including the short, alarming video of Marziyeh killing herself that dominates the movie’s opening scenes. A teary, visibly shaken Behnaz repeatedly watches the video as Jafar drives, offering a running commentary on it. She’s flooded with despair, anger, confusion and guilt, but can’t stop watching it, perhaps especially because Marziyeh makes an on-camera appeal to Behnaz for help that now feels like an accusation. In becoming the video’s audience, the actress has become inescapably complicit.

That’s true of every audience, of course, including the one for “3 Faces,” simply because to watch a movie is to engage in a social act, whether in a theater or at home. Here, though, the suggestion of complicity doesn’t feel like an accusation, the way it can with directors who toss Brechtian brickbats. A humanist in a theocracy, Panahi has long explored social and political issues — poverty, women’s rights, authoritarianism — yet without the tiresome art-house wagging fingers and grandstanding. One characteristic of his work is its anguished tenderness, including in movies that play with hard-boiled genre (“Crimson Gold,” “The Circle”), a generosity of spirit that is itself political.

Behnaz’s doubts about Marziyeh’s video foreshadow the subjects teased out in the main story, including the sometimes convenient divide between fiction and documentary, performance and what we call real life. Panahi has long explored the protean space between these modes, testing their boundaries. In “3 Faces,” he is at once playing a role in a fiction and himself: a dissident filmmaker with a privileged, sympathetic view of women, which strengthens the movie’s autobiographical underpinning. Panahi was arrested in Iran in 2009 and again in 2010. Accused of making anti-regime propaganda, he was forbidden to leave and barred from making movies for 20 years; this is the fourth feature he’s made since.

The result is an immersive, pleasurably intelligent movie, one that weds documentary naturalism and melodramatic excess with formalist rigor. The intimate claustrophobia of the SUV is an emblem of the larger interior-exterior divide faced by all the characters, particularly the women. When Behnaz exits the vehicle, she isn’t just a restless passenger; she is also an autonomous Iranian woman. Jafar’s presence — or rather Panahi’s — is similarly meaningful, given that he’s forbidden to leave Iran. So, he drives and makes movies, and throughout this one he uses the SUV’s windshield and windows to throw a frame around the world, an insistent reminder of his identity, his art, his vision.

After miles of dusty road, phone calls and character-revealing bickering, Behnaz and Jafar reach a village that becomes the backdrop for much of the story. There, they meet assorted gentle eccentrics, each further enhancing the nubby realism. There’s an old woman (very much alive) nestled in her dug grave, and an old man who makes a present of a foreskin. Behnaz and Jafar also solve the mystery created by Marziyeh, whose family is in an uproar over her desire to become an actress. The question of a woman’s proper role — on-screen and off — becomes a steady refrain, particularly with the introduction of Shahrzad, a legendary actress and the movie’s third, most elusive face.

A village pariah, Shahrzad lives alone in a modest, isolated house and appears as a fugitive pretense: a silhouette in a window, a disembodied voice, a distant figure. But her presence fills the movie, partly because she serves as an affecting reminder of Iran’s past, much as the willful Marziyeh is an emissary of its future. Shahrzad also emerges as a kind of twin figure for Panahi, who has continued to make his art despite government censure. Working with modest means and astonishing determination, he makes movies that are at once acts of aesthetic will and of political resistance, as well as assertions of the existential sovereignty that here is etched in every last face.

Added Information:

Not rated. In Persian and Azerbaijani, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/movies/3-faces-review.html" id="4262ef87-8fa1-3683-ad7f-003066c67415">The New York Times</a>.

'3 Faces' Review: On the Road in Iran (and Off It, Too)

The past and present are a terrifying blur in “Transit,” a brilliant allegory set in France that opens amid wailing police sirens. The solitary man in a cafe sipping espresso doesn’t flinch. He is soon joined by a second man who gives him a name: Georg. “Why are you still here,” the second man asks, “Paris is being sealed off.” In urgent tones, they discuss visas, danger, money. Georg agrees to deliver two letters and then steps into streets filled with jackboots and terror, a world in which time seems to have folded in on itself.

An existential thriller about loss, trauma, statelessness and historical amnesia, “Transit” is the latest from German director Christian Petzold, an electrifying, original filmmaker. Petzold is likely best known in the United States for “Barbara,” a slow-burning drama about an East German doctor who, after a failed attempt to go to the West, decides to stay. In “Barbara,” to voluntarily remain in a totalitarian dictatorship is an ethical choice, a form of resistance. There are no valorous choices in “Transit,” where leaving is a high-stakes necessity for Georg and the desperate, panicked refugees around him. To stay is to die.

To remain is also to exist in a time-space puzzle — perhaps another dimension, or a Philip K. Dick-style dystopia — in which German forces are flooding into present-day Paris. When Georg (a transfixing Franz Rogowski) leaves the cafe, the city he steps into looks familiar but different. He is meant to deliver the letters to a writer who turns out to have died by suicide, leaving behind a manual typewriter, a manuscript and a room washed in blood. “He caused me more trouble than the occupation,” a hotel worker grouses. Before long, Georg is dodging shock troops in a heart-thumping chase, and the conventional sense of historical time, with its reassuring sense of progress, has been undone.

“Transit” is based on a 1944 novel by German-Jewish writer Anna Seghers that draws on her experience as a war refugee. Petzold’s great stroke in adapting the book is to situate it in a historically indeterminate moment, overlapping past and present like a cinematic superimposition. He does this subtly, partly by omitting Nazi iconography — the swastikas and all the rest. The sirens in the opening could be sounding in today’s France, with its street protests and official state of emergency instituted in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks. Even after the movie’s political stakes and backdrop come into focus, the story remains steeped in a kind of temporal dissonance.

As “Transit” unfolds, its period remains slyly, artfully indefinite. Georg is on the run — he’s soon in Marseilles — and also firmly located in his own time and space. (He doesn’t look lost in time, though you briefly may be.) Petzold doesn’t set the story in a recognizably bounded here and now (or a circumscribed there and then). The soldiers storming Paris look like contemporary French riot police, and the streets they swarm are filled with current cars and passers-by in up-to-the-minute clothes, including a woman who, as Georg scrambles from shock troops, points at him, shouting: “He’s there! There!” It’s almost a surprise when she doesn’t punctuate her cry with the word “Jew.”

In Marseilles, the plot thickens, the danger escalates, and the emotional temperature spikes. Georg assumes the identity of the dead writer, which introduces yet more complications. He also enters dramatically fraught relationships with other anxious refugees, including Marie (Paula Beer), the dead writer’s wife. A sad, jittery beauty, Marie doesn’t know that her husband is dead or that Georg has assumed his identity and, with it, their travel papers. Georg’s growing attachment to Marie is paralleled by his delicate, paternal feelings for a young boy (Lilien Batman) who, with his North African mother (Maryam Zaree), forcefully underscores the story’s topical political resonance.

By turns intimate and expansive, “Transit” is a thrilling, at times harrowing labyrinth of a movie. Petzold draws from both the traditional European art film and the mainstream commercial cinema without embracing their orthodoxies. He doesn’t over-explain the trickier plot entanglements, confident in his audience’s ability to sort through its thickets. He embraces ambiguity as a principle but also sometimes gives the movie the accelerated pulse of an action flick: There are chases, fear at the door, screams in the night. It’s easy to imagine Humphrey Bogart in the role of Georg, trading melancholic regrets with Ingrid Bergman; in some scenes, Rogowski’s looks, haunting opacity and stolid physicality bring to mind Joaquin Phoenix, creating another time slip.

Early in “Transit,” a narrator (Matthias Brandt) begins talking as Georg reads the dead writer’s novel. The narrator’s identity long remains a mystery; he drops in now and then to add or explain, not always precisely. He’s not altogether reliable, but neither is he especially unreliable. (He’s a storyteller.) As Georg begins reading, the narrator says, “He sensed it was his language, his native tongue.” The typewritten manuscript pages are excerpts from Seghers’ novel, which opens up assorted mind-bending possibilities: Georg is unwittingly following someone else’s script; he’s caught in a time loop or repeating history; or living in a present that is inseparable from the past.

Petzold’s answer, I think, can be found in the crowded consulates in which Georg waits alongside despairing men and women, caught in the stateless, agonizingly familiar limbo reproduced in today’s refugee crisis. In 1940, Seghers’ compatriot, Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, spent time in Marseilles trying to secure his own travel papers. Benjamin haunts Petzold’s movie, including in a shot of a sign for Rue des Pyrénées. Benjamin ended up fleeing across the Pyrenees Mountains, killing himself in Spain.

In one of Benjamin’s final works, he wrote that “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” sounding an alarm about fascism that resonates powerfully in Petzold’s extraordinary, haunted movie.

Not rated. In German and French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/transit-review.html" id="0667cd02-7262-3b04-a60a-ab62d138529c">The New York Times</a>.

'Transit' Review: An Existential Puzzler With Jackboots and Terror

The brood in “Fighting With My Family” is a rambunctious crowd. There’s mum and dad Knight, and a handful of adult kids (one’s doing time). Professional wrestlers all, they grapple with one another in and out of the ring while running a gym in Norwich, England. They know how to put on a good show, how to turn the mat into a stage with thumps and grunts, stomps and smashes. The family that smacks down together stays together, or at least that’s the idea in this charmer about love and choreographed war.

Writer-director Stephen Merchant plunges into the domestic fray straightway, opening with a peek at the Rock, aka Dwayne Johnson, living the dream on the Knights’ television. Johnson is one of the movie’s producers as well as one of the story’s leading talismans, the embodiment of the Knight family ideal. A poster of him from his title glory days hangs in the bedroom of the family’s daughter, Paige (Florence Pugh), who’s been wrestling since she was a young teenager. Alongside her older brother Zak (Jack Lowden), Paige is carrying on a tradition begun by her parents, Ricky (Nick Frost) and Julia (Lena Headey), who found salvation both in each other and inside the ring.

Like all genre movies, sports stories tend to cling to a familiar template, one involving struggle, tears, heart, soul and triumph — cue the cheering crowd. “Fighting With My Family” isn’t much different, which is extremely and shrewdly on point for a movie about professional wrestlers with bigger-than-life personalities and flamboyant stage names who, in a circumscribed space, deliver precisely coordinated, rule-bound narratives of victory, agony and defeat. Like genre cinema, professional wrestling strikes a balance between convention and innovation, between what the crowd knows (expects) and the surprises, the little deviations from the usual script, that can drive it to its feet.

Much of the movie turns on a sibling rivalry that upends and nearly rends the family when Paige, selected at an audition for World Wrestling Entertainment, is shipped off to a Florida boot camp. (WWE Studios helped make the movie.) While Paige — a Goth girl with a heavy curtain of jet-black hair — struggles to fit into the competition, where the tanned and the blond rule, often in bikinis, Zak licks his wounds at home, trying and generally failing to deal with disappointment. As Merchant toggles between Zak in Norwich and Paige in Florida, he settles into a familiar struggle between authenticity and artificiality, a seemingly odd divide on which to hang a tale of professional wrestlers.

If it works, it’s partly because of the easy allure of authenticity narratives, even the most contrived. Paige considers the other female competitors suspiciously, unwittingly condescending to them because she doesn’t view them as real wrestlers. For Paige, her authenticity is a given, even if her professional persona — which changes along with her wrestling name — is a construct. Merchant gently plays with this idea, mostly to fill in the story as she progresses from obliviousness to self-knowledge and the inevitable third-act clinch. (The genesis of the movie is an entertaining, more open-ended Channel 4 television documentary about the Knights, “The Wrestlers: Fighting With My Family.”)

Merchant is probably best known for the original British version of “The Office,” which he helped create. He doesn’t do much with the camera in “Fighting With My Family,” which has a filmmaking style that’s best described as functional. But he has a terrific cast (including Vince Vaughn as a coach), pinpoint timing and a gift for visual japes and physical comedy, for arranging bodies in funny formations and for underlining everyday absurdity. Merchant also has a sense of flow. Even when the jokes are as blunt as the bowling ball that Ricky delivers to another wrestler’s groin — they’re testing out a dubious routine — they just slide into the story, becoming part of its textured realism

Like its amiable, irresistible ménage, “Fighting With My Family” softens its rougher edges with humor. It’s often broadly funny but never mean or patronizing; it takes the Knights, their eccentricities and quixotic aspirations seriously, but not enough to squelch the fun. At times, particularly when the family is in its element at its gym (aka World Association of Wrestling, aka WAW), which does double-time as a refuge for young neighborhood strays, the movie evokes the working-class milieu familiar from British filmmakers like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. Merchant doesn’t seem keen to score political points, but he nevertheless quietly delivers some truths amid the laughter and hurt.

Additional Information:

Rated PG-13 for professional wrestling violence. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/movies/fighting-with-my-family-review.html" id="4f2c5057-d00a-3e60-a2e6-8c5376283719">The New York Times</a>.

'Fighting With My Family' Review: They Body Slam You, Your Mum and Dad. Lovingly.

Norwegian black metal started to make mainstream news when some of its adherents were arrested on charges of murder, arson and other crimes. (They torched churches.) The bleak story is charted in the book “Lords of Chaos,” whose sensationalist subtitle — “The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground” — could serve as the movie’s elevator pitch (though “rise and fall” would be more accurate for the movie). Written by Akerlund and Dennis Magnusson, the screen version centers on Oystein Aarseth (a nicely slippery Rory Culkin), an entrepreneurial musician and professed Satanist who adopts the stage name Euronymous, after a Greek flesh-eating demon.

The movie’s subject is ostensibly outré, but the narrative arc is all too familiar, tracking Oystein’s journey with his group Mayhem from garage-band anonymity to breaking-news infamy. In a voice-over that skews (for reasons you learn later) more sardonic than Culkin’s on-screen performance, Oystein lays out his origin story (he takes credit for inventing Norwegian black metal) and fills in the world he helped make. He’s selling a band and a flamboyant brand that grow more nihilistic and death-oriented as their notoriety and followers increase. One minute, the band is just a motley crew of hard-playing party monsters; the next, one guy is turning fragments of a dead bandmate’s shattered skull into jewelry.

Akerlund, a veteran music-video director who intersperses “Lords of Chaos” with mildly surrealistic bursts, never establishes a coherent or interesting point of view. The tone unproductively veers from the goofy to the creepy, which creates a sense that he was still figuring it out in the editing. He skates over the story’s sociopolitical stakes but goes hard on the cheap shocks: a dead cat hanging from a ceiling like a fixture, bozo fans gnawing on a severed pig’s head mid-concert, close-ups of knives digging and plunging into bodies. He doesn’t seem to care much about those bodies, including that of a gay man who is sexually lured, and brutally murdered, by one of Oystein’s cohort.

It’s never clear why things go as wrong as they do, other than Oystein’s brand marketing was disastrously successful. The character here certainly has a gift for dubious choices and bad company, including a singer portentously named Dead (Jack Kilmer, exuding low-key, melancholic charisma), and a creepy enthusiast, Kristian Vikernes (Emory Cohen), aka Varg, aka Count Grishnackh. Periodically someone rails against religion and conformity for a bit of lukewarm rebel posing, but all this soon sounds like a broken record at a party you’d like to leave. Far more effective is a scene in which a blank young man relaxes in his middle-class home shortly before killing a stranger for no reason at all.

Rated R for graphic, bloody violence, including suicide. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/movies/lords-of-chaos-review.html" id="984fbd28-15d7-3fe0-a0c5-9080a59797d7">The New York Times</a>.

Director Jonas Akerlund works hard to deliver on the title of “Lords of Chaos,” a tale of bad music and terrible deeds. Inspired by a true story, the movie ladles up lots of pulpy bits and buckets of blood to tell a depressing, depressingly familiar story about what happens when young men with apparent means and a whole lot of free time get together to build their own precariously hermetic world. In this case, their clubhouse was the Norwegian black-metal scene of the 1980s and early ‘90s, wh...

'Lords of Chaos' Review: Where Anomie and Speed Metal Meet Doom

This isn’t news; I know it, you know it. But it seems worth repeating again and ad infinitum, especially given that “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” isn’t as distractingly fun, shiny and bright as the more satisfying franchise installments. It drags and sometimes bores, which makes it easier for your mind to drift elsewhere, to thoughts of family, deadlines, chores, the creative impoverishment of the big studios and the casual, fundamentally corrupt commercial exploitation of the child audience. Put differently, what distinguishes this from the better Lego movies is that they’re good commercials.

The new one was written by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the franchise’s brain trust, and directed by Mike Mitchell, whose credits include “Trolls,” another toy-based feature. “The Lego Movie 2” mostly takes place in Bricksburg, the happy town where once upon a time in the buoyant 2014 movie, Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), an upbeat dude in an orange vest, triumphed to become a heroic master builder. Five years later, life in Bricksburg has turned into a George Miller-esque dystopian hellscape. Emmet still looks on the sunny side, but everyone else, including his pal, Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), looks like Lilliputian refugees in their own decrepit and sand-swept “Mad Max.”

That sounds more promising than what transpires in the movie, a busy, noisy clutter of action sequences, pop-cultural allusions, life lessons and cute critters. The clever if rather cynical, self-reflexive backstory involves live-action scenes of a bickering big brother and little sister who, unbeknown to Bricksburg, are the true master builders. The children’s disharmony makes trouble in their play world, draining it of color and optimism; in other words, everything is not awesome, to borrow the franchise’s insanely catchy theme song. There’s a tidy message here: Be nice to your kid sister, which is supernice advice especially because the movie was produced, directed and written almost entirely by men.

The exception is the animation director, Trisha Gum, who worked with Mitchell on the movie’s look and feel, which is by turns immersive and wittily distancing, as when the Bricksburg story is interrupted by a shot of a toy dangling from a string. One pleasure of the Lego movies is how they personalize generic plastic bricks, creating a sense of life by combining scratches and other signs of the human hand — as if a child had used and reused these toys — with distinct, caricatured voices. Will Arnett’s demented take on Batman remains the standout, and it’s disappointing that he isn’t given more to do. In line with the live-action siblings, the under-inspired Emmet and Lucy drive the Bricksburg part.

Much of the story involves an eerily smiley alien land (shades of Camazotz in “A Wrinkle in Time”) where Batman is to marry the polymorphous queen (Tiffany Haddish). Every so often, the kids and their mom (Maya Rudolph) pop up in the live-action scenes, and their family dissonance creates chaos and intimations of doom in Bricksburg until it doesn’t.

The moral is that we should play nice, but also buy truckloads of Legos. In this respect, this sales pitch fits in with something that Walt Disney, a marketing genius, once said about his company not catering “to the child but to the child in the adult.” He was talking about his films’ viewers, who also happened to be the folks destined to foot the toy bill.

‘The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part’

Rated PG for moderate peril and fighting. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/movies/the-lego-movie-two-the-second-part-review.html" id="b39773a0-8cf3-3205-aa0a-4b932b9ff01a">The New York Times</a>.

The new animated Lego movie is pretty much like the last one. Or maybe I’m thinking of another one, not that it much matters. There are differences between editions, most fairly negligible. The unifying factor, to note the obvious about the state of big-screen children’s entertainment, is that they are all feature-length commercials. The “Transformers” series helped pave the way for Legos by flipping the old idea that movies (like “Star Wars”) were the creative source for the licensed merch, ...

'The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part' Review: Everything Is Not Awesome. Everything Is an Ad.

PARK CITY, Utah — Every year, the Sundance Film Festival arrives with the usual hype, unreasonable expectations and the audience’s ravenous appetite for the new. And each year, despite the reliably tough odds (movies are hard to get made) and the industry’s perpetual existential dread (things are always bad unless they’re awful), Sundance comes through. It showcases good and sometimes great movies that affirm that there is more to contemporary American cinema than bland, branded product, a truism that will carry greater, deeper significance when these titles enter the larger, Disney-dominated world.

For movie lovers exhausted by the circus called awards season the arrival in January of the new and unseen is especially welcome. That’s the case even when there’s no consensus favorite like “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012) to ignite Sundance. More common are the years defined by low-key discoveries, the ones that seem unlikely to hit the cinema jackpot — the critics, box office and zeitgeist — as powerfully as Jordan Peele’s 2017 freakout, “Get Out,” did.

This year’s best shot at mainstream success is “Late Night,” a smart comedy about a talk-show host, Katherine (Emma Thompson, superb) who receives a much-needed jolt from an unlikely new writer, Molly (Mindy Kaling, who wrote the script). Director Nisha Ganatra doesn’t do much visually, but she adroitly works around Kaling’s stand-and-deliver acting and gives Thompson the room she needs to turn a cliché into a striking character.

The movie shrewdly leads with comedy — it has belly laughs and zingers — even as it skitters over, and at times dives into, questions of diversity and sexism in entertainment industry, including from other women. Katherine, a transformational figure because she’s the only female late-night host, decides she needs to shake things up by bringing a woman onto her all-male writing staff. Once upon a time, she bashed through a glass ceiling without offering a hand up to other women, a story with real-world sting. Katherine isn’t interested in diversity: She hires a woman for selfish reasons. And Molly delivers because she’s talented — she just needed to get in the room.

As is often the case, some of the best movies I saw at the festival arrived quietly, without celebrities and clamor, and are unlikely to rack up the sales that generate splashy news. Amazon went on a shopping spree here, buying a number of titles, including “Late Night” and “The Report,” from Scott Z. Burns, who’s better known for his scripts (“The Bourne Ultimatum”). Eminently watchable and rather too self-satisfied, “The Report” centers on a Senate staffer (a fine Adam Driver) who is tasked by his boss, Dianne Feinstein (a bone-dry, finely calibrated Annette Bening), with investigating the CIA’s interrogation methods in the wake of Sept. 11.

The presence of another great actress, Alfre Woodard, a Sundance veteran onscreen and off (she was on a 1985 jury), was enough to send me to “Clemency,” the second feature from writer-director Chinonye Chukwu and a standout in the dramatic competition. Woodard plays Bernadine Williams, a coolly efficient warden who’s overseen some dozen executions. As she prepares for the death of another inmate — played by an outstanding Aldis Hodge — Bernadine begins disappearing into her own profound isolation. With visual austerity and not an ounce of sentimentality, Chukwu transforms a character study into an indictment of institutionalized murder, the horror of which is made harrowingly palpable as Bernadine’s face becomes a rictus of pain.

The other dramatic competition high point was the plaintive, gorgeous and finally exultant “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” the first feature directed by Joe Talbot. It centers on a young, romantically despondent skateboarder, Jimmie Fails (actor and character share the name), who can’t let go of the glorious Victorian house that his family lost years earlier. When the house’s current owners conveniently exit, Jimmie and his sole friend, Montgomery (Jonathan Majors), take possession in a story that doesn’t announce its themes but instead transforms lived-in ideas about friendship, loneliness, artmaking, gentrification and the many faces of black masculinity.

The most heart-skippingly lovely passages in “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” don’t so much drive the story as slow things down, enriching it. In an early scene, Jimmie skateboards out of his neighborhood — the faithful Mont hops on the board behind him — into a city that becomes progressively white and visually static (they breeze by in a different time signature). Other people often seem a mystery to Jimmie, who’s estranged from his parents and much of the world. But they’re fodder for Mont, who carries around a red sketchbook filled with portraits and scribbles and who eventually transforms a world of loss into touchingly reflexive art.

Directed by Kirill Mikhanovsky, who shares script credit with Alice Austen, “Give Me Liberty” at times brings to mind the work of Aleksei German, a Russian master of controlled chaos. It follows a young Russian-American, Vic (Chris Galust), who over the course of a hilarious, poignant and very wild day and night in Milwaukee, ferries disabled passengers to and from their appointments while he tries to deliver a boisterous gaggle of elderly mourners to a funeral. As he careens from one destination to the next, Vic begins a beautifully nuanced relationship with one of his passengers, Tracy (Lauren Spencer), a young woman with ALS who uses a wheelchair.

Completely, delightfully unpredictable from scene to scene, “Give Me Liberty” draws you in with its moving performances and blasts of broad comedy — much provided by a visitor played by Maksim Stoyanov — that are delivered with whiplash camerawork, abrupt cuts and sudden tone shifts. Its matter-of-fact approach to disability, including in some deeply moving exchanges between Vic and a profoundly disabled older man, is a tonic. Diversity is a mantra at Sundance, which has long been publicly committed to inclusion, but disabled people haven’t always been part of that mix.

Over the years, the diversity has deepened, become more layered, partly because, I imagine, ambitious filmmakers of increasingly different backgrounds know that Sundance will be receptive to them. The festival still programs familiar coming-of-age stories about teenagers who learn something important; this year’s crop included male-driven tales like “Adam” and “Big Time Adolescence” as well as Minhal Baig’s “Hala,” about a young Muslim girl whose identity struggles evoke “Pariah,” Dee Rees’ 2011 Sundance dazzler. Palatable, easy-to-watch movies have always been part of the Sundance mix; if only its programmers would embrace aesthetic and narrative diversity more fully.

In time, moviegoers will be able to see some of the festival’s best titles, including Joanna Hogg’s elegantly fractured drama “The Souvenir,” about a young film student and her older lover. Invariably, some attendees will insist that this year was another disappointment, though it’s worth remembering that the 2018 edition — which included “Leave No Trace,” “Sorry to Bother You” and “Three Identical Strangers” — was similarly pegged before the festival ended. By the time the 2020 edition arrives, some of this year’s finest movies — including must-see documentaries like “American Factory,” “The Brink,” “One Child Nation,” “Knock Down the House” and “Hail Satan?” — will have come and gone. And Sundance will be reliably ready to disappoint and delight all over again.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/movies/sundance-best-late-night-mindy-kaling-emma-thompson.html" id="c4556156-634a-327f-a90e-171911693898">The New York Times</a>.