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Tag: Sundance Film Festival Reviews

  • ‘Saccharine’ Review: Midori Francis Navigates the Hallucinatory Minefield Between Body Image and Body Horror in Messy Weight-Loss Freakout

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    There’s nothing sweet about Saccharine, but just as it should be gaining traction, nothing terribly coherent about it either. Natalie Erika James throws a bunch of great ideas into her fem-horror riff on body dysmorphia, shame and the tireless quest for physical perfection in a culture obsessed with youthful hotness — following in the path of The Substance and Ryan Murphy’s latest dollop of high-gloss trash, The Beauty. But the storytelling goes haywire, to the point where you’re unsure what the Australian writer-director wants to say, though her game lead, Midori Francis, keeps you watching.

    James’ visually stylish film, acquired by IFC and Shudder ahead of its Midnight bow at Sundance, has some originality thanks to a subtle grounding in the Buddhist/Taoist folk tradition of the hungry ghost. But James never commits fully enough to the spiritual/supernatural side to add much dimension to the confused narrative. While the protagonist is Japanese Australian, the movie has a feel closer to Thai horror in atmosphere, if not in intensity or dread.

    Saccharine

    The Bottom Line

    Let them eat cake.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
    Cast: Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor, Showko Showfukutei, Emily Milledge, Joseph Baldwin, Louisa Mignon, Annie Shapiro
    Director-screenwriter: Natalie Erika James

    1 hour 52 minutes

    Obsessively recording her observations in a journal and charting her progress on a graph, Melbourne med student Hana (Francis) is determined to get down to her goal weight of 60 kilograms (132 pounds). Her unspoken attraction to toned and confident gym trainer Alanya (Madeleine Madden) might be part of the incentive, given that Hana is queer more in theory than practice. She signs up to be Alanya’s guinea pig in a 12-week fitness program.

    While she’s out at a club with her student pals Josie (Danielle Macdonald) and Georgie (Emily Milledge), Hana runs into an old friend, Melissa (Annie Shapero). Hana doesn’t recognize her at first, until it clicks that Melissa is the svelte transformation of the heavy, bullied girl she knew in high school. Telling Hana that the girl from back then is dead, Melissa puts her astonishing weight loss down to a miracle drug she calls “the gray,” giving Hana a few tablets and urging her to try them.

    Melissa’s insistence is somewhat questionable since Hana looks like a normal-size young woman by non-Hollywood standards, even with some prosthetic enhancement. But perhaps that’s part of James’ point — that body expectations for women are so unrealistic that many, like Hana, are driven to starvation and self-loathing. Except that with “the gray,” Melissa swears she can eat as much as she wants and not gain weight.

    Which appears to be the case when Hana wakes up after a heavy night of clubbing with the messy debris of a large takeout assortment on her bedroom floor and yet somehow feels different. She’s sufficiently intrigued to analyze the pills in the university medical lab, discovering a compound of phosphates and … human ashes. Luckily, she has a cadaver handy, one of several people who donated their bodies to science and are getting cut up in class.

    The body assigned to Hana, Josie and their lab teammates is a corpulent woman cruelly nicknamed “Big Bertha.” Hana starts taking home a rib cage here, a few bones there, grinding them up with a mortar and pestle to make her own DIY version of the gray. The compound works, and while her gluttonous binges become increasingly uncontrolled — filmed by James and DP Charlie Sarroff like woozy Francis Bacon images — her weight keeps plummeting. That gets her an admiring comment, an Instagram post and perhaps a flicker of sexual interest from Alanya.

    But homemade meds can come with unexpected side effects — in this case, ghoulish visitations from the hangry Bertha, looking like a cross between Eric Cartman and Nosferatu. Visible only to Hana at first, in convex reflective surfaces like a kettle or the back of a spoon, Bertha does not take kindly to Hana’s attempts to kick the pill habit and start policing her food intake the old-fashioned way.

    In one of the funnier episodes, the spectral presence shoots candy bars from Hana’s rucksack across the room at her until she shovels them in her mouth in a rattled semi-trance state. It’s unclear whether Bertha is also enraged by Hana’s weight continuing to drop — she gets down to 45 kilograms (99 pounds) at one point — but girl, we’ve all been there with the body envy.

    James’ 2020 debut feature, Relic — a slow-burn chiller about three generations of women tormented by a presence in the family home — worked because the director never allowed her control of the material to slacken, even when the narrative was stretched a bit thin. But Saccharine slips off the rails, especially once Hana convinces Josie that Bertha’s spirit has latched onto her in malevolent ways, growing bigger and stronger all the time.

    The always terrific Macdonald (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) is under-used, and the rebuke of confident, plus-size Josie to Hana for letting fatphobia curb her self-acceptance is a point made too hurriedly to register.

    Scenes with Hana’s parents seem intended to shed more light than they actually do, with some psych 101 subtext suggested by the fussing of her birdlike Japanese mother (Showko Showfukutei) and the remoteness of her mostly immobile Australian dad (Robert Taylor), who is steadily eating himself to death. But the parental elements just end up seeming like narrative clutter, with nothing gained by the teasing delayed reveal of Hana’s XL father.

    The climactic scenes toy with the blurred lines between hallucination and reality, but the logic falls apart; threads like Hana’s rash decision to undertake a dangerous surgical fix virtually evaporate without much payoff. And at just under two hours, the movie could seriously benefit from cutting some flab.

    Saccharine is more polished in its technical aspects than in its storytelling, from the queasy visuals (Sarroff shot Relic, as well as both Smile movies) and sickly lighting to composer Hannah Peel’s eerie synths to some impressively gnarly gore. Ultimately, however, the biggest plus is Francis, whose commitment to the central role is so unfaltering that she makes the script’s rough patches less of a deal-breaker.

    James has no lack of talent, but fans of Relic who were hoping this might be a return to form after the mixed-bag Rosemary’s Baby prequel Apartment 7A — either as a juicy serve of Cronenbergian feminism or a movie with something to say about accessible weight-loss meds — will likely be disappointed.

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    David Rooney

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  • ‘Rock Springs’ Review: Kelly Marie Tran and Benedict Wong in a Fresh, Vivid Spin on Grief Horror

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    After the death of her husband, Emily (Kelly Marie Tran) doesn’t know what to do. Her daughter Gracie (Aria Kim) hasn’t spoken in the six months since her father’s passing, and seems to be withdrawing more and more every day. Her mother-in-law, Nai Nai (Fiona Fu), copes with her son’s death through traditional Chinese spirituality, which she shares with her granddaughter. But Emily is Vietnamese and doesn’t speak the language. It’s just now that her husband is gone that Emily is forced to confront the cultural gap between her and those closest to her. Only showing her grief privately, Emily emotionally isolates herself, hoping that pushing forward will heal all the pain. But starting over in Rock Springs, Wyoming, proves to be more difficult than she could have ever anticipated. 

    Nai Nai warned against moving during “Ghost Week”, a time when the barrier between the spirit world and our world comes down. In Chinese culture, the mourning families must pray for their departed loved ones, guiding their souls to peace in the afterlife. Mourning is communal, and as families share their grief, they’re supposed to find healing together. But Nai Nai also warns Gracie about “Hungry Ghosts”, those who die scared and alone with no family members to guide them home.

    Rock Springs

    The Bottom Line

    A big swing that pays off.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
    Cast: Kelly Marie Tran, Benedict Wong, Jimmy O. Yang, Aria Kim, Fiona Fu, Ricky He, Cardi Wong
    Director/Writer: Vera Miao

    1 hour 37 minutes

    When Gracie steals an old doll from a garage sale, it puts her in contact with a spirit she hopes is her father. But writer and director Vera Miao has other plans, using Gracie and her family to tell a multi-generational story of racism, grief and trauma. When Gracie disappears into the woods, past and present collide as she comes face to face with the spirits of dead miners. And what began as a small tale expands to become a confrontation with generational sadness and spiritual unrest.

    In 1885, on the same land where Emily chose to restart her life with her family, a tragedy occurred. A village of Chinese migrant men was massacred and their homes destroyed. At least 28 Chinese miners were killed that day, with other sources indicating a death toll of 40 or 50 people. Only 15 survived with injuries at the hands of angry white settlers who resented that the local mining company had employed them in the first place. These settlers were never prosecuted for what is now known as the worst mass shooting in Wyoming history. To many viewers, this film will be an introduction to this historic tragedy. 

    Miao takes us back to that day, showing us a tight-knit group of miners with Ah Tseng (Benedict Wong) and He Yew (Jimmy O. Yang) at the center. Before the attacks begin, they discuss their homeland and new identity as Americans. Though Ah Tseng has been in the country longer — having worked on the railroads — he seems to doubt the idea that the United States could really be called home. The murderous white settlers only solidify his doubt before his untimely death. The fallen men are piled into a mass grave in the woods right outside Emily’s new house.

    Cinematographer Heyjin Jun cuts through the sadness with breathtaking images of forest and landscape, showcasing the beautiful land spoiled by blood and hate. Tran gives a compelling performance as a young widow adjusting to single parenthood and suddenly being the head of her household. Since her breakout performance in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Tran has struggled to find meaningful roles that allow her to show her range. But she excels here as a woman haunted by her husband’s death and afraid to embrace the traditions that give her daughter comfort. She has great chemistry with newcomer Kim, a gifted young actress who manages to be expressive while rarely uttering a single word.

    Rock Springs is a big swing from Miao that pays off in the end, blending drama, horror and ugly American history to create a truly heartbreaking and hopefully healing experience.

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    Jon Frosch

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  • ‘Antiheroine’ Review: Courtney Love Comes Clean About Highs, Lows and Needing to Be Heard in a Rock Doc Both Raucous and Intimate

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    Of the many insights into turbulent genius Courtney Love in Brit filmmakers Edward Lovelace and James Hall’s adoring biographical doc Antiheroine, the most captivating is the alt rock queen’s sense of humor about her reputation as a wild-child wrecking ball with an endless catalogue of messy transgressions. “Everyone has a Courtney story,” she says early on with a shrug. “She fucked my boyfriend. She stole my grandmother’s wedding ring. She ate my muesli.” Love is not interested in denying or confirming any of these claims, and it’s her unapologetic, unfiltered candor that makes her a great hang.

    If you’ve ever screamed along or jumped around in your underwear to “Violet” or “Olympia” — no, that’s not a confession — you are sure to find this exploratory step back into the spotlight thrilling. It’s an overdue reaffirmation of Love’s place in rock history with an intimate glimpse into her creative process, especially as a lyricist, while she works on her first album of new material in more than a decade.

    Antiheroine

    The Bottom Line

    An unholy icon sheds her celebrity skin.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    With: Courtney Love, Michael Stipe, Melissa Auf der Maur, Eric Erlandson, Patty Schemel, Billie Joe Armstrong, Butch Walker
    Directors: Edward Lovelace, James Hall

    1 hour 38 minutes

    “I’m a household name stuck in 1994,” Love says, referring to the year that, within the same week, her husband Kurt Cobain died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and her band, Hole, released the angry howl Live Through This, one of the best and most ageless albums of the ‘90s. Vilified by the press and detested by Nirvana fans, Love says that when the jokes started about her having killed Cobain, she knew that was going to be her whole life from then on.

    In allowing their subject to tell her own story, Lovelace and Hall make it clear that Love refuses to see herself as a victim. She owns the charges of being abrasive, rude, scrappy, ferociously ambitious and a complicated figure in music history. But the fearlessness and determination with which she pulled herself back up from the depths make her a survivor, one whose music served as her armor through drug addiction, illness, controversy and everything else the world could throw at her.

    Even when defending her talent, so often unfairly written off, Love seems unconcerned about being liked. Of the artistic intent behind Hole’s 1991 debut album Pretty on the Inside, she says: “It was me announcing that I was a great fucking poet, and me announcing my persona as a cunt.” Her longtime friend Michael Stipe puts her in the Marianne Faithfull school of women in music: “Fuck you, this is who I am.”

    The recap of Love’s early life is brisk but illuminating. Born in San Francisco in 1964, she grew up in what she describes as a countercultural household. Her father lost custody for giving her LSD at age four. She had her first drink at age 10, when a stepfather she calls “evil” deliberately got her smashed and made her sick for days.

    Her narcissistic mother moved the family to New Zealand in 1973, but Love was sent back to live in Portland with family friends after being expelled from school for bad behavior. At age 14 she was arrested for shoplifting a Kiss T-shirt and sent to a juvenile hall for a spell, where a counsellor gave her a copy of Patti Smith’s seminal Horses album, which Love says changed her life.

    All this is related first-hand by Love, and an occasional detail here and there gives the vague impression that too many fried brain cells have made her an unreliable narrator. It’s unclear at times if it’s the punchy edit (Jinx Godfrey, Dan Setford and Daniel Lapira are credited in that role) or Love’s attention span that keeps the conversation bouncing around.

    But the trajectory is raw and real, at times making you wonder how Love even made it into her 20s. And irrespective of how much her mind pings from one thing to another, often sparked by journal entries that bring the past to life, the doc leaves no doubt that her intelligence, humor and drive are what have kept her going.

    She shares youthful memories of hanging out with and learning from post-punk bands in Liverpool like Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, whose frontman Julian Cope Love says taught her how to walk into a room and behave like a rock star.

    She started playing guitar in 1980 and moved back to San Francisco, already knowing how to get famous, in her own words, and just needing money and discipline to get there. The movie makes a cogent case that being a rock star was wired into her metabolism rather than something she methodically set out to do.

    Even brutal experiences became fodder for her creativity, like a near rape from which she ran in a ripped dress with one shoe back to her Hollywood Blvd. apartment, then picked up her guitar and wrote Hole’s 1990 debut single, “Retard Girl.” Hole has long been acknowledged as an important feminist band, which is validated by a back catalogue of unflinching songs about sexual politics, exploitation, misogyny and objectification. Love is the composer of “Doll Parts,” after all.

    She is forthright about her drug use and addiction, whether to heroin or fame, and credits Milos Forman with saving her life when he fought to cast her in The People vs, Larry Flynt and later in Man on the Moon, sending her to rehab to get clean before the first movie.

    The real meat of the doc, for many, will be Love’s thoughts looking back on her relationship and marriage with Cobain, captured in affecting archival images and home movies. Music, talent and mutual admiration were their magnet, and Stipe describes the couple as “these two intelligent, raw people riffing off each other in a beautiful way.”

    Love talks about the common experience of parental rejection that drew them closer; about the dream of their wedding in Hawaii like “being on acid;” and she tenderly recalls a tranquil period after the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, when they retreated to Washington state and found a bubble of happiness out of the public eye.

    This idyll occurred because the family was forced to leave California — when custody of Frances was at risk after allegations emerged in a Vanity Fair profile that Love was doing drugs while pregnant. (Love points out that she took weekly drug tests throughout her pregnancy.) But that contradiction between public vilification and private peace is part of the mystique surrounding their marriage.

    There’s clearly still a lot of pain as Love speaks ruefully about how she ultimately was better equipped for fame than Kurt, who craved oblivion and found it too easily. Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur recalls heroin being everywhere when the alternative grunge scene was cresting, and the sight of people shooting up backstage was not uncommon. Cobain overdosed on Rohypnol and spent three days in a coma in Rome the year he died, while Nirvana was touring Europe.

    The torture of knowing Kurt tried to call her at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, and the desk staff failed to connect him despite Love’s instructions to put him through at any time, obviously still haunts her. She considers that the moment he died.

    Self-pity is not in Love’s vocabulary, but band members and friends talk about how the Hole touring schedule, right after Cobain’s suicide, gave her no time to grieve. There are moving accounts of her delivering 100 percent onstage and then crumpling backstage, “a broken, tortured person trying to overcome the pain of her entire life.” The lack of humanity from people determined to make her the villain left scars.

    The film drifts over much of the past two decades except to say that Love stayed clean, turned to Buddhism and rediscovered her need to write music after decamping to London. There’s a brief discussion of Frances obtaining legal emancipation from her mother in 2009, when she was 17, and the daughter’s absence among interviewees is conspicuous. Love volunteers that she was no picnic as a parent, though her joy at one point when she’s flying off to California to see her grandson hints that there’s been at least some degree of repair to the relationship.

    There are other notable absences, including collaborators like the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, who co-wrote several songs on the 1998 Hole album Celebrity Skin, including the hits “Malibu” and the title track, and helped smooth the band’s transition into a more commercial pop-punk sound. (Love amusingly calls it “my dark Fleetwood Mac record.”)

    But Lovelace and Hall make no claim of presenting an exhaustive chronology, mostly leaving it to their subject to go where her reflections take her. That predominantly becomes the new album, which is still in the works, with no news of completion or a release date. Stipe, who co-wrote some of the new songs, confidently calls the album a classic: “We’ll see how the world responds to it.”

    After years of sitting it out as other people told her story, at times with gross misrepresentations, Love just wants to get the album right and have her say in music, which she points out is the only way anyone will listen to her. The fragments of the new songs we hear — either tinkering away on them at home or laying down vocals in the studio, at one point with Auf der Maur in a gorgeous reunion moment — sound promising.

    Says Love: “I got kicked out of the party and now I’m coming back after a very long time.” I won’t be the only one rooting for her renaissance.

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    David Rooney

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  • ‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’ Review: John Turturro Mesmerizes as a Small-Time Hustler Facing Obsolescence in Fine-Grained Crime Thriller

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    Rarely does an opening song choice so precisely define the mood of a film like LCD Soundsystem’s exquisitely tortured anthem “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down” over the opening frames of writer-director Noah Segan’s quiet knockout, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. James Murphy’s melancholy vocals capture the unlivable but unleavable push-pull of the city, wistfully looking back at its grubby past while lamenting the shiny soullessness and skyrocketing exclusivity of its present.

    Those sentiments seem to come directly from John Turturro as Harry Lehman, a nimble-fingered thief with a watchful gaze, always scoping a potential score on the streets or subways.

    The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

    The Bottom Line

    Contemplative, cool-headed and transfixing.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    Cast: John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Will Price, Tatiana Maslany, Steve Buscemi, Lori Tan Chinn, Kelvin Han Yee, Karina Arroyave, John Gallagher Jr., Victoria Moroles, Jack Mulhern, Michael Hsu Rosen, Aida Turturro, Mark Cayne
    Director-screenwriter: Noah Segan

    1 hour 28 minutes

    The song also suggests the movie’s pervasive subtextual nostalgia for the analog past — felt by the small-time career criminal, but no less by an old-school detective being shoved aside to make way for the clever kids in the cyber unit, by a crusty pawn shop owner fencing stolen goods or a steely crime matriarch, taking care of business and adapting to the times, but not shy about admitting she misses the bad old days.

    Turturro is unshowy but magnificent in his best film role in years, an honorable hustler who still carries himself with dignity despite a lifetime of regrets and a world gradually leaving him behind. At least until he unwittingly targets the wrong mark and has to think and act fast to protect the people he cares about and secure his own sorrowful redemption.

    Harry could be described as a counterpart on the other side of the law from John Stone, the wearily disheveled attorney played by Turturro in HBO’s riveting limited series, The Night Of — even if Harry has a greater appreciation for good tailoring. What makes Segan’s movie so intoxicating, however, is not just the depth of its inside-and-out central character study but the granular textures of the world Harry inhabits and the incisively drawn secondary characters played by a deep bench of very fine and impeccably cast actors.

    Segan has clearly been paying attention during his long association with Rian Johnson, who first cast him in Brick and has found roles for him in pretty much everything since. He moved into directing with a segment of the 2019 horror anthology, Scare Package, following in 2022 with his first solo feature, the Shudder vampire flick Blood Relatives. Segan’s latest is a complete swerve into more nuanced genre territory and more complex storytelling, not to mention a singularly great New York movie. The hypnotic, patiently held closing shot alone will strike a chord with natives, transplants and ex-residents alike.

    The opening scene is a model of narrative economy. A well-heeled businessman (John Gallagher Jr.) applies a spritz of cologne, slips on his chunky Philippe Patek watch and exits his upscale apartment building, heading for the subway when no cabs materialize. All we see is a quick shot of peak-hour strap-hangers packed in tight, with Harry close behind the guy. Cut to the end of a lunch meeting, when the businessman reaches for his wallet and finds it gone.

    Harry obviously has been at this game since he was a young man, when more people carried thick wads of cash. Still, he scrapes by, offloading resaleable items through his old friend Ben (an endearingly spiky Steve Buscemi) and laughing off the suggestion of tech-savvy young scammer Eve (Victoria Moroles) that he should shift to online theft.

    While he’s not exactly Robin Hood, Harry is an oddly principled man considering how he makes his living. He believes in circulating his stolen dough where it matters — whether it’s a healthcare worker at the facility that looks after his nonverbal, disabled wife Rosie (Karina Arroyave) during the day; or a neighbor in their Bronx apartment building who looks in on her when she’s at home and Harry steps out to ply his trade.

    Turturro gives Harry a sad-eyed appearance offset by a frequently jokey manner. But it’s the thoughtfulness and resourcefulness of a man whose cerebral cogs are constantly turning that defines him.

    One of the most poignant aspects of his performance is the way his face is transformed by love and devotion when he’s with Rosie — gently brushing her hair; carrying her up multiple flights of stairs and then returning for her wheelchair when the elevator is out of order; cheerfully nattering away in one-sided conversations; or spinning “Native New Yorker” on vinyl and goofily dancing around the room serenading her.

    Things go wrong for Harry when he unwittingly steals from the swaggering young scion of a crime family, Dylan (punchy live-wire Will Price), lifting a gym bag from the kid’s car that contains a luxury watch, guns and a USB card loaded with a fortune in cryptocurrency. Harry has no idea what it is and nor does Ben, whose dinosaur desktop is about 500 upgrades short of the capability necessary to read the thing. Ben sends him to another fence in Chinatown (Kelvin Han Yee), who takes the USB and a few other items off Harry’s hands.

    Dylan and his posse are well-connected, so it takes them relatively little time to track down Harry using CCTV footage. Threatening to harm Rosie if he doesn’t deliver, Dylan gives Harry just a few hours to retrieve the USB and return it to him.

    Watching The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, you are reminded of how rarely we now get to see movies fully shot on locations in the city and how there really is no substitute for the real thing.

    Cinematographer Sam Levy, whose long string of credits includes Frances Ha, Lady Bird and His Three Daughters, captures the bodegas, the subway trains and platforms, the tenements, storefronts and bustling street life with crispness but also a slightly rough-hewn, unvarnished quality, heightening the kinship with gritty New York movies of the ‘70s.

    Harry’s against-the-clock quest to ensure Rosie’s safety takes him back to Chinatown and from there to Brooklyn. Segan’s tight plotting amplifies the necessity for anyone in Harry’s profession of being able to come up with solutions on the fly. One such instance is an amusing bit of improvisation in which he gets backup by greasing the palm of a panhandler played by Aida Turturro.

    There’s also a very moving interlude during which Harry, claiming to be “in the neighborhood,” goes to Queens to see his estranged daughter Kelly, beautifully played by Tatiana Maslany as a knot of wounded anger. It’s that strong scene, and Harry’s contrition, that plant the idea of him preparing to make his exit. The encounter with Kelly — which reverberates in a lovely moment later on — is made even more touching by the heavily embellished account of it he shares with Rosie.

    The ways in which Harry’s detective buddy Warren (Giancarlo Esposito in fine form), Ben, Eve and Billy (Mark Cayne), a young pickpocket who gets tips from the old-timer, all factor into the closing developments demonstrate that Segan has a real gift for intricate plotting, not to mention a deft hand at creating a satisfying ending rich in emotional shading.

    The final scenes also involve a drive across the river with an extended cameo from a major-name star, whose character and Harry — in a duologue loaded with revealing insights — seem to develop an understanding, despite circumstances that could hardly be more unfavorable.

    This is a remarkably layered and rewarding story, especially for a movie running less than 90 minutes; editor Hilda Rasula keeps the pace steady and the transitions fluid. A big assist comes from Gary Lionelli’s full-bodied score, with jazzy retro funk riffs that add excitement to the early scenes and more bluesy, somber sounds in the later action.

    Even before the Cole Porter standard “I Happen to Like New York” comes in over the closing shot, it’s clear this is a movie very close to born-and-bred New Yorker Segan’s heart. It’s an adoring tip of the hat to the city and to the vast canon of New York movies. And it’s a gift to the wonderful Turturro, another native son, who imbues his role with a lifetime of personal history, underplaying everything with the most delicate restraint.

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    David Rooney

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  • ‘Leviticus’ Review: A Sad, Frightening Conversion-Therapy Horror From Australia

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    While the happy and only barely tortured gay romance of Heated Rivalry sweeps the nation, nay the world, it might be instructive, if depressing, to remind ourselves that there are many young queer people who have a much harder time realizing their desires. The new film Leviticus, from director Adrian Chiarella, is a solemn and frightening acknowledgment of that reality, albeit one allegorized into supernatural horror. 

    The film takes place in a dreary town in Victoria, Australia, a drab industrial backwater whose people — or, at least some of whom — flock to religion to give their lives the brightness of hope and higher purpose. Teenager Niam (Joe Bird) has just moved to town with his mum (a deceptively sinister Mia Wasikowska) but already yearns to escape it. He finds some deliverance, of the emotional kind anyway, in a classmate, Ryan (Stacy Clausen), a handsome ruffian with whom Niam shares a special bond. They have found love, or at least affectionate lust, in a hopeless place, just as many kids have done before them, since time immemorial.

    Leviticus

    The Bottom Line

    A stylish, urgent allegory.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
    Cast: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Mia Wasikowska
    Director and writer: Adrian Chiarella

    1 hour 26 minutes

    Chief on the film’s mind is what happens when the relative innocence of that blush of first infatuation — neither boy seems particularly troubled by his proclivity — is spoiled by outside forces, like family and the church. As a hardcore religious right gains traction around the globe, Leviticus challenges the notion, made too easy to accept by the Heartstoppers and Love, Simons of the world, that coming out isn’t really such a big deal anymore. It is still — perhaps increasingly so, in this moment of backslide — monumental and dangerous for plenty of young people, often plunging their lives into horror.

    Chiarella is particularly interested in the abuses of conversion therapy, which hideously imagines that something innate can be excised or, at least, wholly ignored. It is a form of torture, one whose effects can cause lingering and sometimes fatal harm. Such trauma is made manifest in Leviticus, in which these afflicted kids are stalked by a sinister force that, cruelly and perversely, takes the form of the person they most want in the world.

    It’s a grim and clever conceit, even if its rules don’t always make total sense. What the device does most effectively is force the audience to think about the real-world analog of these characters’ psychic (and physical) pain: the many young people who have been told that their sexual and romantic desire will destroy them, that a fundamental human attraction is something they must flee from in mortal terror. How heartbreaking, and how vile, that any adult claiming compassion would seek to imbue a child with that extreme allergy to their own self. 

    Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind, as Naim and Ryan grow distrustful of each other, not sure if the needful, seductive person they see before them is real or a menacing specter who means to kill them. That doleful eeriness is the film’s best asset, adding a tragic queer love story to the template of youth-curse films like It Follows and Talk to Me. Both Bird and Clausen play this mounting nightmare with the appropriate ache and desperation, elevating the emotional tenor of Chiarella’s sad, frequently bleak film. Sure, Clausen is pretty enough that one wonders why he doesn’t just monetize his Instagram and flee to Sydney, but otherwise both he and Bird appropriately register as two small-towners trapped in a toxic community, starkly rendered in Chiarella’s drab austerity. 

    Though his metaphors are awfully on the nose, Chiarella convincingly insists on their power. He has made his argumentative trick work quite well, even if the movie’s messaging sometimes crosses into the obvious or didactic. And anyway, maybe we are at a time, yet again, when such simple lessons bear repeating, when it is not lame or dated to highlight the terrible violations of the most basic kind of homophobia. 

    There is also, perhaps, a slightly radical suggestion teased out toward the end of Chiarella’s film, one that harkens back to so many narratives of the past: Those stories told of uncles and sons and countless others who fled their oppression in search of something they knew to be true and decent, waiting for them in distant, glittering cities. Leviticus has the sturdy nerve and conviction to plainly state that sometimes home and family are irredeemable and worth abandoning. It is not so concerned with changing hearts and minds, but with saving lives. 

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    Richard Lawson

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  • ‘Hot Water’ Review: Lubna Azabal and Daniel Zolghadri Go West in a Slight but Sensitive Mother-Son Road Movie

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    A mother-son road movie more laced with humor than laden with trauma, Hot Water marks a warm and sensitive, if not entirely satisfying, debut feature from Ramzi Bashour.

    There’s an undeniable familiarity that nips at the heels (or wheels?) of the film as it traverses classic American landscapes alongside its protagonists, a tightly wound Lebanese woman (Lubna Azabal) and her turbulent, U.S.-raised teenager (Daniel Zolghadri). We’ve been here before — in this situation, with these types, against these backdrops. Every year at Sundance, to be exact.

    Hot Water

    The Bottom Line

    Warm and sweet, if not entirely satisfying.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Dramatic Competition)
    Cast: Lubna Azabal, Daniel Zolghadri, Dale Dickey, Gabe Fazio
    Director-writer: Ramzi Bashour

    1 hour 37 minutes

    Luckily, the leads are good company, and there’s just enough in Hot Water that feels fresh and personal to lift it above dreaded indie staleness. Bashour has a light touch, an aversion to exposition, histrionics and overt sentimentality, that serves the material well.

    If the film’s modesty, its glancing quality, is a strength, it’s also a limitation. There’s a nagging sense that the writer-director is just skimming the surface of his characters, their relationship to each other and to the country they live in. The Syrian-American Bashour knows these people and their story in his bones — the movie has several autobiographical elements — but he doesn’t always translate that depth of understanding to the screen.

    The problem is an excess of tact — a reluctance to really dive into the ideas simmering here, to allow the central pair’s experience of forced proximity on the open American road to palpably complicate or illuminate their respective identities and points of view. As pleasant, and occasionally poignant, as Hot Water is, it never commits fully to either its comedy or the emotions that often feel assumed rather than earned. And Bashour is not yet a sophisticated enough filmmaker to conjure richness of meaning with the narrative and visual economy of a Debra Granik, a Kelly Reichardt or an Eliza Hittman, to name (perhaps unfairly) some American neo-realist touchstones to emerge from Sundance.

    Hot Water is Bashour’s third collaboration with writer-director Max Walker-Silverman: The latter is a producer here, while Bashour composed the music for Walker-Silverman’s quiet soul-stirrer A Love Song and edited his more ambitious but less affecting follow-up, Rebuilding. Theirs is a softer, fuzzier regional cinema than the aforementioned auteurs’ work, infused with a wistful belief in the redemptive promise of American community, as well as a reverence for the natural beauty we take for granted.

    In A Love Song and Rebuilding, the protagonists are rooted to the land in a way that Hot Water’s Layal (Azabal), a foreign-born professor of Arabic at an Indiana college, is not. Layal’s ambivalence toward her adopted home is a note of discordancy that the film never taps for its full dramatic potential — an example of how Bashour’s gentle approach veers toward a sort of frictionless amiability. The movie is full of fleeting interpersonal clashes, but deeper social and political undercurrents are left largely unexamined.

    The catalyst in Hot Water comes when Layal’s son Daniel (Zolghadri) attacks another student with a hockey stick, getting himself expelled from the high school that’s already held him back twice. Out of options and patience, Layal decides to drive Daniel out to Santa Cruz to live with his father and finish out his senior year. Cue the procession of sunbaked cornfields, plains dotted with wind turbines, snow-capped mountains, craggy red rock, and the neon pageantry of the Vegas Strip. The expected stops at motels, diners and gas stations are punctuated by Layal’s fraught phone calls back to Beirut, where her sister reports on their mother’s declining health.

    Hot Water ambles along agreeably, buoyed by the believably fluid dynamic between Layal and Daniel. The filmmaker and his performers don’t overplay the fractiousness; there’s tension in their relationship, but also teasing affection, respect and a push-pull of aggravation and amusement that is the near-universal dance of parents and teenagers. Daniel gets a kick out of winding his mom up and watching her go off; she chastises him for bad choices and ribs him for not speaking better Arabic. Bashour and DP Alfonso Herrera Salcedo favor straightforward two-shots to showcase that interplay, rather than close-ups capturing instances of individual reflection or realization.

    “Why are you so tense and bummed all the time?” Daniel asks Layal, a question that hints at the gulf that separates this middle-class American kid and his immigrant single mom. He has enjoyed the privilege of nonchalance, of messing up, while she has endured the stress of providing a good life for her son while navigating cultural bewilderments like “chicken-fried steak” and students demanding do-overs on botched oral presentations.

    I could have happily watched a whole film about Layal’s on-campus life teaching Arabic to mostly white students. A priceless, too-brief scene of her coaching a smiling, square-jawed bro through some challenging pronunciation indeed suggests Bashour doesn’t necessarily recognize what his most distinctive material is. Ditto a glimpse of Daniel, shirtless, rehearsing pick-up lines in the mirror — a seemingly throwaway moment that’s slyer and more intimate than much of the rest of the movie.

    Tossing Layal and Daniel into a car and onto the road is perhaps the least interesting, and certainly easiest, way into this story, allowing the filmmaker to push them into confrontation with each other, and with America, rather than coaxing out conflict organically. To his credit, and in keeping with the spirit of the film, Bashour exercises restraint. Layal and Daniel do more bickering than blowing up, and Hot Water doesn’t over-indulge in fish-out-of-water shtick or ambush them with rednecks and racists.

    Rather, their journey is textured with odd little encounters, some more compelling than others. Dale Dickey shows up as a benevolent, aphorism-dispensing hippie in an interlude that plays like filler. I preferred the unusually composed kid working the front desk of a motel (“I don’t know, I don’t eat meat,” he notes after referring a hungry Layal and Daniel to a nearby Jack in the Box). Or the run-in with a ripe-smelling hitchhiker, which at first appears to reveal a generational divide between mother and son before uniting them in revulsion.

    Azabal (Incendies, The Blue Caftan), alternating among English, Arabic and French with regal impatience, is the kind of performer who can convey fierce love and pride with a mere glance, through sunglasses no less. Layal is perpetually harried — her exasperated “Oh, Daniel!” when he sneezes with a mouth full of carrot cake is perfection — but there’s also a sincere wonderment in the way she looks at her son. Zolghadri, so terrific in Owen Kline’s Funny Pages, flaunts the same gift for note-perfect line delivery here, pivoting seamlessly from sarcasm to authentic feeling and back again.

    The leads are so strong that the movie’s reliance on cutesy shorthand — Layal’s constant hand sanitizing and her compulsive clementine-eating as a replacement for smoking, Daniel and Layal exiting their motel room in a slow-mo strut (have mercy, filmmakers: no more slow-mo struts) — registers as an unnecessary distraction. These actors don’t need things in boldface to build out their characters.

    The final section, with its minor twist and succession of heart-to-hearts, seems calculated to surprise and stir, but underwhelms. It’s the offhanded bits of Hot Water that land most potently — the ones that hint at aches and yearnings beyond the immediate needs of the plot. “Did you say bye to the house?” Layal asks Daniel as they prepare to pull out of their driveway and hit the road. “The house has no ears, mom,” he mocks. Then, when she gets out of the car to grab something, he gazes up at the home he’s about to leave behind, and whispers: “Bye, house.” That kind of moment, tiny but casually heart-piercing, makes you impatient to see what Bashour does next.

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    Jon Frosch

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  • ‘Porcelain War’ Review: Intimate Reflection on Making Art in Wartime Ukraine Is Beautiful but Frustrating

    ‘Porcelain War’ Review: Intimate Reflection on Making Art in Wartime Ukraine Is Beautiful but Frustrating

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    Watching Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s visually confident, intellectually insecure documentary Porcelain War is like listening to a recitation from a brilliant poet while somebody sitting next to you is whispering what the poems are actually about. And the person sitting next to you explaining what the poet is trying to say is… twist… also the poet!

    There’s a great deal of beauty in Porcelain War and there’s a potent artistry behind it, but I’ve never watched a documentary with so many running visual metaphors and so little faith that the audience will be able to grasp them. It’s a bit stunning and a bit insulting all at once. That it often tends more toward the former explains its top award in the U.S. Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

    Porcelain War

    The Bottom Line

    Visually confident but intellectually insecure.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)
    Directors: Brendan Bellomo, Slava Leontyev

    1 hour 28 minutes

    The documentary is the story of Slava (the co-director) and Anya, partners in life and in art. He makes porcelain objects — snails, reptiles, owls — and she covers their white surfaces with intricate and whimsical paintings. They live in Crimea, surrounded by artists and friends, but when the Russians attack, rather than fleeing their homeland, they go from the country into Kharkiv, a city just 25 miles from the Russian border.

    In Kharkiv, Anya and Slava continue to make their art, placing their porcelain figures amid the rubble, while Slava is simultaneously serving as a weapons instructor for a military squad of civilians now forced to take up arms against the invading Russians. The artist couple is also accompanied by their bouncy dog Frodo, a terrier of some sort, and A VERY GOOD DOG.

    The third (or fourth, if you count Frodo, which you truly must) member of their little society of artists in extremis is their longtime friend Andrey Stefanov, a painter who has turned his attentions to photography during the war, when he isn’t lost in thought about his wife and daughters, who fled to Lithuania.

    The responsibility of the artist to continue to produce art in the darkest moments and the capacity of art to add beauty and levity in that darkness are just a few of the undercurrents in Porcelain War.

    Art is, as the documentary makes clear and then repeats, in and of itself a rebellious act and an act of creation to ward off destruction. It’s hard to dispute this contention, and the directors and Stefanov, the documentary’s primary cinematographer, do a moving job of capturing the contrasts between the bucolic countryside and the rubble left in urban centers by Russian bombing.

    The documentary shifts back and forth, often in hard cuts, from activities like a mushroom-hunting trip in the forest (or just Frodo leaping through sun-drenched fields) to the harsher realities of war. Except that both are reality, as we can see when one of their porcelain owls is placed on a decimated city wall or when Frodo very nearly happens upon a mine on one of their walks.

    But can war — at least from a defensive posture when what you’re protecting is your generational homeland and all you hold dear — be an act of creation and art? This is the complicated thesis that Porcelain War dances around while never necessarily committing to it.

    The necessity of fighting back against the Russians is never in doubt for the furniture salesmen and dairy farmers Slava is training. And once rebellion is happening anyway, we see Anya painting one of their bomb-equipped drones.

    That drones have become a crucial piece of documentary vernacular in the past decade is made clear in several shots in which the filmmaking drone is filming the war-making drones in action. That one is making art and the other is contributing to carnage (however righteous) is a conversation Porcelain War instigates without directly addressing. Perhaps the filmmakers are hoping to avoid questions of whether or not they explicitly view this as Ukrainian propaganda or just as a story.

    And you know that if the filmmakers felt comfortable making the topic explicit, they would, because the documentary is so very explicit in spelling things out at so many points. Like if you, dear reader, hear porcelain described as “fragile, yet everlasting” in a documentary about Ukraine, I’m betting there’s a connection you would be able to make without Slava’s voiceover coming out and saying, “Ukraine is like porcelain, easy to break, but impossible to destroy.”

    Everything in Porcelain War is a metaphor, including little Frodo, of whom Slava says, “Everyone says that he is gentle, but courageous,” before Anya adds, “a small embodiment of the Ukrainian spirit.” Over and over again, the documentary does this, planting a seed that might be perceptive or poignant or just witty and then denying the viewer the chance to make a not-too-large leap.

    Comparably to another Sundance prize winner, Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s Daughters, Porcelain War suggests that having a co-director who is also a featured subject in your documentary may be good for intimacy, but isn’t always ideal for dramatic clarity. Expecting Slava Leontyev the Director to agree that probably 75 percent of Slava Leontyev the Subject’s voiceover — thoroughly poetic and thoroughly duplicative — could be cut is a big ask.

    It’s my sense that in the absence of that voiceover, none of the documentary’s themes would be lost or weakened. It would be so much easier to marvel at Stefanov’s photography, to have your heart break at the tragic juxtapositions made by the editors, to celebrate the animation that flows out of Anya’s tiny paintings, to wait breathlessly through a harrowing sequence shot on a military body-cam. Or just to get carried along by the score from Ukrainian quartet DakhaBrakha as Frodo frolics obliviously on the edge of war.

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    Daniel Fienberg

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  • ‘Reinas’ Review: An Understated Portrait of a Peruvian Family Navigating Political Turmoil

    ‘Reinas’ Review: An Understated Portrait of a Peruvian Family Navigating Political Turmoil

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    Klaudia Reynicke’s compact feature Reinas deals in intimate moments with an understated charm. 

    The film, which premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance, takes place in Lima during a tumultuous summer in 1992 and chronicles an unsteady reunion between a father and his two daughters. It’s a quiet study of paternal redemption, much like In the Summers, another one of this year’s festival offerings. Here, as in Alessandra Lacorazza’s debut, the complexities of a seemingly simple relationship reveal themselves over the course of slow summer days. Reynicke (Love Me Tender, Il Nido) shapes a moving character study of a family trying to ground itself against the backdrop of a shaky political landscape.

    Reinas

    The Bottom Line

    A compact feature filled with moments of understated charm.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
    Cast: Abril Gjurinovic, Luana Vega, Jimena Lindo, Gonzalo Molina, Susi Sánchez
    Director: Klaudia Reynicke
    Screenwriters: Klaudia Reynicke, Diego Vega

    1 hour 44 minutes

    An excerpted television news report from the ’90s functions as a prologue, detailing a country in crisis. Peru’s minister of the economy announces that in the next 24 hours, the price of milk will jump from 120,000 Peruvian intis to 330,000, and the cost of sugar, now 150,000 intis, will double. In the middle of this throttled economy, Carlos (Gonzalo Molina) drives his taxi around the city. 

    When we meet the puerile father of Lucia (Abril Gjurinovic) and Aurora (Luana Vega), he is in the middle of a conversation about his dormant acting career with a half-interested passenger. The patron with the waning curiosity asks Carlos if he works in television or film. Carlos says he is a theater actor and then proceeds to list a few film roles. That this story — along with many others — doesn’t track isn’t clear until later. Reinas is about how Carlos reunites with his daughters just as the siblings prepare to leave Lima with their mother, Elena (Jimena Lindo). But it’s also about the stories a father tells himself and his children to construct a different self-image. 

    The Carlos that Aurora and Lucia, two mild-mannered girls, know is unreliable. At the start of Reinas, Carlos arrives late to eldest Aurora’s 18th birthday party. He barges in with a mouth full of lies — excuses for his tardiness that land like apologies for his general absence. When asked by the youngest, Lucia, about his whereabouts, Carlos, without missing a beat, says he’s been in the jungle fighting crocodiles. The girls can only muster disbelieving looks. Later at the party, when Carlos regales attendees with a harrowing story of near death and a car bomb, the audience has been primed to react the same way. 

    As Carlos spends more time with his girls, the illusion of who he wants to be is replaced with the reality of who he is. Reynicke shapes a portrait of a man making an effort. Some of the strongest and most charming moments in Reinas take place around two beach trips Carlos informally organizes at the behest of Lucia and Aurora. In these moments, he assumes the caretaking role he once abandoned. The beach excursions are imbued with hope and possibility. They take on a dreamy quality with ethereal choral music playing over scenes of Carlos teaching Lucia how to ride a wave or bartering with roadside hawkers to get the girls lunch or new swimsuits. 

    As played by Molina, Carlos is a figure who bets on his casual charm to mask his noncommittal nature and penchant for dishonesty. But as the character renews his commitment to his daughters, we can see him trying to fight this reflex and act more authentically. Molina teases out this shift, which helps mask lingering questions about Carlos’ employment, his position on the Peruvian political spectrum and the history between him and Elena. 

    Outside of the bubble that Carlos and Elena have created for their daughters, Lima roils. The city no longer feels safe and Reynicke offers a visceral portrayal of the political reality through unfussy scenes of daily life — conversations about the strict curfews, which manufacture fear; the scarcity of basic goods; and the challenge Elena faces when exchanging intis for U.S. dollars are among a few examples. 

    Elena, played with understated force by Lindo, doesn’t want to raise her children in this environment. She invites Carlos back into their lives in part because she needs him to sign their daughters’ travel papers. As Carlos forges new bonds with Lucia and Aurora and subtly tries to sabotage the plan, we see Elena run around Lima preparing for their upcoming trip.

    In Reinas, Reynicke offers a quietly sad portrait of an unexpected effort to make a family feel whole. Realizing that he might never see his daughters again, a reinvigorated Carlos recommits to them with quality time and tokens of affection. Even the way he refers to them — his preferred term of endearment is “reinas” — changes, feeling more weighted and sincere.

    Reynicke also dedicates screen time to depicting Lucia and Aurora’s relationship. Lucia remains adamant about going wherever her mother goes, but Aurora has her own priorities in Lima. The scenes of the sisters negotiating their own impending departure are steeped in fine-tuned devastation. By the end of Reinas, we start to see that it’s not only Carlos who needs to believe in a different reality.

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    Lovia Gyarkye

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  • ‘Rob Peace’ Review: Chiwetel Ejiofor Crafts a Conventional but Stirring True Story of Talent, Struggle and Tragedy

    ‘Rob Peace’ Review: Chiwetel Ejiofor Crafts a Conventional but Stirring True Story of Talent, Struggle and Tragedy

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    In his feature directorial debut, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Chiwetel Ejiofor crafted a humanizing portrait of a gifted Malawian boy who saves his village from famine by building a DIY windmill. That film — based on the true story of inventor William Kamkwamna — leaned into the conventions of inspirational movies to shape a narrative steeped in good-natured earnestness. But it also teased a portrayal of the complicated relationships between fathers and sons. 

    Ejiofor revisits this theme more forcefully in his latest directorial effort, Rob Peace, about a young man torn between the promise of his future and the responsibilities of his past. Adapted from Jeff Hobbs’ 2014 book The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, the film offers a sweeping and empathetic depiction of its central character. Through Peace’s story, Ejiofor explores the violent impact of the carceral state and the fraught interdependence of a father and his son. While largely predictable in its approach, Ejiofor’s film still evokes a genuine emotional response thanks to strong performances from its cast, especially lead Jay Will. 

    Rob Peace

    The Bottom Line

    Evokes genuine emotions despite a traditional framework.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    Cast: Jay Will, Mary J. Blige, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Camila Cabello, Michael Kelly, Mare Winningham
    Director-screenwriter: Chiwetel Ejiofor

    1 hour 59 minutes

    The film opens in 1987 in Orange, New Jersey, where seven-year-old Robert DeShaun Peace (Jelani Dacres) eagerly awaits his father’s arrival. When the man everyone calls Skeet (played by Ejiofor) pulls up in his car, Rob leaps from the front steps and into his arms. There is mutual admiration between these two, and Ejiofor, who wrote the screenplay, underscores that with key moments of bonding. Rob looks up to his father, and Skeet sees his son as the future of their neighborhood.

    The beginning of Rob Peace also establishes the loyalty Rob feels to his hometown. Ksenia Sereda’s intimate shots of men gathering on a stoop while listening to the radio and passing around beers paint a picture of a vibrant community. This perspective is critical to understanding the tension Rob carries for the rest of his life. 

    After Skeet is convicted of a double homicide, Rob’s mother, Jackie (Mary J. Blige), doubles down on saving her son. She doesn’t want Rob to end up like his father or any of the other men in Orange. The film jumps seven years to 1994. Rob (now played by Chance K. Smith) is a student at St. Benedict’s Prep School in Newark, where he excels in his classes and plays water polo. Outside of school, the gifted student reviews the details of his father’s case. Rob knows that Skeet is innocent, and he’s determined to prove it.

    Two narratives unfold in Rob Peace: the story of Rob moving through increasingly elite spaces without losing his sense of self and the one of the same young man trying to save his father. As Rob (now played by Jay Will) moves from Orange to New Haven, where he matriculates at Yale University, Skeet never leaves his mind. He calls his father, visits him in prison and continues working to prove his innocence.

    Will deftly balances his character’s charismatic exterior with his more wounded interior. He especially plays well against Ejiofor; some of the best scenes are the increasingly charged interactions between Rob and his father. Ejiofor’s performance highlights the toll the carceral system takes on a person; Will’s offers insight into the emotional fallout of having an incarcerated loved one. 

    As Skeet becomes more desperate for his freedom, he makes demands on his son to act more quickly. Rob begins to wonder about the truth of his father’s testimony, and Will grounds his character’s growing doubt in an authentic ambivalence. It would have benefited the film to make space for more of the character’s interiority, especially as the pressure to help Skeet mounts. 

    At Yale, Rob thrives academically and socially, drawing the attention of a professor (Mare Winningham) and the admiration of his peers. It’s at Yale that Rob meets his biographer, Hobbs (Benjamin Papac), and his eventual girlfriend, Naya (Camila Cabello). But being at the school doesn’t magically solve our protagonist’s problems. Rob still needs money to pay Skeet’s legal fees. With this, Rob Peace offers an under-explored portrait of the tension faced by Black working-class students in elite institutions. Rob is surrounded by students who don’t know his dad is in prison and don’t understand the loyalty he feels to his community. 

    The decision to sell weed on campus is a practical one. Unable to help Skeet with his campus jobs, Rob decides to dip his toe in this more lucrative operation. His friends warn against it: Rich white students might be able to deal on campus without fear of consequence, but Rob is poor and Black. The rules are different. Yet without many options, the young Orange native feels he must risk it. 

    Rob Peace moves briskly. Time jumps keep the narrative moving, with Ejiofor often opting for montages backed by poignant music (by Jeff Russo) instead of letting moments play out. These shortcuts make sense for a film trying to cover so much ground, but occasionally undercut some of the more emotionally potent scenes. They especially compress the latter half of Rob’s life, leaving us with a flattened sense of the character’s motivations as he finds himself in more financial trouble. 

    Still, with Rob Peace, Ejiofor has found a subject whose life story reflects some of the most unjust realities of the United States. Throughout the film, people in Rob’s life comment on his preternatural intellect and charisma. They express excitement about his future — all visions that require him to leave East Orange. But Rob didn’t see anything wrong with his community. He had no desire to leave, and part of the tragedy of Rob Peace is that few people seemed to wonder why.

    Full credits

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    Production companies: Republic Pictures, Hill District Media, Los Angeles Media Fund, Participant, Sugar Peace Productions, 25 Stories
    Cast: Jay Will, Mary J. Blige, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Camila Cabello, Michael Kelly, Mare Winningham
    Director-screenwriter: Chiwetel Ejiofor
    Producers: Antoine Fuqua, Rebecca Hobbs, Jeffrey Soros, Simon Horsman, Andrea Calderwood, Kat Samick, Alex Kurtzman, Jenny Lumet
    Executive producers: Mary J. Blige, Jamin O’Brien, Morgan Earnest, Luke Rodgers, Jeff Skoll, Robert Kessel, Bruce Evans, Faye Stapleton, Ali Jayazeri, David Gendron
    Director of photography: Ksenia Sereda
    Production designer: Dina Goldman-Kunin
    Costume designer: Deirdra Elizabeth Govan
    Editor: Masahiro Hirakubo
    Music: Jeff Russo
    Casting director: Alexa L. Fogel, CSA
    Sales: Republic Pictures

    1 hour 59 minutes

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    Lovia Gyarkye

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  • ‘Love Machina’ Review: Provocative but Unfocused Doc Tackles Romance and Robotics

    ‘Love Machina’ Review: Provocative but Unfocused Doc Tackles Romance and Robotics

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    If you follow the news, you’d think that AI is going to take over every activity we formerly thought of as “human,” perhaps by the time you finish reading this sentence.

    One of the great pleasures of reviewing documentaries, though, is that every few months a new film will pull back the curtain on the latest advancement in artificial intelligence or consciousness-infused robotics. Fairly consistently, the answer is: “Nah. People are safe. For now.”

    Love Machina

    The Bottom Line

    Intriguing but scattered.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)
    Director: Peter Sillen

    1 hour and 36 minutes

    For now.

    The latest documentary to enter this fray is Peter Sillen’s Love Machina, a jumbled and easily distracted meditation on artificial intelligence, robotics, love, immortality, transformation and a form of spirituality that combines all of those things.

    This is a subgenre in which any filmmaker will have to confront a series of what look like binaries, but increasingly aren’t: Visionary or crackpot? Science or science fiction? Utopian vision of the future or warning of an approaching dystopian nightmare? A storyteller can answer those questions or leave it for the audience to decide. Sillen falls squarely in the fuzzy in-between, both amazed by what he keeps uncovering and aware that there are counterpoints that need to be presented, even if he leans much more into the former.

    Whether this slightly wishy-washy form of curiosity is a feature or a bug will depend, as ever, on the predisposition of the viewer. But Sillen, like his documentary’s primary subjects, definitely leads with his heart.

    Our primary heroes are Martine and Bina Rothblatt, married for 40 years. They’re really, really, really in love, in a way that’s beautiful and just a wee bit creepy — especially when they refer to themselves with the portmanteau “MarBina” and describe themselves as, “Two bodies, one soul, forever in love.” It’s just intense.

    Now lots of people are intensely in love, but not a lot of people are as brilliant as Martine Rothblatt, who is a futurist, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, a biotechnology innovator and an expert in satellite technologies. She founded SiriusXM. Tapping into what is presumably an ungodly amount of personal wealth, Martine and Bina launched the Terasem Movement, a transhumanist organization with its roots in the work of Octavia Butler (because no school of thought based on the writings of a science-fiction author has ever been strange and problematic).

    The primary project of Terasem appears to be Bina48, a disembodied robotic head with a vague resemblance to Bina and an algorithmic intelligence based on Bina’s so-called “mind file.” The latter is a virtual upload of Bina’s thoughts, experiences and memories compiled from testing and interviews, and filtered through various AI systems, some proprietary and others not. Real Bina is smart, lively and deeply in love with Martine. Bina48 is a dead-eyed, strangely styled miracle, capable of affectless recitations of things that Real Bina told various engineers over a multi-decade process.

    Martine and Bina are certain that their future, and possibly the future of all humanity, is in the stars. They are convinced that if human consciousness can be captured on a hard drive, Bina will be able to live on either in a much more advanced robotic ancestor to Bina48 or in her own body, which will be cryogenically frozen after her death. What about Martine’s consciousness? The documentary gives no answers, but Martine is her own embodiment of the transmutation of human identity, as a trans woman, an interesting personal journey that Love Machina discusses, but not with the depth or intelligence it deserves.

    The Rothblatts’ certainty is unwavering. Terasem may not be an actual cult, but their techno-zealotry certainly has cult-like elements that make them frequently off-putting. Especially since they speak in a love language that is at least half jargon, jargon that then comes out of Bina48’s latex mouth. Is this thing they’re trying to do actually plausible? All evidence still points to “Not right now,” though Love Machina is also full of evidence that this is a realm in which the acceleration of advancement is nearly as terrifying as Bina48 herself.

    Sillen is able to find some people — Stephanie Dinkins, a professor at Stony Brook University is worthy of a doc all her own — prepared to speak to the practical limitations of believing that any quantity of data could ever reproduce consciousness, and willing to broach how problematic it is that Bina48 is an avatar of a Black woman constructed almost wholly by white men. That’s the “could” of the equation. Nobody wants to talk about the “should.” It’s like Jurassic Park never even happened.

    Perhaps sensing that Martine and Bina’s romantic fanaticism is both the doc’s strongest aspect and potentially its most unnerving, Siller weaves their love story through the full film but keeps detouring for a depth-free progression down a futurist checklist. Robotics designer David Hanson, star of 2022’s very, very similar Sophia, is featured. Mike Perry, of cryogenics behemoth Alcor, is a distracting presence, especially if you know him as the gentleman who revealed a very shocking secret in the series finale of How To With John Wilson. Sillen is constantly introducing us to people who seem both fascinating and like they needed to be asked a lot more follow-up questions.

    Bina48 is described as a work-in-progress and Love Machina ultimately comes across as an idea-in-progress. It’s provocative enough to recognize a lot of the conversations we need to have now rather than after the robots have taken over, but not coherent enough to adequately have those conversations itself.

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    Daniel Fienberg

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  • ‘Freaky Tales’ Review: Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn in an Electrifying Salute to Late ‘80s Oakland Pop Culture That’s Hella Fun

    ‘Freaky Tales’ Review: Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn in an Electrifying Salute to Late ‘80s Oakland Pop Culture That’s Hella Fun

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    If it takes doing an MCU movie, with all the corporate constrictions that entails, to plunge into the kind of exhilarating creative exorcism that Freaky Tales represents, then bring on the superhero as stepping-stone. Before they made Captain Marvel, longtime filmmaking duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck established their talents with three boldly idiosyncratic indies, Half Nelson, Sugar and Mississippi Grind. But nothing in those distinctive works can prepare you for the kinetic energy, the freewheeling imagination and the righteous battles — we’re talking rap and some serious blade slice-and-dice — of their love letter to the Bay Area and the pop-cultural imprint it left on Fleck as a kid in the ‘80s.

    The tales of the title are four chapters all built around the theme of underdog victory, each of them different in texture and tone yet all ingeniously interconnected and all owing something to the big-screen aesthetics of the time.

    Freaky Tales

    The Bottom Line

    Lives up to the title and then some.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    Cast: Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis, Ben Mendelsohn, Jack Champion, Ji-young Yoo, Dominique Thorne, Normani, Symba, Jordan “StunnaMan02” Gomes, Angus Cloud, Kier Gilchrist
    Director-screenwriters: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck

    1 hour 47 minutes

    The stories are stuffed to the gills with specific references to Oakland in the era, from local rapper cameos to beloved landmarks like Giant Burger, the Berkeley punk music venue at 924 Gilman St., the Grand Lake movie palace, Sweet Jimmie’s ice cream parlor and the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, where Golden State Warriors point guard “Sleepy” Floyd beat the Lakers with a record-breaking final-quarter score. But Freaky Tales is 100 percent user-friendly also to non-natives and non-hoops fans.

    Then there’s the flurry of movie references. Boden and Fleck have cited Repo Man, The Decline of Western Civilization, Hollywood Shuffle, The Last Dragon and Scanners as inspirations. The mark of those films can be detected throughout, perhaps most amusingly in the mysterious, possibly alien green light source that charges the East Bay atmosphere and might be connected to a fictional self-help plan called Psytopics. Ubiquitous advertising claims that this mindfulness program will teach its participants how to control the force around them and use it to change their lives.

    The ample carnage has its roots in kung fu but then knives, swords and an ax are brought to the party in an astonishingly choreographed final act in which the gushing fountains of blood and viscera become almost operatic. The sticky end of a magnificently odious villain is a direct homage both to David Cronenberg and to a John Cassavetes scene that might make even Brian De Palma finally love The Fury.

    Animation, comic strip-style graphics and retro-vibe fonts are used to great effect, starting with a fun title sequence that looks like it’s been kicking around a projection booth for 40 years.

    Chapter 1 is titled Strength in Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back. Tina (Ji-young Yoo, divine) and her lovelorn friend Lucid (Jack Champion) are regulars at the club, where everybody looks hardcore with their piercings and spiked leather accessories, but the sign on the door vetoing racism, sexism, homophobia and violence makes it clear this is a welcoming place. However, that doesn’t extend to the mob of Nazi skinheads that descend to wreck the joint and rough up its patrons. That brutal experience prompts some expedited fight training and creative weaponry as they armor up for some serious retaliation.

    In Chapter 2, Don’t Fight the Feeling, Barbie (Dominique Thorne) and Entice (Normani), aka Danger Zone, are scooping ice cream until they graduate from open-mic rap nights to the big time. They get what appears to be their chance when they’re invited to perform on a bill with local legend Too $hort (Symba), until a rude awakening indicates they’ve been set up for humiliation in a rap battle. But don’t underestimate the power of two disrespected women to respond with fire to unreconstructed ‘80s sexism. (The real Too $hort, whose song of the same name gives the movie its title, pops up briefly.)

    A brilliantly cast Pedro Pascal steps in as crime-world debt collector Clint in Chapter 3, Born to Mack (another Too $hort reference). He’s about to become a father when a violent act from his past comes back to haunt him and it subsequently becomes clear that the unscrupulous boss for whom he works isn’t going to let him walk away. But no sooner has Clint decided it’s as good a day as any to die than he finds a reason to rethink that idea. Pascal’s late-night video store scene with a major-name star whose movies are the subject of droll riffs is a sweet surprise.

    Chapter 4, The Legend of Sleepy Floyd, casts the blindingly charismatic Jay Ellis as the NBA All-Star, recapping his aforementioned triumph on the court with some cool animation. But it’s the jaw-dropping fictional developments after the game, when tragedy strikes and the Psytopics advocate suits up for some biblical-level retribution that will pave the way for Freaky Tales to become an instant cult classic. If Ellis’ career doesn’t rocket into a whole new orbit after this, then Hollywood just isn’t paying attention.

    Every aspect of this movie works in deliriously loopy sync. That applies to Jac Fitzgerald’s invigorating camerawork, to a score by Raphael Saddiq that gets bigger and ballsier as the filmmakers up the suspense, and to production design and costumes by Patti Podesta and Neishea Lemle, respectively, that evoke the milieu and the period with a love that’s infectious. Freaky Tales is a project where every scene suggests what a blast they all had making it.

    The performances are fully on board with the gonzo spirit right down the line. Alongside Ellis and Pascal, whose gift for combining soulfulness with tough-guy grit is a huge plus, special mention needs to be made of Ben Mendelsohn. After bringing such a depth of feeling to his work with Boden and Fleck in Mississippi Grind, the actor is riveting and malevolently humorous here as a corrupt cop that makes most other corrupt movie cops look like amateurs.

    Freaky Tales is a genre-defying riot. Come for the crazy mix tape of circuitously connected plotlines, stay for the joyous explosion of vintage breakdancing on the end credits.

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    David Rooney

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