June '26 Digital Week I

Film Series of the Week 

Louis Malle: Portraits of America 

(Metrograph, NYC)

French director Louis Malle (1932-95) was best known for intelligent and provocative films like his incest comedy Murmur of the Heart and two Nazi Occupation dramas, Lacombe, Lucien and Au Revoir, Les Enfants, but he was also a heartfelt chronicler of an America that could only be seen by an outsider. This series includes several such films, including his 1978 “success de scandale” Pretty Baby, with a 12-year-old Brooke Shields as a child prostitute, and his witty Atlantic City, with an excellent Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, from a scabrously funny John Guare script. 

Also included are Malle’s sympathetic documentary portraits of his adopted country during the Reagan presidency that show those left behind: 1985’s God’s Country (farmers) and 1986’s And the Pursuit of Happiness … (immigrants). There’s also a new doc, Louis Malle, Le Révolté (Louis Malle, The Rebel) by Claire Duguet, which—though too short (75 minutes)—effectively hits on the major themes of Malle’s life and career. This essential series was curated by Malle’s daughters Chloé and Justine. (metrograph.com)

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

Carolina Caroline 

(Magnolia Pictures)

If it wasn’t for the winning presence of Samara Weaving—an actress who always seems to elevate the lame movies she’s usually stuck in—as Caroline, a young woman who falls for the charming but dangerous Oliver and follows him on a deadly Bonnie and Clyde-like excursion across Texas, then Adam Carter Rehmeier’s derivative drama (the obvious script is by William Thomas Dean IV) would be even less palatable. Routine and predictable for much of its length—even Kyle Gallner’s charismatically villainous Oliver is unoriginal—this is yet another film that wastes poor Weaving.

The Currents 

(Kino Lorber)

After successful designer Lina impulsively leaps from a bridge into icy Swiss waters, upon her return home to Buenos Aires she finds it difficult to return to normal life in Argentine-Swiss writer-director Milagros Mumenthaler’s sometimes opaque but mostly trenchant character study. Although a few moments of fantasy and surreal touches aren’t always successful, the director’s intimate glimpse into this fragile woman’s psyche is greatly assisted by Isabel Aimé González Sola, a bracingly natural actress who makes Lina an elegantly empathetic protagonist.

Forastera 

(Grasshopper Film)

Teenager Cata’s beloved grandmother Catalina dies, and Cata herself discovers her body—this leads to her trying to deal with her grief in ever more confusing ways in Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ achingly intimate chamber drama. Anchored by Zoe Stein’s magnificent and moving performance, Iglesias’ film shows how those we loved and lost are still among us in different ways, whether in our memories or otherwise, as her infinitely suggestive final shot underlines.

Streaming Release of the Week 

Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny 

(Icarus Films)

The fascinating true story of Emerik Blum, a Bosnian-Jewish businessman whose Yugoslav company Energoinvest was successfully run as a socialist collective of sorts (women workers were paid the same as men), is recounted in Jasmila Žbanić’s concise but often illuminating documentary. The film is structured from valuable archival footage and interviews with many of those involved, including Blum and several colleagues, but it would have been even more interesting if Žbanić had given more time to delving into Blum’s personal history—his family was murdered during the Holocaust, which is mentioned but not gone into in any depth. 

CD Release of the Week

Thomas de Hartmann—Esther 

(Pentatone)

Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956) was a Ukrainian composer who composed this neglected opera—based on the Biblical story of Esther, who saved the Jewish people from annihilation—in Paris during World War II, which also threatened the very existence of the Jewish people. This world-premiere recording displays the de Hartmann opera’s strengths, notably the lyrical vocal writing, although it also brings its static nature to the fore. Still, it’s a treat to be able to hear this valuable work in its entirety, and it’s performed superbly by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under conductor Kirill Karabits and sung beautifully by a top cast led by American soprano Corinne Winters as Esther.

Film Series: Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2026

Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2026

Through June 4, 2026

Film at Lincoln Center

165 West 65 Street, New York, NY

filmlinc.org 

Benedetta Porcaroli and Lucrezia Guglielmino in The Kidnapping of Arabella

This year’s Open Roads—the 25th edition of the series that imports new films from Italy—opened with The Kidnapping of Arabella, the second feature by Carolina Cavalli. It stars the winning and gifted actress Benedetta Porcaroli as Holly, a bored 28-year-old who meets the eponymous 8-year-old and is convinced that this precocious youngster is her as a child. Although Porcaroli and Lucrezia Guglielmino (Arabella) have a believable older-younger sister vibe, Cavalli wastes a lot of screen time with their meandering and their meeting a collection of faux-Fellini stereotypes. It’s too bad that Chris Pine, who gives a committed performance—complete with serviceable Italian—as Arabella’s put-upon father, seems adrift in this context. 

Barbara Ronchi in Elise

Some of Italy’s best actresses populate several of this year’s Open Roads entries, starting with Elise, in which the fiery Barbara Ronchi—who was so unforgettable as the tragically sorrowful mother in Marco Bellocchio’s masterly 2023 Kidnapped—ratchets up her intensity level as a woman who is imprisoned for killing her sister without any motive, and who agrees to be subjected to a visiting criminologist’s study. Director Leonardo Di Costanzo intelligently explores thorny questions of morality and memory, and Ronchi’s emotionally bare acting provides the necessary grounding.

Jasmine Trinca in The Eyes of Others

In The Eyes of Others, Andrea De Sica’s at times perceptive but often jumbled satire about the corruption of power among the ultra-rich, Jasmine Trinca is magnificent as an enigmatic woman whose arrival on a private island turns heads as well as leads to duplicity and ultimately murder. The film looks gorgeous, and there are some truly shocking moments, but De Sica is unfortunately more interested in stylishness than depth.

Jasmine Trinca in La Gioia

Valeria Golino impressively transforms into the dowdy, repressed high school teacher Gioia, who lives with her elderly parents and falls into an unlikely relationship with a mysteriously slippery student Alessio in Nicolangelo Gelormini’s leaky but watchable La Gioia. Although little of it is plausible—at least as presented by Gelormini—the actors are enough of a reason to watch: alongside Golino, Saul Nanni makes a charismatic Alessio and Jasmine Trinca (again!) does wonders in a largely thankless role as Alessio’s needy mother Carla. 

Tecla Insolia in Primavera

Ludovica Rampoldi’s script for Primavera—first-time director Damiano Michieletto’s tantalizing fictional biopic about Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi’s stormy relationship with a young orphan musician named Cecilia—smartly places maestro and student at the center of what is after all a Baroque melodrama. It looks and sounds sumptuous, of course, and Tecla Insolia gives a remarkable performance as Cecilia, making her far more than just another female footnote in a male-dominated artistic era.  

Valeria Golino and Pilar Fogliati in A Brief Affair

Rampoldi also wrote and directed A Brief Affair, a one-note comedy-drama about two people who meet cute one night and reluctantly fall into an adulterous affair, managing to keep their illicit encounters secret—at least until a couple of unsurprising plot twists end up bringing everything into the open. It’s all attractively acted by Pilar Fogliati, Adriano Giannini, Andrea Carpenzano and Valeria Golino (again), but Rampoldi’s derivative script and direction keep this from becoming a true guilty pleasure.

March '26 Digital Week II

Film Series of the Week/Rendez-Vous With French Cinema

Case 137 

(Film Movement)

The great French actress Léa Drucker adds another sharply-etched characterization to her résumé as Stéphanie, an internal-affairs investigator in the Paris police force on a case of police brutality during the “yellow jacket” protests of 2018 in Dominic Moll’s low-key procedural that persuasively encompasses the complicated political aspects of class and race hanging over the investigation. Drucker is unwaveringly good whether subtly taking the temperature of those she’s looking into or handling her skeptical ex-husband (a fellow cop), loving young son, and cantankerous mother. A top-notch supporting cast and Moll’s documentary-like visuals strongly contribute to this deeply moral, unnerving drama. 

Colors of Time 

(Distrib Films)

In Cédric Klapisch’s latest drama, four cousins meeting for the first time explore their celebrated ancestor Adèle’s home—as we meet Adèle herself (a fine Suzanne Lindon) as she leaves the sticks for Paris at the zenith of the 1890s Belle Époque and befriends artists like Claude Monet, who ends up having more to do with the extended family than expected. Typically flavorful and spirited, lavish but not overstuffed, Klapisch’s film might be schematic in its crosscutting between the present-day cousins’ endless zoom calls about Adèle’s valuables—including a painting that may have a surprising provenance—and her adventures in the dazzling city of lights, but it’s a delight from start to finish. 

Festival Film of the Week/True-False Film Fest

Who Moves America 

(Sidereal Time Production)

This entry in the annual nonfiction film festival in Columbia, Missouri (the latest edition ran March 5-8) takes the pulse of the UPS workers preparing for—and, in many cases, dreading—a possible strike when the Teamsters contract with management ends in the summer of 2023. Yael Bridge—who has made other films chronicling labor strife in America—provides an honest if necessarily one-sided chronicle of how so many workers who rely on their paycheck to get by respond to the possibility of losing money (and maybe more) for an important cause in a country that has been steadily, often ruthlessly whittling back workers’ rights at the expense of their corporate bosses’.  

Streaming Release of the Week 

Dracula 

(Vertical Releasing)

French director Luc Besson returns with this downbeat, mostly colorless adaptation of the Bram Stoker classic, with Caleb Landry-Jones hamming it up mightily as the Count—his spectacularly grotesque makeup is the memorable part of the character. Surprisingly—but in a good way—noted scenery chewer Christoph Waltz gives a nice low-key turn as the priest (Van Helsing in all but name) who tracks Dracula down, while Zoë Bleu plays Mina, Dracula’s paramour, with satisfying brio. Besson, a veteran of large-scale canvases, seems to have come a cropper with this umpteenth version of a well-worn tale, as he brings to it little energy or vitality. 

In-Theater Release of the Week

For Worse 

(Brainstorm Media)

Amy Landecker makes her triple-threat debut as writer, director and star in this agreeable romantic comedy about Lauren, a newly divorced woman who begins an on- and off-again relationship with Sean, a much younger man in her acting class, until they attend a wedding that marks a real turning point in her life. Although much of this is mined for superficial comedy—Lauren’s ex has a hot yoga instructor as a girlfriend, Lauren’s best friend Jessi (a funny Missi Pyle) very much wants her to take the plunge with Sean, and the classes are led by no-nonsense instructor Liz (a too dour Gaby Hoffman)—Landecker makes an appealing heroine and as a filmmaker finds her feet in the second half, when Lauren meets two men with opposite designs on her (played by Landecker’s own husband, Bradley Whitford, and Ken Marino, the latter amusing in an obnoxious role).

March '26 Digital Week I

In-Theater Release of the Week 

Wuthering Heights 

(Warner Bros)

In Emerald Fennell’s latest pseudo-provocation, Emily Bronte’s classic novel has been transformed into an often risible and limp romance that drags along for more than two hours: if Margot Robbie (as Cathy) and Jacob Elordi (as Heathcliff) remain watchable, it’s due more to their movie-star magnetism than Fennell’s labored direction and soggy writing. The kids playing the star-crossed couple as youths— Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper—are quite natural and might have come across better in a less pretentious context, but unfortunately we’re stuck with Fennell’s ugly visuals, choppy editing, on-the-nose symbolism and a score that’s not so much played as smeared over every frame.

Film Series of the Week

Rendez-Vous With French Cinema (Film at Lincoln Center)

The Stranger 

(Music Box Films; opens April 3)

This popular series of new French films returns for its 31st year at the Walter Reade Theater in Manhattan. For opening night, there’s prolific director François Ozon’s latest, a B&W adaptation of the classic Albert Camus novel about Meursault, a nihilistic young French man in Algiers, who kills a local man in cold blood and stoically faces the consequences. Although Ozon follows Camus’ plot closely, there’s a bloodlessness, so to speak, to his filmmaking, as if he’s mimicking the protagonist’s distance from others, including Marie, the willing young woman he’s sleeping with. Benjamin Voisin, typecast as Meursault, is almost too inscrutable; his opposite number, Rebecca Marder, invests Marie with pathos, sympathy and humanity.

Two Pianos 

(Kino Lorber; opens May 1)

Iconoclastic director Arnaud Desplechin—whose My Sex Life and A Christmas Tale are remarkable portraits of messy relationships—returns with another skewered tale of screw-ups: classical pianist Mathias returns to his hometown Lyon from Japan, where he’s been teaching, to perform with his mentor, Elena. Butting heads with her during rehearsals, he finds himself drawn back into the life of his ex, Claude, whose husband has just died. Mathias befriends her young son, who looks strongly like him. Desplechin revels in throwing these characters into highly emotional moments to navigate, and if he sometimes veers into melodramatic territory—Mathias feints when he sees Claude upon his return—his observations are deeply felt, as are the performances by François Civil (Mathias), Charlotte Rampling (Elena) and Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Claude).

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t 

(Universal)

In the second sequel to the surprisingly successful 2013 heist movie, the group of illusionists called the Four Horsemen rounds up new recruits to help with their latest caper: going up against the ruthless head of a diamond company, Veronika Vanderberg, who’s also a money launderer. Rosamund Pike is deliciously evil as Veronika, but the large cast of Horsemen, old and new—Jessie Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman and an always welcome Lizzy Kaplan alongside newcomers Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa and Ariana Greenblatt —are interchangeably bland, even though they try hard to be clever. Despite its far-flung locations, Ruben Fleischer’s crime flick is quite familiar and monotonous. The Blu-ray image looks fine; extras include featurettes and deleted and extended scenes, along with a director’s commentary.

DVD Release of the Week

The Time It Takes 

(Distrib Films)

Francesca Comencini’s film is a touching if occasionally saccharine reminiscence about growing up the daughter of Luigi Comencini, one of the most successful filmmakers during Italy’s cinematic golden age. Francesca dramatizes life with a famous father as something that was simultaneously wondrous and strange, culminating in her drug addiction before straightening herself out and becoming a filmmaker in her own right. There are delightful moments on the set of Luigi’s films, and the splendid performances of Fabrizio Gifuni (Luigi), Anna Mangiocavallo (young Francesca) and Romana Maggiora Vergano (adult Francesca) help smooth over the film’s sentimental lapses.

New York Jewish Film Festival 2026 Roundup

New York Jewish Film Festival

Through January 28, 2026

Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center

filmlinc.org

The 35th annual edition of the New York Jewish Film Festival—co-presented by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center—once again presents an enticing mix of documentaries and features. Here are capsule reviews of a handful of films I saw: 

Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause

Charles Grodin was many things: a terrific actor onscreen and onstage; an acerbically funny talk-show guest; and an impassioned political talking-head in the early days of MSNBC. All that is covered more than adequately in James L. Freedman’s heartfelt documentary, which includes interviews with many of his Hollywood colleagues and friends: Robert DeNiro and Martin Brest (his Midnight Run costar and director), Steve Martin, Elaine May, Martin Short, Carol Burnett, Ellen Burstyn and many others. But what’s eye-opening is Grodin’s activism for prison reform: he helped get several women who were wrongly jailed for drug offenses. There are countless hilarious film clips and appearances on Carson and Letterman, but the most poignant moments are the heartrending testimonials from the women Grodin helped release from prison.

All I Have Is Nothingness

When Claude Lanzmann died in 2018, his legacy was already cemented by his unforgettable nine-hour film Shoah, which eschewed archival Holocaust footage to instead let those who perpetrated and were victimized by the Nazi killing machine speak. Guillaume Ribot has made a valuable making-of feature using never-before-seen footage of Lanzmann meeting and ingratiating himself with several Shoah subjects and families. Lanzmann comes off as passionate, overbearing but always respectful—the perfect artist to create such a monumental work of witnessed history.

Orna and Ella

The closing of Orna and Ella, a beloved restaurant in Tel Aviv, after 25 years is recounted in this touching documentary by director Tomer Heymann, who records the final weeks leading up to the closing with sympathy and tact. We see these two graceful chefs-restauranteurs—whose intimate location was a rarity in that it made its own breads, pastas and ice cream on the premises—at the center of a bittersweet look at a beautiful personal and professional partnership.

Out of Exile: The Photography of Fred Stein

Renowned photographer Fred Stein, who grew up in Germany before fleeing Hitler and becoming famous after moving to France and America as a street portraitist and candidly capturing the likes of Albert Einstein, is the subject of this intimate documentary by his son Peter Stein and Dawn Freer. The filmmakers explore Fred’s compelling biography as well as a look at how his legacy is being handled by scholars and museum curators who are creating exhibitions of his historically important work. 

Sapiro v. Ford—The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford

This little-known but important story about a Jewish lawyer and labor activist who sued Henry Ford for libel in 1927 after the racist mogul ran a smear campaign against him in his Detroit newspaper is recounted in Gaylen Ross’ enlightening documentary. Stephen Kunken engagingly recites Sapiro’s own words about his life, business and battle with Ford, while Ross effectively uses newsreel footage and Ford’s own words against him. The outcome of the suit—Ford agreed to a retraction, eventually shutting down his paper—was the first time hate speech suffered consequences in America, which up to that time had no laws governing its misuse.

Frontier

Judith Colell’s trenchant drama about the residents of a Spanish village near the French-Spanish border, who risk their lives to help Jewish refugees escape Vichy France, has very few melodramatic flourishes as it concentrates on the humanity of good people hoping for a small triumph over evil. The performances by a first-rate cast—led by Miki Esparbé as customs officer Manel, Maria Rodríguez Soto as his wife Merce, Bruna Cusí  as helpful neighbor Juliana and Joren Seldeslachts as the local Nazi SS head—are superlative individually and together.

Fantasy Life (Closing Night)

Matthew Spear not only wrote and directed but also stars as Sam, a down-on-his-luck paralegal who gets a gig as a manny for a mostly invisible husband and his depressed and lonely wife, Dianne, watching their three young daughters, in this alternately amusing and enervating would-be rom-com. Although Amanda Peet is her usually winning self as Dianne, there’s nothing in Spear’s writing, directing, performance or bearing that would make anyone believe Sam would become her confidante and possibly something more. 

Film Series: Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2025

Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2025

Through June 6, 2025

Film at Lincoln Center

165 West 65 Street, New York, NY

filmlinc.org

Battleground

This year’s edition of Open Roads, Film at Lincoln Center’s annual survey of new films from Italy, includes the latest by master director Gianni Amelio, one of the mainstays of the festival circuit since arthouse hits Open Doors (1989), Stolen Children (1992) and Lamerica (1994). In Battleground, Amelio sets his sights on World War I, where two friends, both doctors in a hospital for wounded soldiers, take opposite tacks in treatment: Stefano looks for fakers to send back to the front line while Giulio tries to help patients desperate to go home. When the deadly Spanish flu breaks out, both men must deal with another unpredictable mortal danger. Amelio’s messy, complicated and disturbing exploration of human behavior provides no pat or easy answers.  

The Time It Takes

Francesca Comencini’s The Time It Takes is a touching if occasionally saccharine reminiscence about growing up the daughter of Luigi Comencini, one of the most successful filmmakers during Italy’s cinematic golden age. Francesca dramatizes life with a famous father as something that was simultaneously wondrous and strange, culminating in her drug addiction before straightening herself out and becoming a filmmaker in her own right. There are delightful moments on the set of Luigi’s films, and the splendid performances of Fabrizio Gifuni (Luigi), Anna Mangiocavallo (young Francesca) and Romana Maggiora Vergano (adult Francesca) help smooth over the film’s lapses into sentimentality.

Familia

The horrific results of domestic abuse are harrowingly rendered in Familia, Francesco Costabile’s vivid adaptation of a memoir by Luigi Celeste, whose estranged father returns to continue brutalizing his mother (a magnificently shellshocked Barbara Ronchi)—while Luigi joins a group of skinheads to separate himself from his awful home life. The film’s bluntness, culminating in a fatal meeting between father and son, is almost too on the nose, but Costabile’s unflinching depiction of the fallout from abuse is undeniably compelling.

The Great Ambition

The Great Ambition, Andrea Segre’s absorbing political biopic about Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer, is centered by an extraordinary performance by Elio Germano as Berlinguer, who was at present at the many upheavals in 1970s Italian politics, culminating in the kidnaping and murder of prime minister Aldo Moro. 

Sicilian Letters

Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia’s Sicilian Letters is a cleverly constructed crime drama, based on real events, that pits Carello (the great Toni Servillo), a disgraced former politico, against his godson Matteo (Elio Germano, excellent), a mob boss on the run, who begin corresponding and become friendly again—but their relationship is, as current parlance has it, very complicated. 

Diamonds

Ferzan Özpetek’s latest film, Diamonds, was a huge hit in Italy, and it’s not hard to see why. Luisa Ranieri and Jasmine Trinca—luminous actresses both—play sisters who run a successful fashion house in 1970s Rome, and the film follows their attempts, as often comic as dramatic, to deal with their most difficult client: an Oscar-winning costume designer. Although it’s an overstuffed 135 minutes, Diamonds is an entertainingly high-gloss soap opera that’s a valentine to cinematic costumes as well as the unbreakable bond among women. The large, mainly distaff ensemble is perfection, but Özpetek intrudes on his characters too often by appearing onscreen to diminishing returns. 

May '25 Digital Week II

Film Series of the Week 

Kira Muratova—Scenographies of Chaos 

(Film at Lincoln Center, NYC)

One of Ukraine’s greatest directors, Kira Muratova toiled for much of her career under the oppressive Soviet system, and several of her films, pre-Glasnost, were banned or suppressed for years, even decades. This near-exhaustive survey of 16 of her features, made between 1964 and 2012 (she died in 2018 at age 83), shows Muratova as an uncompromising artist whose work artfully dissects quotidian lives with a pinpoint scalpel. Her early classics Brief Encounters (1967) and The Long Farewell (1971) are messy in the best way, mirroring her female protagonists’ unstable personal and public lives. The Asthenic Syndrome, Muratova’s 1989 international breakthrough, is a profoundly cutting critique of the USSR’s last days told through her dazzling formalist technique. Some Muratova films will be released by Criterion, but to see them on the big screen, visit the Walter Reade Theater by May 25.

Films of Vicente Aranda 

(Film Movement Plus)

Vicente Aranda—the best post-Bunuel Spanish director after Carlos Saura—made artfully erotic explorations of female sexuality for several decades (he died in 2015 at age 88). Film Movement Plus has resurrected a quartet of his films, a grab bag of his work that showcases his singular mix of seriousness, sleaziness and potent political commentary. The Girl in the Yellow Panties (1980) introduces a former Francoist writer who’s beguiled by his sexy young niece (played by Aranda’s muse, the great Victoria Abril, in one of her first—and most memorable—roles). Abril returns majestically in Lovers (1991), an absorbing true-life adultery drama a la The Postman Always Rings Twice, as a widowed landlord who seduces her young tenant as he tries to navigate pre-married life with his virginal fiancée (Maribel Verdu, another superb Spanish actress in one of her earliest starring roles). The other two Aranda films, 1994’s The Turkish Passion and 1998’s The Naked Eye, are like late-night Cinemax softcore flicks distinguished by Aranda’s precise direction and the performances of his leading ladies Ana Belén (Turkish Passion) and Laura Morante (Naked Eye).

In-Theater Releases of the Week 

The Kiss 

(Juno Films/World Wide Motion Pictures Corporation)

Director Bille August, who made masterly character studies like Pelle the Conqueror and The Best Intentions early in his career, made a late-career classic with A Fortunate Man in 2018, while his latest, an adaptation of German/Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s only novel, is a well-mounted bittersweet romance between an army officer and a crippled but beautiful and headstrong woman. It’s beautifully shot, compellingly acted and keeps one engaged from start to finish, but August allows a certain sentimentality to creep in that’s not present in Zweig’s more tough-minded novel, and the result is less than the sum of its considerable parts.

Love 

(Strand Releasing)

Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud’s triptych about forms of nontraditional intimacy—titled Love, Sex, and Dreams—comprises standalone works that can be seen in any order; the first being shown here, Love, introduces two colleagues at an Oslo hospital: Marianne, a single straight doctor, and Tor, a single gay nurse, who have conversations about pursuing sexual gratification without love or personal attachments. Although a fascinating philosophical exercise, Haugerud’s film never achieves any emotional or dramatic resonance since it feels that the director is randomly moving his pieces on a chessboard, with little that’s organic or truly felt in the relationships or character motivation. It will be interesting to see if the other two films can avoid this self-inflicted impediment.

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

Dune Prophecy 

(Warner Bros)

The Dune franchise, starting with Frank Herbert’s books, seems the most self-important and humorless of all sci-fi/fantasy worlds, and this prequel—which takes place more than 10,000 years (!) before the events of the original Dune—is another example. It focuses on the women of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, who foretell the birth of hero Paul Atreides, but—at least in this six-episode telling—the dourness and violence of the protagonists (embodied without much distinction by eminent performers like Emily Watson and Olivia Williams) are dramatized with po-faced inscrutability. The UHD image looks excellent; extras are the featurette Building Worlds and five Behind the Veil featurettes.

Mickey 17 

(Warner Bros)

Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to his ham-fisted but Oscar-winning Parasite is a sci-fi story set in 2054 during a space expedition where our eponymous hero is an “expendable,” taking on dangerous jobs and being cloned every time he dies. It’s a strangely inert, even risible black comedy that purloins Edward Ashton’s underlying novel (pointedly titled Mickey 7) to little effect but stultifying repetition. Bong’s direction—despite accomplished cinematography, editing, sets and costumes—is plodding and his actors follow suit, particularly a sleepy Robert Pattinson as Mickey and hammy Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette as the colony’s leaders. The film looks quite impressive in UHD; extras comprise several on-set featurettes.

CD Release of the Week 

Weinberg—Complete Music for Cello and Orchestra 

(Naxos)

Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96) died before his musical renaissance began with his emotionally shattering Holocaust opera The Passenger, several productions of which were soon followed by the dozens of recordings of his varied orchestral and chamber music. His symphonies and string quartets took precedence in several of these releases, his modest but still significant output of orchestral music for cello gets a hearing on this satisfying disc. The Concertino for Cello and String Orchestra is an enticing run-through for his weighty Cello Concerto, which is one of Weinberg’s most eloquent large-scale pieces; rounding out this recording is the enchanting Fantasia. Cello soloist Nikolay Shugaev performs impressively, backed by the solid Tyumen Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Yuri Medianik.

Film Series: Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2024

Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2024

Through June 6, 2024

Film at Lincoln Center

165 West 65 Street, New York, NY

filmlinc.org

A Better Tomorrow

This year’s edition of Open Roads, Film at Lincoln Center’s annual survey of new films from Italy, includes the latest by Nanni Moretti, one of the mainstays of the festival circuit since his early triumphs like 1994’s Ciao Diario. Unfortunately, A Better Tomorrow is one of his most unfocused efforts. Moretti plays a director busy on his current film and who wants to make a long-cherished pet project but is upset that his producer wife (Margherita Buy) is working on someone else’s film. Moretti’s casualness extends to mild jokes about the movie industry, and supporting turns by the likes of Mathieu Amalric amount to little more than winking at the viewer. Buy is always an asset, but Moretti doesn’t do nearly enough with her; the result is watchable but far from essential.

I Told You So

In I Told You So, the sophomore feature by Ginevra Elkann, Rome seems to be on fire as a heatwave in January is affecting everyone, including the kaleidoscope of characters Elkann intercuts among for 100 intriguing but ultimately exhausting minutes. In a large and talented cast that includes Valeria Golino as a former porn star turned YouTuber, Danny Huston as a priest and former heroin addict and Greta Scacchi as his exasperated sister who comes to town with their mother’s ashes, only Alba Rohrwacher as a desperate single mom who doesn’t want to lose her son gives a compelling but not over the top performance. 

In the Mirror

Rohrwacher is also superb in Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror, a fractured character study about a woman with amnesia who rebuilds her life through reenacting scenes from films starring beloved Italian star Monica Vitti. It sounds like a credulous idea, and it is, for the most part—although Rohrwacher gives a beautifully modulated portrayal of mental illness (and does a great Vitti impersonation as well), Torre never makes this stab at credible psychological drama anything more than a stunt.

Enea

While Stefano Sollima’s Adagio is a suffocating film noir about a teenager who becomes enthralled with the corrupt cops and criminals he falls in with (including stark turns by Adriano Giannini, Pierfrancesco Favino and Toni Servillo), Pietro Castellito’s Enea stakes much the same terrain with more assurance. Castellito Jr.—his father, the great actor Sergio Castellito, plays the father here—confidently makes himself an unlikeable but sleazily charming protagonist who sells drugs on the side; if it at times bites off more than it can chew, Enea has a stylishness that underscores its satirical sleaziness.

The Beautiful Summer

With The Beautiful Summer, Laura Luchetti has a made an empathetic and sensitive coming-of-age saga about 17-year-old Ginia (a starmaking turn by the terrific Yile Yara Vianello), who is simultaneously confused and happy at her attraction to Amelia (the smoldering Deva Cassel), a headstrong model for local artists. The 1938 Turin setting is both evocative and quietly chilling, as Mussolini’s fascists hover in the background; Luchetti’s gorgeously realized feature, one of the best surprises of this year’s Open Roads, is scheduled to be released stateside by Film Movement later in 2024. 

There’s Still Tomorrow

In There’s Still Tomorrow, actress Paola Cortellesi’s directorial debut, Delia, an ordinary mom with two teenage children, stoically puts up with her husband’s unending and unapologetic physical and emotional abuse—until she receives a letter that can change her fate. Shot in striking B&W and cannily changing aspect ratios, Cortellesi’s darkly comic drama not only gets the details right of a small Italian village during the 1940s U.S. army occupation, but Cortellesi herself gives a performance of great empathy and comic grace, the emotional center of an ambitious and satisfying paean to quotidian women everywhere.

Film Series Roundup—Director Patricia Rozema Retrospective

Patricia Rozema Retrospective

Through April 11, 2024

Roxy Cinema

2 Avenue of the Americas, New York City

Roxycinemanewyork.com

Director Patricia Rozema

Canadian director Patricia Rozema has been making highly personal and idiosyncratic films for several decades now, although in America she is barely known. The Roxy’s retrospective—the first in New York that I can recall—comprises several films, including several rarely seen ones.

I Saw the Mermaids Singing

In 1987, Rozema made her feature debut with I Saw the Mermaids Singing, a lightweight, alternately enervating and charming comedy about Polly, an aimless young woman who latches onto her new boss Gabrielle, an elegant gallery owner, discovering new things about herself along the way. Although Sheila McCarthy makes a winning heroine, the unfocused film’s literal flights of fancy and narrative tangents are more cutesy than witty.

White Room

With her next film, Rozema would find her own voice, even though she calls it an “abject failure” (whether jokingly or not I don’t know). 1990’s White Room, which has never been released in the U.S., is an unnerving neo-noir about naïve garderner Norm, who witnesses the murder of rock star Madelaine X (an all too briefly seen Margot Kidder), then gets involved with the mysterious Jane, whom he meets at the funeral. Maurice Godin is a wooden Norm, but Kate Nelligan gives one of her best performances as Jane, a sensual and maternal presence that dominates the movie—shot, as many of her films are, in an always photogenic Toronto. 

When Night Is Falling

In 1995, Rozema made When Night Is Falling, a trenchantly observed study of the intimate relationship between Camille, a married philosophy professor, and Petra, a traveling circus performer. Although it sounds like mere softcore titillation, Rozema’s direction and writing as well as the first-rate acting from her cast—Pascale Bussières as Camille, Rachael Crawford as Petra, and Henry Czerny as Camilla’s professor boyfriend Martin—makes it one of the more memorable of the mid ’90s entries into lesbian drama.

Mansfield Park

Also part of the Roxy retro are Rozema’s first two films made outside Canada, unsurprisingly featuring formidable heroines—and stellar performances—at their center. Mansfield Park (1999) remains one of the most original Jane Austen adaptations, with Frances O’Connor at her most winning as Fanny. And Rozema’s contribution to the 2000 omnibus series Beckett on Film, the one-woman play Happy Days, stars a mesmerizing Rosaleen Linehan as one of Beckett’s greatest creations, Winnie, who’s buried up to neck in sand.

Happy Days

Too bad that Rozema’s most recent feature, 2018’s Mouthpiece, does little with the conceit that Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken brought to their original play—both enact aspects of the metaphorically named Cassandra, a woman dealing with her mother’s death. Only an admittedly perfect final image redeems this otherwise one-note film, but that shouldn’t detract anyone from seeing the other titles in this long-awaited retrospective.