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TOP PICK OF THE WEEK
RK/RKAY
**** Mahboob is a fictional character, but that doesn’t stop him from making real-life mayhem in this cheeky comedy from Indian filmmaker Rajat Kapoor. Kapoor stars as RK, a somber visionary who directs himself in a film about Mahboob, a mustachioed romantic who is murdered in a forest. Rather than face his morbid fate, Mahboob hails a taxi that inexplicably transports him out of the film and into RK’s life, where he pleads for his creator to spare him. RK/RKAY could have been a Truman Show-style meditation on faith and free will, but Kapoor is more interested in asking witty questions. How do you report a fictitious person missing to the police? How do you return him to your imagination? What do you do when his diabolical nemesis (Ranvir Shorey) follows him into the real world with a lethal grudge? The answers that the film offers are delightfully clever and deliciously bizarre. Kapoor seems to be meditating on what happens when a director is drawn too deeply into his art, but allegorical baggage never weighs down the film. He keeps the mood playful, setting the stage for a magnificently wacky ending that suggests the only thing stranger than cinema is life. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Virtual Cinema.
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Limbo
*** Syrian refugee Omar won’t pluck his oud (an 11-stringed Middle Eastern lute) outside his home country. It doesn’t sound right on Scottish soil, he says. Given the natural acoustics, who could blame him? Omnipresent in U.K. director Ben Sharrock’s spare comedy are the oppressive gusts and rumbling waves of this Scottish isle, creating a sensorial conundrum for asylum seekers like Omar awaiting their papers. The wild, whistling remoteness all around is a prison of freedom. All the while, Omar (Amir El-Masry) hauls his encased oud around “like a coffin for [his] soul,” teases flatmate Farhad (Vikash Bhai), exemplifying both the depth of Limbo’s central friendship and its obvious purgatorial themes. Sharrock’s patient wide shots and 4:3 aspect ratio cement the film’s sense of lost translation and wait-for-it humor within a stunted cultural exchange between wary refugees and a few myopic Scots. Even if Limbo is a wee bit wanting for character richness—laying bare certain plot devices—its unforced human comedy is remarkably shrewd yet innocent. Even more, El-Masry transforming Omar’s calm dignity into unshoulderable doubt is one of 2021′s best performances thus far. He’s a character unpacked but not reassembled by a geopolitical way station that is absurdly, unbearably fine. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, Living Room.
Nina Wu
*** Nina Wu is a struggling actress living in Taipei. When her agent nabs her an audition for a plum role in a ’70s espionage thriller, she hesitates after learning it requires full-frontal nudity, though ultimately goes through with it. She earns the part, but discovers that the on-set environment is dangerous and brutal—the director is abusive in his quest to elicit Nina’s best performance, and the (mostly male) crew members do nothing to intervene. As Nina begins to unravel, repressed memories leak through the cracks, and she questions how she actually got the role in the first place. The answer is horrific, almost as horrific as the fact that Nina Wu is inspired by true events. Written by and starring Wu Ke-Xi in the titular role, this darkly surrealist character study takes inspiration from Satoshi Kon’s 1997 anime masterpiece Perfect Blue, and is a mesmerizing exploration of the myriad ways in which trauma completely alters one’s mental health, one’s identity, one’s entire world. As Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” which is exactly the coping mechanism Nina chooses. Though the film is occasionally a tad unfocused, it still retains a serrated sharpness, leaving an unforgettable scar. NR. MIA VICINO. On Demand, Virtual Cinema.
Our Towns
*** When journalists Deborah and James Fallows conclude their new HBO documentary in Bend, the Central Oregon hub is held up as a beacon, having reinvented itself into a year-round tourist destination after weathering the 1980s timber crash. Evolving municipal identity runs through all eight profiles in Our Towns, based on the Fallowses’ 2018 book of the same name. While the film’s many drone-captured sweeps of marshes, highways and farmland are simultaneously majestic and too polished, the most useful takeaway from Our Towns is a psychological prophecy. The Fallowses note that although Americans are routinely intransigent when it comes to their national politics, they often believe their communities’ outlooks to be different. And with enough of that exceptionalism, cities can actually become positively idiosyncratic. California’s Inland Empire boxing gyms double as chess clubs. West Virginia public radio stations leap to the national stage. Small-town Maine newspapers stay robust against all odds. If Our Towns has a major shortfall, it too often employs industrial narratives as a crutch for town health and identity. Today’s innovations are framed as victories for locales like Bend, but the exit of the previous industry only shows how fickle and exploitative commercial definitions can be. Luckily, though, the guiding principle here is classic, unassuming human interest—may it never decline, crash or outsource. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. HBO, HBO Max.
Queen Marie
*** Queen Marie of Romania once wondered, “What can a woman do in a modern war?” In the wake of World War I, she showed what a woman could achieve in the aftermath of that conflict when she journeyed to Paris and unleashed her political prowess on the Treaty of Versailles, which led to Romania doubling in size. It didn’t hurt that the British-born monarch bedazzled the press—a talent that is captured perfectly by Roxana Lupu, the star of Queen Marie of Romania, an elegantly entertaining biopic directed by Alexis Sweet Cahill. Marie spends the film subtly outsmarting bloviators like Woodrow Wilson (Patrick Drury), but she has both the cleverness of a Jane Austen heroine and the steeliness of Ripley or Sarah Connor. When the domineering Lupu declares, “I am Queen Victoria’s granddaughter. Never forget that,” her voice crackles with the fervor of belief. Like many movies about pompous Europeans chatting in lovingly decorated rooms, Queen Marie of Romania can be claustrophobic, but Lupu keeps the film from becoming dry or drab. Whether you’re obsessed or repulsed by royalty, her performance will leave you in awe of the power of the crown when it is wielded by the right woman. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. On Demand.
The Columnist
** “Never read the comments.” That is the golden rule of online content creation. And yet, when your job requires any sort of internet presence, it’s nearly impossible to avoid. Femke Boot (Katja Herbers) is a columnist for a popular Dutch magazine. Because her articles tend to focus on women and/or politics, Femke is constantly being harassed with vile Twitter replies and death threats—all perpetrated by men. This is an all too common problem for women who dare to post their opinions online, and Femke is justifiably fed up. So, when the police won’t do anything, she takes matters into her own hands by going on a killing spree. This is where the catharsis is supposed to kick in. And it does, somewhat, but there is a vital nuance missing. What the male writers and director of this icy thriller gloss over is that we don’t necessarily purely want revenge on these bullies. While retaliation is always cinematic and awesome, women really just want to be seen as people, not faceless vessels for others to project their own insecurities onto. As a result, the end product feels flattened and surface level, its innovative and relevant premise held back from reaching its full potential. Still cool to see bigots get wrecked, though. NR. MIA VICINO. Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube.
What Lies West
* Although centered on two very different more-than-girls, not-yet-women paired by fate for a late-summer escapade of unexpected resonance, What Lies West never quite feels like a coming-of-age flick. That’s probably because none of the characters, young or old, ever do. The world of overburdened, emotionally stunted burnouts unwilling or unable to grow up should’ve rightly fueled a scathing satire. Nicolette (Nicolette Kaye Ellis), a floundering recent theater grad-turned-hopeful social media influencer, certainly veers cartoonish, as does the helicoptering yoga mom (Anna Peterson) who hires Nicolette to babysit her misanthropic 16-year-old daughter Chloe (Chloe Moore) for reasons impossible to take seriously. The young women manage to bond and embark on a 40-mile hike across Sonoma County—a sloppily planned trudge undertaken by clumsy amateurs with a vague purpose and poor direction. Despite all that, some adventures ensue. As much as the film trembles before the suffocating oppression of parental fears, this is the safest possible telling of an absolutely meaningless tale. Writer-director Jessica Ellis’ debut is formulaic and panders to its only conceivable audience: the ever-growing throngs of nascent auteurs inspired by the idea that anyone can make movies, which is What Lies West surely proves. NR. JAY HORTON. Amazon Prime, Google Play, On Demand.