‘How to Have Sex’ (2024)
The title is provocative, but this is no how-to manual; instead, the writer and director Molly Manning Walker tells a contemporary coming-of-age story that will reverberate with viewers of all ages and sexes. Her focus is on Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), a 16-year-old British girl on a post-exams holiday in Crete with her friends. They plan to party, drink and hook up, and the latter is of particular import to Tara, who is keen to lose her virginity — less out of desire or romanticism than to simply get it over with. Manning is a cinematographer making her feature directing debut, and she deftly uses compositions, color and sound to convey Tara’s isolation, desperation and disappointment. She gets a big assist from McKenna-Bruce, a charismatic and empathetic lead who can whisper, in a throwaway line or discreet gesture, everything you need to know about this young woman’s past and present.
‘Miller’s Girl’ (2024)
The first-time writer and director Jade Halley Bartlett makes occasional rookie errors in this psychosexual drama. But she has a knack with actors, particularly Jenna Ortega, who plays the lead role of a brainy teen seductress with wit and verve. Bartlett photographs Ortega like a movie star, and she comes off like one; she has a particular way of chewing on a line of loaded dialogue, and she and Martin Freeman (as the creative writing professor whose professional interest becomes personal) create a specific, uneasy but undeniable chemistry that smooths over the script’s rougher stretches. The third-act turn into a 21st century “Oleanna” is effective, with Bartlett inventively intermingling her levels of fiction and cleanly visualizing the inevitable he said/she said conflicts. The moment when Ortega decisively takes the upper hand is screen acting of the highest order.
Alex Garland’s latest, “Civil War,” has struck up a fair amount of conversation for its provocative ideas. This is his bread and butter; he delights in using the conventions of genre filmmaking to reflect on the complexities and difficulties of the human condition. His previous film falls along the same lines, taking up the forever-topical subject of the power dynamic between men and women. Jessie Buckley (excellent as ever) stars as a young woman whose peaceful getaway at a country cottage turns into an unsettling exploration of misogyny; Rory Kinnear co-stars, in a clever bit of casting, as every man she encounters. It’s a rather unsubtle method of underscoring the ever-present threat of gendered violence, but these are not subtle themes — or times.
‘A Most Wanted Man’ (2014)
In one of his final performances, great Philip Seymour Hoffman is Günther Bachmann, the German intelligence officer at the center of this modest but affecting adaptation of John le Carré’s post-9/11 novel. The director Anton Corbijn, his visual style sharpened by years as an in-demand photographer, finds the right look and feel for this story of weary bureaucrats trying (and often failing) to navigate a shifting geopolitical landscape. The supporting cast (which includes Willem Dafoe, Rachel McAdams and Robin Wright) is first rate, but this is Hoffman’s aria, and he performs it with the grace and nuance that made him such a special actor.
The biographical drama of the tortured artistic genius has become one of the most tiresome touchstones of contemporary cinema, but Mike Leigh does not make check-the-box movies, and this dramatization of the life of the British painter J.M.W. Turner eschews the shopworn biopic tropes. Instead, Leigh sees Turner as a pragmatic painter, blunt in his personal interactions but inspired in his work, and Leigh’s regular collaborator Timothy Spall plays his complexities and contradictions adroitly, while the cinematographer Dick Pope gives his process a breathtaking pulse.
‘The Dead Don’t Die’ (2019)
The eternally hip writer-director Jim Jarmusch summons up a cast of his go-to actors (including Steve Buscemi, Adam Driver, Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton) for this delightfully unpredictable zombie apocalypse comedy. Driver, Murray and Chloë Sevigny are police officers in the small town of Centerville, a tiny world turned upside down by the rise of the undead, and what begins as a fairly standard “Night of the Living Dead” riff becomes a pointed commentary on Trump’s America — and then a clever meta-textual riff on filmmaking itself.
‘The Witness’ (2016)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video and on Peacock.
After her violent 1964 death, the name Kitty Genovese became a kind of shorthand for urban indifference, after the Times reported that her stabbing had been witnessed by 38 neighbors who failed to act. In later years, The Times reconsidered its account; this powerful documentary also attempts to set the record straight, following Ms. Genovese’s younger brother Bill as he attempts to not only clarify the circumstances of her death, but highlight the joy and bravery of her life. Kitty Genovese was a person, not a symbol, and the director James Solomon admirably and poignantly corrects that error.
‘Riotsville, USA’ (2022)
As news outlets have recently reported on police clashing with protesters on college campuses, some necessary historical context is available via this documentary account of how our government addressed similar civil unrest in the late 1960s. The title comes from a government training facility, a fake town built for urban riot training exercises, and the director Sierra Pettengill uncovers shocking (and occasionally amusing) archival footage of those exercises and contemporaneous images of police and soldiers violently stifling peaceful protesters. This is a fierce, angry film — the kind of documentary where historical overview blurs uncomfortably into contemporary commentary.
