Critic's Notebook

Crash Dive

Vince Valitutti/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
Thirteen Lives (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

“Apollo 13” might have been the film that changed the game in Hollywood. It was a dramatic re-enactment of a real-life event most people had either forgotten about, or not quite understood the historical importance of. But that aborted space flight happened in 1970; and Ron Howard directed the movie version in 1995. Nowadays the rush to adapt real-life events into filmic re-enactments happens almost as soon as news cameras arrive on the ground. “Thirteen Lives” is about a Thai football team getting trapped in a flooded cave in 2018 – that is to say, four years ago. The teenagers who were in that cave are still teenagers now. Is that a spoiler? But how can it be, when the incident is so fresh in our minds? So what Mr. Howard needed to do was find an angle like what “Apollo 13” had. In that case, it was to remind us of human ingenuity in times of crisis and what humanity lost by stopping our exploration of the universe. It is unfortunate that this time around, Mr. Howard did no such thing.

Life Under Siege

Oxymoron Films

MOVIE REVIEW
Our River . . . Our Sky (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

The key scene in this Iraqi film comes about two-thirds of the way through. Sara (Darina Al Joundi) is on a bus stuck in Baghdadi traffic when there’s a nearby burst of machine-gun fire. Everyone ducks, wearily; they have all done this before. It’s 2006 and the war is raging. But it’s soon over, with only one corpse in the street; and the driver reassures the passengers they are all safe. Everyone sits up, mutters a few curses, take a few deep breaths and starts cracking jokes. If their bodies were dumped in a strange part of town, at least it would be a nice change of scenery! Maybe their corpse can go to Paris, Venice, Dubai! And this group of strangers all laugh in glee at still being alive.

Say Yes to the Dress

Dávid Lukács/Focus Features

MOVIE REVIEW
Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

Sometimes a gem comes along at just the right time to cheer everybody up. In 2022, that gem is “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” which is about the importance of kindness, community and good clothes, three things the world has been sorely lacking these last horrible years. It stars Lesley Manville as the most lovable British heroine since Bridget Jones, is about a journey of self-discovery via haute couture and is rated PG. Not since David Mamet made “The Winslow Boy” has a movie so adult also been appropriate for all ages. But this one is much better looking.

A Bitter Pill

Nan Goldin

MOVIE REVIEW
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

There has rarely been a more effective demonstration of how the personal can be political. Nan Goldin should be mentioned in the same breath as Sylvia Plath as artists who changed the world through their overwhelmingly emotional, deeply personal art. Ms. Plath was a poet, whose work was seen through the gendered lens of “confessional” and whose suicide has unfortunately permanently overshadowed her incredible talents as a writer. Happily Ms. Goldin is still alive, despite a life equally full of pain. She is most famous for “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” a photographic slide show set to music which debuted in 1986, depicting herself and her friends going out or staying in, having sex, taking drugs, being ill in hospital or other similarly private and intimate activities. (The best version is in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while a more British-themed version is in the permanent collection of the Tate in London.) It runs on a continuous loop and can be an overwhelming experience due to the rawness of emotion from the combination of sound and images that somehow floods the viewing room. Like a great movie, come to think.

The King of Queens

Ilze Kitshoff/TriStar Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
The Woman King (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster to really make for an enjoyable evening at the cinema. Fight scenes, women in peril, countless evil enemies and the right amount of nudity to maintain a PG-13 rating: “The Woman King” has it all. And better still, it uses this standard blockbuster template in an entirely fresh setting: the kingdom of Dahomey in west Africa in 1823. It’s plagued by the slave trade, where innocent villagers are kidnapped and sold to disgusting white men, here personified by the cocky Brazilian Santo (Hero Fiennes Tiffin). The new king, Ghezo (South London’s favorite son John Boyega, getting to do something different from his previous blockbuster fare and have a great time doing so), has pledged to stop selling his own people, if nothing else. And he has the manpower to put his money where his mouth is. Well, womanpower, actually. He has an elite squad of soldiers, the Agojie, all women, and all the stuff of nightmares.

Ship of Fools

Fredrik Wenzel

MOVIE REVIEW
Triangle of Sadness (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

“Triangle of Sadness” continues writer-director Ruben Östlund’s preoccupation with the upending of hierarchical social constructs – gender, race, wealth, class, chain of command etc. – in the face of disasters natural or manmade. It’s certainly the kind of stuff that plays well at festivals, as evidenced by Cannes twice bestowing on him the Palme d’or. But does anyone honestly remember what happens in “The Square,” which won him his first in 2017, without looking up the plot? “Triangle,” Mr. Ostlund’s second Palme d’or winner, has a wild ending that feeds right into the rush of the festival setting; the problem lies in the uneven two and a half hours it takes to get there.

Death Wish

Carole Bethuel/Curzon Film

MOVIE REVIEW
Everything Went Fine (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

Broadly speaking, François Ozon directs two kinds of movies. The first are about young gay men getting themselves into a situation that ends with somebody dying. The second kind are about women in some sort of family-themed trap, to which they learn they must submit. The traps vary (a crappy marriage in “5x2,” a slutty houseguest in “Swimming Pool,” a parasitic twin in “Double Lover”) but they cannot be escaped, and writhing in the net only draws the knots tighter. The daughters in “Everything Went Fine” learned their lessons about their gilded cage in childhood, and tell anyone who asks that it’s impossible to deny their father anything. Mr Ozon must have been thrilled to option the memoir by Emmanuèle Bernheim, the late screenwriter of “5x2” and “Swimming Pool,” on which this movie is based. This is a family in which the ties do significantly more than bind.

Score Card

Dogwoof

MOVIE REVIEW
Ennio (2022)

By ALAN DIMENT

One of the great clichés available to the critic is the term “roller-coaster.” This is normally interpreted to mean that the film in question is a fast-moving, exhilarating experience with lots of emotional ups and downs. To this control freak – who’d rather undergo a marathon screening of all the “Fast & Furious” movies than go anywhere near a theme park – “roller-coaster” conjures up an entirely different meaning. It infers that the film is terrifying, nausea-inducing and only to be undertaken in order to impress somebody that you find attractive.

“Ennio” is in itself a bit of a roller-coaster but for different reasons. It starts calmly enough with the aged maestro Ennio Morricone undertaking his morning exercises – including press-ups that many men a third his age could not manage or be bothered with. But then the brakes are off and we are zipping along through the great composer’s life in a blur of archive footage, movie clips and so many different talking heads offering up opinions and anecdotes that it’s hard to keep track of who’s who, even with the captions. “Game of Thrones” was a comparative cakewalk next to this. One emerges from “Ennio” disoriented and slightly breathless.

Highway to the Comfort Zone

Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

An aircraft carrier is 90,000 tons of diplomacy (as they say on the T-shirts) and its smell is hard to describe. It’s an enveloping sensation that permeates the entire world around you, especially when the carrier is out at sea and a floating city for thousands of people. Below decks the air is heavy with the weight of the ship, metal and body odors, recycled air and watertight doors. The flight deck smells like salt air and overheated tarmac, wind and jet fuel. It gets under your skin like very little else.

“Top Gun: Maverick” is all about what it’s like to chase a sensation. It begins with old-school renegade expert Maverick (Tom Cruise) taking an experimental plane for a test flight before its program is shut down by an admiral so tough (Ed Harris in a delightful cameo) he doesn’t even flinch as the plane passes so low overhead it knocks the roof of a guard hut. It transpires that Maverick is needed urgently at the flight school outside San Diego, where a secret mission – think the targeting of the Death Star in “Star Wars,” only more convoluted – requires training only Maverick can provide. The training is overseen by Cyclone (Jon Hamm), a by-the-rules admiral who dislikes Maverick, personally and professionally. One of the trainee pilots is Rooster (Miles Teller, phenomenally cast and with a superb mustache, and otherwise serviceable), whose late father was Maverick’s wingman and who has daddy issues galore. Maverick’s daddy issues from the original are forgotten. As the world turns, eh? The rest of the plot is pretty standard blockbuster stuff.

L'état d'urgence

Carole Bethuel

MOVIE REVIEW
The Divide (2021)

By SARAH MANVEL

The English title implies something that’s grown apart, while the original French title means something which has broken, which is more appropriate. This slice-of-life story, set in a Parisian emergency room on a day of the Yellow Vests protests, manages to excoriate French society at all levels while also being a kind, clear-eyed metaphor of how a nation handles its suffering.