Movies of Note Don’t Worry

FILM

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RThe African Desperate At the beginning of Martine Syms’s debut narrative feature, sculptor Palace (Diamond Stingily, also an artist in real life) is shown receiving her MFA from an art school in upstate New York. Four white faculty members bestow the honor, but only a er off ering a range of supercilious (some even outright racist) critiques and patronizing banalities. This kicks off Palace’s fi nal 24 hours as an exhausted graduate student, who vows to skip the end-of-summer party but instead fi nds herself drawn to the debauchery. Syms’s work—which ranges from performance art to gallery installations to this more straightforward narrative endeavor—is compelled by a preternaturally propulsive energy that sustains its momentum even as she explores various forms of expression. As Palace navigates her fi nal day at the college, Syms inserts multimedia quirks into the coming-of-age proceedings, such as when Palace, doing her makeup for the night, assumes the peculiar dialect of a social media infl uencer fi lming a tutorial; trenchant memes occasionally pop up in the top right corner of the screen, fl ashing by so quick as to be illegible but hilarious nonetheless. It’s through these means that the fi lm off ers wry commentary on everything from undecipherable artspeak to racism. (An exchange between Palace and a faculty member extolling the virtues of a rapper he heard an interview with on NPR’s Fresh Air, to which Palace replies “What’s Fresh Air?,” is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a fi lm all year.) Cowritten by Syms and Rocket Caleshu, its script is so good as to seem unwritten, the stuff of real-life folly; Stingily’s performance is similarly ingenious. —KATHLEEN SACHS 97 min. Gene Siskel Film Center

RBros In the romantic comedy Bros, Bobby (Billy Eichner) recently expanded his career as a LGBTQ+ history podcast host into lead curator of the fi rst major LGBTQ+ museum in New York. A er a meet-cute of sorts with not-his-usual-type Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), Bobby struggles to pair his feelings with his self-described permanently single lifestyle.

Written by Eichner and longtime comedy veteran Nicholas Stoller, and directed by Stoller, Bros toes the line between genuine moments of sweetness and acerbically cutting sarcastic wit. Modes of relationships diff er, and Bros is comfortable in highlighting those diff erences for all their joys and faults.

Where the fi lm truly succeeds is in its ability to de ly balance universal experience with individuality. While there are obviously commonalities between the romantic experiences of gay and straight people across gender identities, or even more narrowly between cis white men as a subcategory, the diversity of specifi c experience is critical to Eichner’s script, as even within narrow categories there are vastly varied modes of interaction, openness, and perspective. Of course, fi nding shared experience and opening oneself up to be surprised by those who fall outside of our initial expectations is a common trope in romantic comedies, but Eichner and Stoller’s script is inventive enough to expand the trope in entertaining ways, and Macfarlane brings depth of performance to a character that could otherwise fall into cliché.

Ultimately, Bros is a genuinely funny movie with nuanced emotional he . It’s a refreshing and vulnerable take on the genre from a perspective so rarely seen in Hollywood fi lmmaking and a reminder of the joy and laughter that’s there to be found in the chaotic minutia of human relationships if we’re open to fi nding it. —ADAM MULLINS-KHATIB R, 115 min. Wide release in theaters

Catherine Called Birdy

Based on Karen Cushman’s well-loved 1994 children’s novel, Lena Dunham presents a girl’s coming-of-age story set in 13th-century England. The sets and costumes look period-correct, but this is no attempt at historic verisimilitude à la Robert Eggers’s The Witch. Birdy is the kind of impossible, irreverent girl Dunham specializes in. Spoiled, defi ant, but also capable of empathy beyond her years, she’s an almost prototypical heroine for a children’s book.

The plot turns on the family’s money problems, the solution being to marry Birdy off for as much of a dowry as she can command. Of course the girl fi ghts this plan tooth and nail, sending a succession of suitors running away screaming. Using contemporary pop music and employing 2022 dialogue—albeit peppered with occasional medieval lingo—Dunham has fashioned a teen rom-com in period garb. It reminded me a bit of Sofi a Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, though pitched to tweens. Those familiar with Dunham’s previous work will be surprised by the gentleness of approach and the conventionality of the story’s resolution. In the end, Birdy comes to terms with the need to do what’s best for her family and to grow up and become like everyone else. I was very aware while watching that as a 51-year-old man I was not who this was made for. But is it a good message to send young girls that they can be bad and do what they want for a little while but when the rubber hits the road they must toe the line? —DMITRY SAMAROV PG-13, 108 min. Wide release in theaters and streaming on Prime Video

Catherine Called Birdy ALEX BAILEY/AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC

Don’t Worry Darling

The saying goes that all press is good press, but how true can that be if alleged drama surrounding a fi lm overshadows the merits of the fi lm itself? Don’t Worry Darling is the second movie to fall into this trap this summer, though it does manage to still bring on the thrills, mostly thanks to another potent performance from Florence Pugh. Her range is on full display as Alice, a 1950s housewife who begins to suspect that her husband’s company is up to something sinister within their utopian community. Alice, her husband, Jack (a dull but good enough Harry Styles), and all the company employees along with their wives live isolated from the rest of the world, hardly able to remember their lives from before they arrived. The only rule is that they stay within the company town, where they’re safe. Chris Pine delivers a disturbing performance that’s part televangelist and part cult leader, totally nailing that brand of big, inspiring speeches that seem poignant in delivery but are empty when you actually listen to the words being said.

Piecing together what’s actually going on in this seemingly idyllic community proves tougher than expected, which primes for a tense twist in the fi nal act, and the fi lm’s introductory scenes are truly creepy as Alice begins to question her sanity, the world, and the people around her. The issue is in the middle: once Alice is convinced that something is wrong, the movie ought to pick up the pace to maintain momentum. Instead, it drudges on with a shot-by-shot repetitiveness that’s likely intentional but ends up being ineff ective. There’s even a pump-fake twist and by this point, you’re begging for the real reveal to be, well, revealed. When the truth fi nally does come out, the explanation is interesting but fl imsy, and a er waiting so long to fi nd out, it’s unsatisfying. Ultimately, Don’t Worry Darling boasts a (mostly) talented cast with a strong start but can’t follow through on its promises. —NOËLLE D. LILLEY R, 122 min. Wide release in theaters

RRiotsville, U.S.A. A er protests in many major American cities shook the country’s establishment in the mid-60s, Lyndon Johnson assembled what would come to be known as the Kerner Commission (a er Illinois governor Otto Kerner, who headed it) to study and recommend solutions to the racial and economic issues that inspired the widespread unrest. Their report, published by Bantam Books in paperback, quickly became a bestseller. But the sweeping reforms the commission called for were mostly ignored, except for a line item toward the end to boost funding for law enforcement. Some of this new money went to the construction of model towns on army bases in Virginia and Georgia. Dubbed “Riotsville,” they were stage sets where police departments and the military playacted command and control tactics to quell inner-city turmoil, complete with bleachers full of offi cers and politicians cheering and laughing as soldiers dressed as “hooligans” and “rabble-rousers” got their heads bashed in and helicopters clouded all of the ersatz Main Street with tear gas.

Sierra Pettengill’s disquieting documentary uses only archival footage shot by the military and clips from period news coverage to explore this uncanny episode in the country’s history. As fake as the towns and protestors obviously were, the training law enforcement groups received in these Riotsvilles was all too real. Their violent strategies to snuff out unrest outside the Republican convention in Miami and the Democratic one in Chicago in 1968 were taught on those sets. While Pettengill’s sympathy for the largely le -wing activists and community organizers is clear, her use of strictly period footage that has rarely screened before—and certainly never for a wide audience such as a major broadcast network—lends her fi lm a depth that would’ve been absent if she presented a bunch of contemporary talking heads explaining the fl aws and lapses of the establishment. These odd, sometimes amateurish frames put the viewer back into that tumultuous time in a way that no amount of outraged words ever could. —DMITRY SAMAROV 91 min. Gene Siskel Film Center v