Our Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP

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Tuesday, May 30, 2017 at 1:51 p.m.

Courtesy Imagination Worldwide Paint It Black: Amber Tamblyn, the actress, author and filmmaker, doesn’t bother with coyness when it comes to her influences. “The movie I saw in my head was Grey Gardens directed by David Lynch,” she writes in the press notes for her debut feature, Paint It Black, based on Janet Fitch’s 2006 novel. The film itself proves more entrancing than the imitative mashup that logline suggests. Tamblyn (and Ed Dougherty, who co-wrote the adaptation with her) has shaped Fitch’s book into an actress’s duel and duet in which Alia Shawkat and Janet McTeer torment each other in a starting-to-molder Echo Park mansion. The dress-up and the passing manias are too poisonous to suggest the Maysleses’ immortal study of the two Edith Beales, and McTeer’s character, world-class pianist Meredith, keeps a gleaming Steinway in the house rather than raccoons. Instead, Tamblyn arcs toward Lynch, celebrating and interrogating the roles that actresses have played in his films. Here it’s a dead boy that plunges us into the underworld.

For more, read our review of Paint It Black. 1/13

Courtesy PBS Distrubution Abacus: Small Enough to Jail: You’d never think a bank would be the David in a David-and-Goliath story, but such is the case in Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, the latest documentary from Oscar-nominated Hoop Dreams director Steve James. At the center is the Sung family, whose patriarch, Thomas Sung, founded Abacus Federal Savings Bank in New York’s Chinatown in the 1980s. The recurring references to It’s a Wonderful Life from Thomas (who fancies himself Jimmy Stewart’s small-town heart of gold, triumphing amid financial woes) give the film the backbone for its American dream. Or an American nightmare, as Abacus became the only bank indicted during the 2008 financial crisis.

For more, read our review of Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. 2/13

Courtesy Grasshopper Films Last Men in Aleppo: Suspended in orange and crimson, the mysterious, shimmering black circle that greets us in the first shot of Last Men in Aleppo could be blood circling a drain, a dying star, a storm front seen from space. Instead, it's something more mundane: the eye of a goldfish. But the otherworldly tone with which Firas Fayyad's documentary begins puts us in an unusual frame of mind. For even though Last Men in Aleppo is mostly a ground-level, you-are-there experience, the eyes of history, and maybe even of something greater, are never far.

For more, read our review of Last Men in Aleppo. 3/13

Courtesy Cohen Media Group Maurice: Director James Ivory says, "The thing that marks Maurice as a gay film is that its story has a happy ending. Forster always wanted that. He wrote about it and said that. Most gay stories, at least back then, ended with some very bad thing. In that way, it was maybe ahead of its time. And also, I was lucky with my actors, because they weren’t frightened of it. All three guys were straight, but they kissed lustily, and they weren’t afraid of intimacy. Even today, the physical closeness often puts many actors off. And remember that Maurice came out at a time of great tragedy and unhappiness, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. There was no cure yet, and people were losing their lives, and their family and friends.

For more, read our interview with James Ivory about the rereleased Maurice. 4/13

Courtesy Anthology Film Archives Ta’ang: Pack a sleeping bag before entering Wang Bing’s patient, immersive study of the lives of refugees seeking safety on the border between Myanmar and China. The film runs almost 150 minutes but feels longer, in a good way — it’s more a sleepover than a narrative, a long day and night spent sitting at a camp, then journeying by foot, then watching laborers hack sugarcane, then laughing with family and friends around a fire, then marching on in the daylight, up a muddy mountain path, as explosions boom in a restless sky. Much of the film is given to real-time observation, the everyday reality of a tragedy captured in long, unbroken shots, some casually framed and illuminated by candles or campfires.

For more, read our review of Ta’ang. 5/13

Courtesy Kino Lorber A Woman’s Life: Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man, from 2015, showed us a modern factory worker's soiling experience of the postindustrial economy. Now A Woman’s Life begins on the Normandy coast in the middle of the 19th century but is no less concerned with francs and debts, with how lives are circumscribed by the laws of the market. Even a lit-adaptation costume drama by this director — in this case, an exquisitely moving retelling of the first completed novel by Guy de Maupassant — is about socioeconomic confinement. Title figure Jeanne (Judith Chemla), the minor baroness whom we meet in the full bloom of youth, will find herself as cramped within Brizé’s frame as she is within her society.

For more, read our review of A Woman’s Life. 6/13

Courtesy First Run Features Stefan Zweig: Maria Schrader’s excellent dramatic feature chronicles Stefan Zweig’s final years in exile. Born in Vienna to an upper-middle-class family in 1881, Zweig had become one of the most popular writers in the world by the 1920s. He was a passionate humanist, fervently dedicated to a peaceful pan-Europeanism. Following World War I, his villa on the Alps, near Salzburg, became a cultural mecca for European artists, with H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Richard Strauss and Béla Bartók frequent visitors. From the terrace, they could see across the border into southern Germany. In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, Zweig writes, “We spent so many happy hours with all our guests, sitting on the terrace and looking out at the beautiful and peaceful landscape, never guessing that directly opposite, on the mountain in Berchtesgaden, a man lived who would destroy it all.”

For more, read our review of Stefan Zweig. 7/13

Courtesy Synergetic Distribution Sami Blood: Amanda Kernell's scrupulously shaped coming-of-rage drama opens with Christina (Maj-Doris Rimpi), an elderly woman wearing sparkling pearls and a pitiless countenance, turning bitterly obstinate when taken back to the Lapland of her birth for her sister's funeral. She'll speak to no one, vows not to stay the night, and has zero tolerance for displays of yoik, the local throat singing. Stuck in a hotel despite her protestations, she watches a helicopter lift, the green-humped mountains behind it frosted at the peaks. The world around her is gorgeous, a true pleasure to regard, and she stares at that chopper as if it were her only possible rescue from damnation.

For more, read our review of Sami Blood. 8/13

Courtesy Park Circus/Miramax Reservoir Dogs: Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I’ve never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director’s feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy. Yes, the opening scene — black-suited crooks bantering about Madonna and the ethics of tipping — was funny. But the characters played like a collection of tics and attitudes rather than real people. And as the pop-cultural references piled up, the film seemed to lose energy and flirt with pointlessness. I knew this guy Tarantino was going places, but this felt like an exercise, not a movie.

For more, read our review of Reservoir Dogs. 9/13

Photo by Robb Rosenfeld/Courtesy A24 The Lovers: A comedy, and also a tragedy, of remarriage — without couples counseling or divorce — writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ The Lovers revitalizes its genre with a piquant premise: What happens when long-wedded spouses, each with a romantic partner outside their dormant dyad, find the spark reignited — a combustion that results in their carrying out an “adulterous” affair, two-timing the very same people they’ve been cheating with? As he did in his two previous features — Momma’s Man (2008), a wry, tender rejoinder to the comedies of male regression then ascendant, and Terri (2011), a high-school movie orbiting around a mountainous, pajama-clad protagonist — Jacobs lets casually observed details and offhand humor advance the story. There are no grand pronouncements in The Lovers, which smartly communicates its ideas about relationships during its long stretches of silence.

For more, read our review of The Lovers. 10/13

Courtesy Film Movement Afterimage: What makes Afterimage so difficult to watch is that the audience meets the charismatic avant-garde painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski (Boguslaw Linda) the way his students do: as a spectacular figure, one-legged and one-armed, standing on a hill in a meadow with his class, then throwing himself to the ground and rolling to the bottom to greet a newcomer. It's the film's sunniest and most affirmative scene — and what follows crushes it like lead.

For more, read our review of Afterimage. 11/13

Courtesy Kino Lorber The Woman Who Left: Lav Diaz’s penchant for ethical quandaries and psychological angst has earned him comparisons to Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment inspired Diaz’s Norte, the End of History (2013), in which a radicalized youth spirals into despair after committing murder. Now the prolific Filipino filmmaker gives us The Woman Who Left (2016), a brooding, existentialist noir, loosely based on a short story, “God Sees the Truth, but Waits,” by another Russian great, Tolstoy. The film is a story of solidarity and redemption, and its main strength is a panoramic vision of the Philippines’ socioeconomic woes.

For more, read our review of The Woman Who Left. 12/13

Courtesy Kino Lorber Hermia & Helena: The latest Shakespeare-inspired film from Argentine director Matías Piñeiro, and his first in English, Hermia & Helena takes a lively jaunt through intellectual and personal relationships. The plot follows Camila (Agustina Muñoz), a theater director who travels from Buenos Aires to New York for an artistic residency translating A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The act of creative translation is made pleasingly tactile: Dialogue from the play occasionally materializes onscreen.

For more, read our review of Hermia & Helena. 13/13

Our Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP

Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for the best films of May 2017. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen, or they may go into wider release in the coming months.

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