‘John Henry’: Film Review

As if to apologetically clear the cinematic air for Miami, “cigarette” power boats, and art in general after the atrocity of 2018’s John Travolta vehicle “Speed Kills,” “Omniboat” applies a brisk scrub of cleansing absurdism to the same locational and vehicular themes.

Landlocked by South Africa on all sides, the kingdom of Lesotho is a place of high skies, wide landscapes and narrow prospects for its two million inhabitants: a set of dimensions somehow captured in every exquisitely constructed, square-cut frame of “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.” A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born

A leisurely, somewhat hazy travelogue compared to the piercing political indictments of his acclaimed prior “We Come as Friends” and Oscar-nominated “Darwin’s Nightmare,” Austrian documentarian Hubert Sauper’s new “Epicentro” looks at Cuba on the brink of colossal transition, as the old Communist system is in its apparent death throes, and free-market capitalism waits in the wings. It’s a fascinating moment for cultural stock-taking.

Jane Austen has been through a lot on screen in recent years.

The experiment known as Biosphere 2 may be best remembered now — when remembered at all — as something that spawned “Bio-Dome,” the godawful 1996 comedy that is nonetheless many people’s favorite movie involving Pauly Shore or Stephen Baldwin.

It’s exciting, and fascinating, to see a great director of documentaries try his or her hand at a dramatic feature, since in theory the essential skill set should all be there. The best documentarians possess an acute visual sense, and they are all, of course, potent storytellers.

Sultry music swells as the camera swoons over a young couple in a tender nighttime embrace. The 1950s residential New York City street is carefully rain-slicked and lined with shiny classic cars: an obvious stage set.

There's more than a hint of early eighties Tom Cruise about Argentinian newcomer Juan Pablo Cestaro who stars in Marco Berger'sYoung Hunter(El cazador), the premise of whichcoyly echoes that of Risky Business.This time, however, the horny teen who gets into carnally-related deep water after being left alone by vacationing parents happens to be gay.

There’s mannered, there’s manic, and then there’s the malfunctioning pinball-machine delirium that Ben Whishaw brings to “Surge”: a blinking, buzzing, flashing clatter of hyper-accelerated impulses, chicken-fried synapses and staggered hypnic jerks that never culminate in sleep.

Inventor Nikolai Tesla is more popular today than when he died penniless in a New York hotel in 1943. Back then, he was the futurist who swore he could summon unlimited, clean, wireless electromagnetic energy from the earth — a neat idea, but surely coal and oil were fine.

Actress Romola Garai makes a distinctive feature directorial debut with “Amulet,” even if this upscale horror drama is ultimately more impressive in the realm of style than substance. It’s some style, though: She hasn’t just created a stylish potboiler, but a densely textured piece that makes for a truly arresting viewing experience to a point. A shame then that the film succumbs somewhat to the more pretentious and silly aspects of Garai’s initially cryptic puzzle of a script.

At the risk of overselling Edson Oda’s ultra-original, meaning-of-life directorial debut, there’s a big difference between “Nine Days” and pretty much every other film ever made. You see, most movies are about characters, real or imagined, and the stuff that happens to them, whereas “Nine Days” is about character itself — as in, the moral dimension that constitutes who a person is, how he or she treats others, and the choices that define us as humans.

Brooklyn couple Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Reynolds) have several plans to salvage their lives. Go vegetarian, plant a garden, make sourdough bread, and above all, quit the internet addiction that’s become their relationship’s third wheel, distracting them from make-outs and barging into their fights until Su yells, “Alexa stop!” To detox, the couple embarks on a phone-free week in upstate New York.

Late in the film “Lance,” a documentary that depicts the ascent and the crash of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, the subject recalls the disappearance of his lucrative sponsorships. These deals — with a massive market value and a perhaps more important intangible value of keeping him in the public eye as a figure of rectitude and hard work — were in some sense his life’s work, and they vanished after his 2013 admission that he had used illegal doping throughout his cycling career.

There have been some good dramas about people sliding into dementia, like “Away From Her” and “Still Alice,” but I confess I almost always have a problem with them. As the person at the center of the movie begins to recede from her adult children, from the larger world, and from herself, he or she also recedes — at least, this is my experience — from the audience.

A small town already down on its luck receives a few fresh kicks in “The Evening Hour.” Based on Carter Sickels’ 2012 novel, this second narrative feature from director Braden King is more plot-driven than his first, 2011’s “Here,” a leisurely and slight, if pleasant, road-trip romance.

Imagine a high-ratings, high-stakes game show that trivializes a convict’s life-or-death fate for public consumption. As wild as it sounds, a version of this reality TV entertainment apparently really exists in modern-day Iran, where writer-director Massoud Bakhshi’s “Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness” is set, and where a wildly popular edition of it has been airing for nearly a decade.

By Matthew Carey

If you didn't know better, you might almost imagine that The Nest, writer-director Sean Durkin's long awaited follow-up to his debut Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), was inspired by a lost Henry James novel.

A father-son balancing act that never finds a satisfactory equilibrium, John James' debut doc Siempre, Luis introduces a man, Luis Miranda, whose career as a political power broker would, in some quarters, be considered deserving of a documentary. But this film knows its best shot at attracting viewers lies elsewhere: in Miranda's efforts to mount a Puerto Rico benefit production of the blockbuster musical Hamilton, which happens to have been created by his son Lin-Manuel.