10 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER4, 2019
COURTESY KINO LORBER
In the hands of the right filmmakers, long-form television can have a trans-
formative power, as seen in the seven-plus hours of Bruno Dumont’s two
comedically polemical series, “Li’l Quinquin” (2014) and its sequel, “Coin-
coin and the Extra-Humans” (above), from 2018, both screening this week
at Museum of the Moving Image. The title character of the earlier series
(Nov. 2) is a tough-minded but tenderhearted farm boy (Alane Delhaye) in
a seaside town in the North of France, who stumbles upon a gruesome mur-
der that attracts the attention of two oddball police detectives and exposes
the town’s social fault lines. The characters—played by the same actors, all
nonprofessionals—return for the loopier yet more provocative sequel (Nov.
3), in which the boy, now a teen-ager, is involved with a far-right party
that’s hostile to the local immigrant population. Meanwhile, the town gets
spattered with blue gunk from outer space that makes clones of the towns-
people; with extravagant humor, Dumont gives these ingenious metaphors
for migration and identity a stringent political workout.—Richard BrodyAT THEMOVIES
1
For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town1
MOVIES
Frankie
With an international cast of characters in a
complex skein of relationships, the director Ira
Sachs gives this intimate story a wide scope.
Isabelle Huppert stars as Françoise Crémont,
nicknamed Frankie, a famous French actress,
dying of cancer, who summons her loved ones
for a sentimental gathering in the Portuguese
seaside village of Sintra. The guests, in turn,
bring others; the result is a melancholy and
melodramatic roundelay, in which haphazard
encounters and delayed reunions mesh with
the intense circumstances (and the awesome
beauty of the setting) to coax stifled conflicts
to the fore. Marisa Tomei, who co-stars as
Frankie’s close friend Ilene, a movie-business
hair stylist currently working on a “Star Wars”
shoot, brings a quiet ferocity to the character’s
sudden new reckonings. The well-modulated
cast includes Brendan Gleeson, Sennia Nanua,
and Jérémie Renier; though the drama at times
veers toward psychology by numbers, Sachs
displays, in climactic moments, an inspired
reserve that fills poised frames with pow-
erful feelings. In English, French, and Por-
tuguese.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)Harriet
The intensity and the lyrical fervor of Kasi
Lemmons’s direction lend this historical drama,
about Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery
and her work with the Underground Railroad,
the exalted energy of secular scripture. The
action begins in Maryland, in 1849, where the
enslaved Araminta Ross (Cynthia Erivo) is
granted permission to marry the freeman John
Tubman (Zackary Momoh). When she is de-
nied the freedom that she’d been promised,
she risks her life to flee to Philadelphia. Taking
her mother’s name, Harriet, she returns co-
vertly—and armed—to guide her relatives to
freedom, and is pursued by her former master
and his posse. Then, after the Fugitive Slave
Act is passed, in 1850, Northern cities no longer
insure safety. The movie, written by Lemmons
and Gregory Allen Howard, presents a gripping
and wide-ranging view of her activity—includ-
ing her work with a daring black clergyman
(Vondie Curtis-Hall) and the black abolitionist
William Still (Leslie Odom, Jr.), who devotedly
records the stories of the formerly enslaved—and her inner life, featuring depictions of the
virtually prophetic visions that guide her in
her mission.—R.B. (In wide release.)Jojo Rabbit
Having dealt with vampires in “What We Do in
the Shadows” (2015) and superheroes in “Thor:
Ragnarok” (2017), Taika Waititi turns his atten-
tion to Nazis. Roman Griffin Davis plays Jojo,
a ten-year-old German kid who has great faith
in the Führer; more to the point, the Führer,
in the form of an imaginary friend, has faith
in him. (Waititi plays Adolf, in full Nazi cos-
tume.) Their exchanges are the sharpest thing
in the film; Hitler is tetchy and thin-skinned,
and Jojo is troubled by doubts, compounded
by his kindly mother (Scarlett Johansson),
his tangible pal Yorki (Archie Yates), and Elsa
(Thomasin McKenzie), a Jewish girl hiding in
the eaves of his house. The film takes a heap of
risks, in both tone and taste, and only a fraction
of them pay off; few other directors, though,
would brave such bitter farce. With Sam Rock-
well.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
10/28/19.) (In limited release.)The Last Command
In this silent drama, from 1928, Josef von Stern-
berg tells a tale of two revolutions, Communist
and cinematic. A former tsarist general (Emil
Jannings), now eking out a living as a Holly-
wood extra, is cast as a Russian general in a First
World War drama directed by a Soviet émigré
(William Powell) whom he had once known—
from across the battle lines of the Revolution.
As the actor recalls his years in uniform, the last
days of imperial Russia unfurl in an hour-long
flashback centered on a passionate Bolshevik
(Evelyn Brent) who came between the two men.
Though Sternberg caricatures the revolution-
aries’ vulgarity and cruelty, he is as biliously
satirical toward the cynical upstarts of the movie
business: as the actor’s memories intertwine
with the film shoot, the analogy between a movie
set and a battlefield turns into perverse psy-
chodrama. Sternberg examines each agonized
detail of the onetime commander’s humiliation
in Hollywood with piercing discernment.—R.B.
(MOMA, Oct. 30, and streaming.)The Lighthouse
Robert Eggers’s new movie has much to live
up to, after the sleep-wrecking shudders of his
2016 film “The Witch.” Once again, the tale is
set in the past. This time, however, we are on a
benighted island off the coast of Maine, where
two men, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and
Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), are tasked
with spending four long weeks together. Their
job is to maintain the lighthouse and the fog-
horn; their relationship, taciturn at the start, be-
comes ever more fractious, and their fate grows
darker by the day. Dafoe delivers long and foam-
flecked monologues, like a marooned preacher,
and Pattinson is dour and dangerous; yet the
characters, joined by a mermaid and a seagull,
are caught up and often subsumed in a tempest
of images. The result, filmed in black-and-white,
may strike some viewers as self-conscious and
overwrought; others, perhaps, will be struck
dumb.—A.L. (10/28/19) (In wide release.)