10 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town PHOTO 12/ALAMYMartin Scorsese and the screenwriter Jay Cocks have teamed up to program
a series of double features at Film Forum (Aug. 16-Sept. 5), which show-
cases some rare treasures—among them the Hungarian director Miklós
Jancsó’s historical drama “The Round-Up,” from 1966. It’s set in 1869, in a
vast and desolate plain in rural Hungary, where a finely appointed cavalry
troop of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy tries to impose law and order
on a seething, starving populace that includes many veterans of Hungary’s
suppressed independence movement. Jancsó approaches the subject with
bitter irony: one of the great cinematic choreographers, he stages martial
maneuvers and punitive crackdowns in grand and fluid long takes that
capture both the dark allure of authoritarian repression and its terrifying
force. Scenes of interrogations and humiliations, forced and false confes-
sions and denunciations, depict the hands-on exertion of cruel power at
a granular level and convey the taint of complicity fostered by a corrupt
regime—an allusion to the Soviet occupation of Hungary.—Richard BrodyINREVIVAL
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MOVIES
The Kitchen
The financial crisis and the crumbling morale
of New York in the late seventies is the back-
drop to this tense and vigorous crime drama,
written and directed by Andrea Berloff. When
three Irish-American men in a Hell’s Kitchen
gang are imprisoned, their suddenly impover-
ished wives challenge the group. The women,
united by common cause, have divergent mo-
tives. Claire (Elisabeth Moss), who was phys-
ically brutalized by her husband, learns to de-
fend herself, trained by a romantic psychopath
(Domhnall Gleeson). Ruby (Tiffany Haddish)
escapes from her domineering mother-in-law
(Margo Martindale), a gangland mainstay
whose racist abuse she has silently endured.
Kathy (Melissa McCarthy), a fast thinker long
subordinate to her lunkheaded husband, flour-
ishes emotionally behind a gun—while seeking
redemption for her father (Wayne Duvall), an
underemployed construction worker. Berloff
energetically yokes brazen criminal schemes,
high-stakes confrontations, and grisly outcomes
to a facile but hearty framework. The complex
yarns unspool in a narrative middle ground that
lacks stylistic flair or psychological depth, but
they’re nonetheless engrossing.—Richard Brody
(In wide release.)Once Upon a Time... in
Hollywood
Sooner or later, Quentin Tarantino will work
up the nerve to confront the present day, as
he did in his earlier films. For now, however,
he opts for yet another period piece—while,
of course, reserving the imaginative right to
adjust historical facts to his satisfaction. The
year is 1969, and an actor named Rick Dalton
(Leonardo DiCaprio) is on the downslide.
Once a star, he has been reduced to playing
dastardly types on TV, and an agent (Al Pacino)
proposes that he try Italian Westerns. Rick is
good pals with his stunt double, Cliff Booth
(Brad Pitt), and the movie is most rewarding
when it’s most relaxed—when the two of them
just hang out. Rick’s neighbor is Sharon Tate
(Margot Robbie), and there’s a lovely scene
in which she goes to watch herself on the big
screen, with Tarantino’s cinephilia in full cry.
Meanwhile, in the wings, the Manson clan
awaits.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
8/5 & 12/19.) (In wide release.)The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Ivan Dixon’s incisive political fantasy, from 1973,
stars Lawrence Cook as Dan Freeman, the first
black man in the C.I.A. After leaving the agency,
Dan moves to Chicago and puts his training to
use: he leads a group of black gang members and
Vietnam War veterans in an uprising against the
police and the government. Dixon launches the
film with a satirical tone—mocking white offi-
cials who’d rather not integrate the agency—and
sharpens it to an edge of restrained precision,
aided by Cook’s highly pressurized performance.
Scenes of Dan’s interactions with other black
men and women—including his ex-fiancée, Joy
(Janet League); a sex worker whom he recruits as
an infiltrator (Paula Kelly); and a detective who’s
his longtime friend (J. A. Preston)—deliver a
frank yet delicate reckoning with the pain and
the conflict of their experience as black Ameri-
cans. Dan’s dealings with the authorities reveal
the unchallenged attitudes that render racist
policies both inescapable and irreparable.—R.B.
(Metrograph, Aug. 18, and streaming.)Tel Aviv on Fire
This droll but wan satire of Palestinian life
under Israeli occupation is centered on the
production, in Ramallah, of a TV series—a
historical soap opera set in the run-up to the
Six-Day War, starring a French actress (Lubna
Azabal) as a Palestinian agent on a mission to
kill an Israeli general. Salam (Kais Nashif), a
young Palestinian slacker, is hired as a gofer
by his uncle, the show’s producer; at an Israeli
checkpoint, an Israeli officer (Yaniv Biton),
whose wife watches the show, orders Salam
to change the depiction of the general—with
specifics. Meanwhile, Salam’s new job reinvig-
orates his romance with Mariam (Maisa Abd
Elhadi), a doctor. The film’s director, Sameh
Zoabi (who wrote the script with Dan Klein-
man), looks frankly at political violence—the
relentless force of Israeli dominion and also
Palestinian veneration of suicide bombers—
but its evenhanded and noncommittal view
of the progressive and humanistic power of
sentimental fantasy comes off as cynical and
self-promoting.—R.B. (In limited release.)Two Weeks in Another Town
This drama, from 1962, directed by Vincente
Minnelli and based on a novel by Irwin Shaw, is
one of the sharpest and most perceptive movies
about the film industry. Kirk Douglas plays Jack
Andrus, an Oscar-winning actor who, after a
nervous breakdown caused by his breakup with
an actress (Cyd Charisse), heads to Rome for a
role in a film by a tyrannical director (Edward G.
Robinson). The director brutalizes his sensitive
young star (George Hamilton) and is, in turn,
emotionally flayed by his wife (Claire Trevor),
who is nonetheless his only solace in the face of
a mercenary producer. Minnelli’s flamboyantly
expressive portrait of movie people at the end of
the studio era—and of their struggle for a place
in the lifeboat—dramatizes the reckless conver-
gence of the personal with the professional and
the artistic, the clash of money and art, and the
web of romance, power, and danger that both
threatens their work and gives it lasting val-
ue.—R.B. (Metrograph, Aug. 16-17, and streaming.)