24 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
COURTESY ARSENAL
The films of the German director Ulrike Ottinger, whose career stretches
back to the nineteen-seventies, are among the imaginative wonders of
the past half century. (They’re the subject of an ongoing retrospective at
Metrograph that begins, with the director in attendance, on March 14.)
Ottinger brings a combination of giddy fantasy and decorative extrav-
agance to mythical subjects, and revises them with gender-questioning
schemas and feminist ideas—as in “The Image of Dorian Gray in the
Yellow Press,” from 1984 (screening on March 15). Freely adapting
Oscar Wilde’s novel to modern West Germany, Ottinger casts the
supermodel Veruschka, in drag, as the young aesthete and replaces his
portraitist with the director Fritz Lang’s supervillain, Dr. Mabuse (who
is, here, a woman, played by Delphine Seyrig), now a media mogul who,
with her tentacular control of newspapers and television, plans to turn
Dorian into a celebrity in order to destroy him with fabricated scandals.
Blending high culture and pop spectacle with literary and cinematic
history, Ottinger fuses the paranoid frenzy of Weimar-era thrillers,
the theatrical flair of musicals, and the antic comedy of cartoons into
potent political critique.—Richard BrodyINREVIVAL
of administrative details, the nerve-jangling
tension that women endure from ambient
sexual aggression, and the oppressive air of
surveillance and terror sparked by the war
against abortion. The young women’s journey
to New York—and their encounter with a
Philadelphia hipster (Théodore Pellerin)—
offers an anguished apprenticeship in the
wider world’s network of money and pow-
er.—R.B. (In limited release.)
Sorry We Missed You
With more sympathy than imagination, Ken
Loach dramatizes the plight of the Turners,
a family of four in northeastern England,
who endure the miseries of the gig economy.
Ricky (Kris Hitchen), a construction worker
and landscaper, gives up his job to become
a delivery driver, believing that he’d make
more money under better conditions; he
persuades his wife, Abbie (Debbie Honey-
wood), a home health aide who’s deeply de-
voted to the many patients she visits in her
daily rounds, to sell her car—relegating her
to long bus rides—so that he can purchase
a van. But Ricky’s work proves demanding,
and his boss (Ross Brewster) is unyielding;
with both Abbie and Ricky working longer
hours than ever, the Turner children—the
teen-age Seb (Rhys Stone) and the younger
Liza Jane (Katie Proctor)—go unsupervised.
Meanwhile, the family sinks deeper into
debt. Loach, working with a script by Paul
Laverty, follows the dramatic principle of
Murphy’s Law, piling an agonizing litany of
undeserved misfortunes on characters left
blank.—R.B. (In limited release.)Stage Fright
Alfred Hitchcock’s theatre-centered mys-
tery, from 1950, shows how good actors get
away with murder. Marlene Dietrich plays
Charlotte Inwood, a star of the London
stage, who recruits her furtive lover, Jona-
than Cooper (Richard Todd), to help conceal
her husband’s suspicious death. Jonathan, inturn, recruits his steadfast girlfriend, Eve
Gill (Jane Wyman), a student at the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Art, to help him skip
town. Eve takes matters into her own hands
and launches an investigation, but when a
handsome detective (Michael Wilding) is
put on the case her affections begin to waver.
As deceptions and disguises pile up, the lay-
ers of mystery grow thicker and the lurid
symbolism of material objects is thrust to
the fore. In the portrayal of Eve’s father, an
urbane and audacious seaman dubbed Com-
modore (Alastair Sim), Hitchcock evokes a
deep-rooted, irony-rich complicity of father
and daughter—seemingly borrowed from
the films of Howard Hawks—that suggests
an inner compass that helps guard against
chasing the wrong man.—R.B. (Film Forum,
March 13-14, and streaming.)The Way Back
The force of Ben Affleck’s perpetually an-
guished glower suggests depths that this
redemption-through-sports drama doesn’t
reach. He plays Jack Cunningham, a con-
struction worker who lives alone and drinks
heavily. Having been, in the mid-nineties,
a star athlete at a Catholic high school, he’s
now summoned by the school’s headmaster
(John Aylward), a priest, to take over im-
mediately as coach of the boys’ basketball
team, which has been a disaster ever since
Jack graduated. As he grows into his new
role, teaching his players both to win and
to take responsibility for their actions, his
own conflicts—involving grief, alcohol, rage,
divorce, and long unresolved troubles from
his youth—are inflamed ever more furiously.
As written by Brad Ingelsby and directed by
Gavin O’Connor, Jack screws up repeatedly,
albeit within a bubble of privilege that goes
unacknowledged; meanwhile, elements of his
early life as well as new problems are conve-
niently dropped in, making the story line up
with a numbing neatness that the hearty cast
(including Janina Gavankar, Al Madrigal,
and Glynn Turman) can’t overcome.—R.B.
(In wide release.)The Whistlers
Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest film divides
its time, unusually, between Romania and
La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. The
inhabitants of the island use whistling to
communicate across large distances, a skill
that Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is keen to learn.
He’s a cop from Bucharest who’s in league
with the criminal elements he’s meant to be
investigating, so any means of keeping his
secrets safe is a useful trick. The comically
twisted plot is adorned with references to
older movies, and it’s never easy to deter-
mine where the center of dramatic interest
lies. Our attention, however, is engaged and
held by the performers, notably Catrinel
Marlon as Cristi’s elegant co-conspirator
and Rodica Lazar as his boss. As for Ivanov,
who has worked with Porumboiu before,
he’s in suitably phlegmatic form: morose,
corruptible, yet not, we suspect, beyond
redemption. In Romanian.—A.L. (3/9/20)
(In limited release.)
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