10 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town COURTESY METROGRAPHThe Metrograph mini-retrospective of four films by Jamaa Fanaka opens,
on Feb. 25, with his first feature, “Welcome Home, Brother Charles,”
from 1975. He made it as an undergraduate at U.C.L.A., filming on
weekends, in the course of seventeen months, and it received a successful
theatrical release as a blaxploitation film. Its audacious blend of realism
and fantasy spotlights the police brutality, judicial persecution, and
sexual stereotypes that Black men endure in American society. Marlo
Monte plays Charles Murray, a small-time drug dealer whose genitals
are mutilated by a racist officer during a wrongful arrest; Charles is then
falsely convicted of assaulting the officer. Upon his release from prison,
Charles seeks revenge—by way of mystical new powers issuing from
his penis, with which he hypnotizes white women and wreaks havoc
on his legally protected persecutors. The movie’s phantasmagorical
exaggerations aren’t satire but horror; they mesh with Fanaka’s furious,
documentary-like view of Black family life and personal relationships
amid the relentless pressure of state violence—and amid the racist
delusions that sustain systemic discrimination. The element of fantasy
dramatizes the tragic impasse of injustice, the impossibility of righting
the wrongs that Charles has borne.—Richard BrodyONTHEBIGSCREEN
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MOVIES
Death on the Nile
After much delay, Kenneth Branagh’s film of
the Agatha Christie novel has finally landed
in theatres. There it will keep company with
“Belfast,” Branagh’s other movie of the mo-
ment, which is as precise in its geography,
and in the feelings that arise from a familiar
locale, as the Egyptian mystery is vague and
concocted; the landscapes, often viewed from
above, have the glaze of a video game. As in
his 2017 adaptation of “Murder on the Orient
Express,” Branagh plays Hercule Poirot; this
time, he is a guest on a river vessel when mur-
der is committed—several murders, in fact,
the last of which is choreographed with un-
expected grace. The cast includes Gal Gadot,
Sophie Okonedo, Letitia Wright, Armie Ham-
mer, and Russell Brand, and the script is by
Michael Green; the lightly puzzling plot is
weighed down by agonized emotions that it
was hardly designed to bear. We even get a
flashback to the sleuth’s traumatic wartime
past.—Anthony Lane (In theatrical release.)Kimi
Steven Soderbergh energizes this new
techno-thriller with a blend of style and pas-
sion. It’s set in Seattle, where a young woman
named Angela (Zoë Kravitz) works for a
startup that produces the titular product, a
competitor to Alexa and Siri. Her job, which
involves monitoring recordings of users’
voices, establishes the surveillance-centric
paranoia on which the drama depends. Pick-
ing up a recording of a woman being violently
attacked, Angela reports the crime to her
supervisors—who do their best to silence
her, permanently. Angela is agoraphobic;
gazing through the windows of her loft, shepeers into other people’s homes and is seen,
in turn, by others—including a lurker with
binoculars. Her hermetic indoor life, medi-
ated by computer screens and cell phones, is
an apt metaphor for pandemic lockdown, but
Soderbergh, working with a script by David
Koepp, ranges more widely into the pitfalls of
digital life itself, targeting tech titans whose
greed leads to depravity. Doing his own
camerawork, Soderbergh brings jazzy flair
to Angela’s productive solitude, her lonely
sense of justice, and her audacious forms of
self-defense.—Richard Brody (Streaming on
HBO Max.)Marry Me
The charismatic presence of this breezy rom-
com’s stars, Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson,
furnishes the film’s very substance. J. Lo plays
Kat Valdez, a pop star who plans to marry
another pop star, Bastian (Maluma), during
a concert. But when Kat learns that Bastian
has been cheating on her, she publicly repu-
diates him and, instead, thrills her audience
by calling a random spectator to the stage and
wedding him on the spot. Her choice is Char-
lie Gilbert (Wilson), a devoted Brooklyn math
teacher and divorced dad who’s there with his
twelve-year-old daughter, Lou (Chloe Cole-
man), and who disdains the world of celebrity.
Yet what starts as Kat’s publicity stunt of mar-
rying (for real) a perfect stranger morphs into
a true relationship as the pair get to know each
other. The contrived premise is invigorated
by the notion of Charlie as a star in his own
milieu, one who’s awaiting his moment in the
spotlight. The actors trade good-humored riffs
with life-worn vigor; they bring the movie,
despite its dramatic shortcuts, to life. Directed
by Kat Coiro; co-starring Sarah Silverman and
John Bradley.—R.B. (In theatrical release and
streaming on Peacock.)The Sky Is Everywhere
The mild drama of Josephine Decker’s new
film, based on a novel by Jandy Nelson, is
overwhelmed by the bold imagination of its
fantasy sequences. Grace Kaufman stars as
Lennie Walker, a high-school senior in a rustic
town in Northern California, whose life is
shattered by grief after the sudden death of
her older sister, Bailey (played, in flashbacks,
by Havana Rose Liu). A gifted clarinettist,
Lennie renounces her plan to apply to Juil-
liard. In her desperate solitude, she pursues
a relationship with another student musi-
cian, Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon), but is
romantically distracted by Bailey’s bereaved
boyfriend, Toby (Pico Alexander). Sunk in
her own emotion, Lennie shows little tender-
ness toward her guardians—her grandmother
(Cherry Jones) and her uncle (Jason Segel).
Though the action is schematic and the char-
acters undeveloped, Decker conjures Lennie’s
inner life in wondrous scenes of surrealistic
inspiration, as when green-armed earth spirits
bedeck Lennie and Joe with flowers, furniture
falls from the sky as Lennie races through a
redwood forest, and Bailey dances through
town in a grandly stylized memory that’s
punctured by bitter reality.—R.B. (Streaming
on Apple TV+.)