14 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
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MOVIES
Ad Astra
James Gray, the director of such films as “The
Yards” (2000) and “The Immigrant” (2013),
steps, for the first time, into the future, and
into the realms of science fiction. We follow the
exploits of Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), an
astronaut noted for both his low heart rate and
his famous father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones),
a pioneer of extraterrestrial travel. With the
earth threatened by mysterious power surges,
our hero flies first to the moon—no big deal,
we learn—and thence toward Neptune, which is
both the source of the surges and the area where
Clifford McBride went missing, many years
earlier. The result is, even by Gray’s standards,
a startling mixture of the outward bound and
the inwardly reflective, with Roy confiding
his restless and friendless thoughts (scarcely
becoming to a spaceman) in voice-over. Seldom
has Pitt looked less at ease. With Ruth Negga
and Donald Sutherland.—Anthony Lane (Re-
viewed in our issue of 9/23/19.) (In wide release.)Bacurau
The title of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s boldly in-
ventive political fantasy, set in the near future,
refers to a fictitious small town in rural Brazil
that’s the center of a hotly contested election
and a fierce dispute over natural resources.
The village’s idiosyncratic and temperamentalcharming makeshift tower provides a pedestal
for a roughly modelled bronze cast of a cat.— J. F.
(Through Oct. 19.)
Hayv Kahraman
Shainman
CHELSEA A freak-show contortionist is the Iraqi
artist’s motif (and metaphor) in this two-part
show, titled “Not Quite Human” (in the gal-
lery’s West Twentieth and West Twenty-fourth
Street spaces). Spectral, exoticized female fig-
ures with black hair, severe brows, and milky
skin populate cleverly layered compositions.
Kahraman’s paintings are serenely disturbing,
evoking Persian miniatures, Orientalist tropes
in Renaissance portraiture, and Victorian circus
posters. The figures float in empty fields of
raw linen, frozen in unlikely, if not anatomi-
cally impossible,poses, their crotches lewdly
dramatized by surreally pronounced genitalia
and spiderlike strands of pubic hair. Kahra-
man’sstudied tangles of body parts refer not
only to acrobatic feats and fetishistic fantasies
but also to brutal dismemberment and carnage.
The artist, who is based in Los Angeles, draws
upon her experiences of war and of life as a
refugee to reflect on the horrors of bombings
and the dehumanization that allows for such
violence.—J.F. (Through Oct. 26.)
Josiah McElheny
Cohan
DOWNTOWN The profoundly beautiful work
of this American sculptor—a 2006 MacAr-
thur Fellow, whose mediums are glass and
reflection—inaugurates the gallery’s new
mother ship, in Tribeca, a neighborhood that
has become an undeniable force in the New
York art scene. On the walls, McElheny hangs
magic-trick pictures of infinite galaxies, fash-
ioned with lapidary precision from thousands
of translucent rods. If the past two years of
American life have left you feeling blue, you’re
not alone: the show’s centerpiece is a sixteen-
foot-long curved wall of glass bricks, a glim-
mer of azure, cerulean, cobalt, midnight, and
sapphire. The artist conceived the nearly nine-
foot-tall arc as a haven for listening: music
and poetry performances, organized by the
invaluable nonprofit Blank Forms, take place
there on Wednesdays at 6:30 and Saturdays at
2.—A.K.S. (Through Oct. 19.)
Aliza Nisenbaum
Kern
UPTOWN “Bodies, with their color and their
nuance and their materiality, are so different
in person than on social media,” the Mexican
painter Aliza Nisenbaum told me last month,
in her Harlem studio. She was putting the fin-
ishing touches on a group portrait of the staff at
the Kern gallery, where her exhibition of taut
and tender pictures must be seen in person to
be fully appreciated. Nisenbaum spends hours
painting people from life, an intimate process
with social-justice roots: the artist met her
first sitters in Queens, in 2012, while teaching
English at Immigrant Movement International,
a community center founded by the Cuban
artist-activist Tania Bruguera. The first pic-
ture that greets visitors is the kaleidoscopic
“Jenna and Moises,” from 2018, a portrait of
art and civics intertwined: Jenna is both a salsa
dancer and an immigration attorney. Still, as
the Marxist Mexican muralist Diego Rivera
wrote, “Every good composition is above all a
work of abstraction.” As politically minded as
Nisenbaum is, her work is also about the sheer
joy of color, pattern, and perception.—A.K.S.
(Through Nov. 2.)Amy Sherald
Hauser & Wirth
CHELSEA The subjects of the eight strong oil
portraits here impress with their looks, in both
senses: striking elegance, riveting gazes. In six
of the pictures, people stand singly against
bright monochrome grounds. (The other two
works are more complicated.) Sherald acti-
vates the double function of portraiture as the
recognition of a worldly identity and, in the
best instances, the surprise of an evident inner
life. All of her subjects are African-American.
Should this matter? It does in light of the art-
ist’s stated drive to seek “versions of myself
in art history and the world.” Race anchors
Sherald’s project in history. She represents it
strategically, rendering the skin of her subjects
grisaille, and thereby apostrophizing America’s
original sin and permanent crisis: the otheriz-
ing of the not white, regardless of gradations.
Three years ago, Sherald was plucked from
low-profile but substantial status as an artist
when Michelle Obama chose her to paint her
official portrait. On view at the Smithsonian
National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C.,
it is a tour de force. Even so, it didn’t prepare
me for the more intense eloquence of the can-
vases here—I had a dizzy sensation at Sherald’s
show of ground shifting under my feet.— P. S.
(Through Oct. 26.)characters are held together by a web of long
memories and strong traditions. Its water sup-
ply has been cut off by a huge dam that serves
business interests, represented by a politician
named Tony Junior (Thardelly Lima). After the
townspeople mock him and his campaign, they
find themselves under attack from an interna-
tional group of mercenaries; they suspect that
the timing isn’t coincidental, and, despite being
vastly outgunned, they fight back. Mendonça
deftly sketches the personalities and passions
of Bacurau’s besieged residents while also ex-
amining the mercenaries’ cruel power; the light
touches of science fiction evoke present-day
depravities, and the vision of local unity offers
a thrillingly imaginative playbook for resis-
tance. With Sônia Braga, Barbara Colen, and
Udo Kier. In Portuguese and English.—Richard
Brody (New York Film Festival, Oct. 1-2.)Capernaum
Nadine Labaki’s anguished tale of poverty and
depravity, despair and survival in the slums of
Beirut stars an extraordinary young actor, Zain
Al Rafeea, as a boy named Zain, who’s about
twelve years old. Unregistered at birth by his
parents, who never let him attend school and
instead forced him to work, he’s now in jail
for attempted murder. The events leading to
his arrest are framed by scenes of his time in
court—where he is suing his parents—and told
in flashbacks. Unable to save his eleven-year-old
sister (Haita Izzam) from a forced marriage to
a local merchant, Zain runs away from home
and is taken in by an undocumented Ethio-
pian migrant (Yordanos Shiferaw), who’s being
menaced by the authorities and by street-level
predators. With a journalistic ardor for detail
that sometimes outweighs the drama, Labaki
depicts underworld barbarity, official indif-
ference, and the crushing weight of traditional
misogyny through Zain’s ferociously intelligent,
deeply principled perspective. In Arabic.—R.B.
(BAM, Sept. 30, and streaming.)Diego Maradona
Asif Kapadia makes documentaries about
limit-busting souls who cannot help goading
themselves beyond all that seems reasonable
and wise. Having investigated Ayrton Senna
and Amy Winehouse, he turns his gaze upon
Diego Maradona, who bestrode the world as the
most gifted soccer player of the nineteen-eight-
ies. The movie starts in 1984, with Maradona’s
arrival as a player for Napoli, a team described,
or demonized, as the poor relation of the top
Italian league. (The opening question at his
first press conference was about the Neapolitan
Mafia.) Halfway through the film, we reach the
1986 World Cup, where Maradona, who was
born in a Buenos Aires slum, lifts the trophy
for Argentina: a summit from which he could
only fall. The Dionysian frenzy of hero worship
is well captured by the film, though it could
use more footage from the field of play, where
Maradona redefined what it means to be fleet
of foot.—A.L. (In limited release.)Judy
Renée Zellweger’s passionate and vulnerable
incarnation of Judy Garland energizes this em-
pathetic, nuanced, yet patchy drama centered
on the singer’s London concert series in 1968,
the year before her death. Struggling with her
career because of a prescription-drug addiction