12 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
COLUMBIA PICTURES/EVERETT
The late writer, director, and producer John Singleton (the subject of a
retrospective at BAM, Sept. 13-20) deeply explored the connections be-
tween personal and societal crises, as in his drama “Baby Boy,” from 2001
(Sept. 15). It’s a tale of family and community, starring Tyrese Gibson
as Jody Summers, an unemployed twenty-year-old man who lives with
his mother (Adrienne-Joi Johnson) in South Central Los Angeles and
has a young son with an office worker named Yvette (Taraji P. Henson,
in her first major movie role). His relationship with Yvette is threatened
by his brazen infidelity; his relationship with his mother is roiled by her
street-hardened boyfriend (Ving Rhames). The drama involves legacies
of poverty and violence—the disruption of lives through the lure of
crime, the mass incarceration of black men, the horrors of casual misog-
yny. Scenes of warmth among relatives, friends, and lovers veer toward
catastrophe with harrowing suddenness; the emotional turmoil arising
from social precarity imbues the film with an air of doom.—Richard BrodyIN REVIVAL
celebrated German director (Charlie Korsmo)
is making his first American film in an empty
wing of a hospital: a campy sci-fi chiller about
a doctor’s unorthodox experiments, starring
an actress named Mabel (Jess Weixler) as a
blind woman whose sight is restored. Mabel
is, in real life, sighted, but the other disabled
characters in the clinic are played by disabled
performers—notably Rosenthal (Adam Pear-
son), who (like Pearson) has neurofibromato-
sis, a disorder that causes facial deformity. As
the German director’s film grows ever more
contrived, the actors stage a cinematic revolt,
creating mini-movies of their own devising;
meanwhile, Mabel and Rosenthal forge a bond
both in and out of character. Schimberg films
the kaleidoscopic tumble of dramas and fan-
tasies in incisive and confrontational images
that shift sharply between contemplation and
intimacy, whimsy and wonder.—Richard Brody
(In limited release.)
Hustlers
The writer and director Lorene Scafaria’s mild
drama, about a ring of strip-club dancers who
drug male clients and bilk them out of tens of
thousands of dollars, is based on a well-known
piece of investigative journalism by Jessica
Pressler. The film stars Constance Wu as Dor-
othy, a.k.a. Destiny, a dancer whose income
plummets after the 2008 financial crisis. But her
former mentor, Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), has
been doing well luring men to the club, and she
brings Dorothy in on a new scheme—slipping
the men knockout drops to gain access to their
credit cards and personal data. The two women,
in turn, recruit other women and rake in vast
sums of money until they’re caught. Scafaria
insightfully builds the action around Dorothy’s
interviews with a journalist (Julia Stiles), but
the duo’s methods—the elaborate webs of seduc-
tion, the employment of sex workers—and their
canny business minds are all but elided in favor
of a heartwarming tale of friendship, family, and
shopping. Cardi B and Lizzo are brilliant in all-
too-brief dramatic roles.—R.B. (In wide release.)The Sound of Silence
An exciting idea and a cast with the flair to
convey it go to waste in this overplotted,
underdeveloped science-fiction mood piece.
Peter Lucian (Peter Sarsgaard), awkward
and guarded, is a Manhattan-based tuner of
homes—a consultant who identifies and fixes,1
For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-townwith the help of high-tech sound equipment
and his own supersensitive ears, the frequencies
and harmonies that drive people to distrac-
tion in their apartments. A music scholar and
self-taught scientist, he also plots his findings
(augmented by his own street-level research)
on a map of the city and is formulating a grand
theory that he plans to publish. But when a
client (Rashida Jones) remains unsettled after
his intervention, a tense relationship develops.
Meanwhile, he confronts the chicanery of a
research assistant (Tony Revolori), two pro-
fessors (Austin Pendleton and Tina Benko),
and a tech executive (Bruce Altman). These
jump-started plotlines, with their tone of
brooding doubt, are merely distractions from
the fascinating faux-documentary details of
Peter’s obsessive quest, which gets lost in the
tangle. Directed by Michael Tyburski.—R.B.
(In limited release.)Mr. Klein
Joseph Losey’s Second World War drama re-
turns, newly restored, forty-three years after
it opened. Its air of claustrophobia has, if any-
thing, thickened over time, and the warning
issued by the story feels more urgent still. The
setting is Occupied Paris, in 1942. Alain Delon
plays an art dealer named Robert Klein—one
of two Robert Kleins in the city. The other,
whom we never meet face to face, is Jewish, and
probably involved in the Resistance. One Klein
follows the trail of the other, and the confusion
between them turns out to be fatal. Seldom
have the bureaucratic niceties of tyranny been
documented with such care; power is wielded
not from the barrel of a gun but in lists of postal
addresses and registration cards. It’s strange to
see Delon, so coolly frightening in other films,
as a victim; he seems like a different creature.
In French.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue
of 9/9/19.) (In limited release.)Symbiopsychotaxiplasm:
Take One
William Greaves’s 1968 drama, which he com-
pleted in 1971, is one of the greatest movies
about moviemaking. Greaves wrote a brief
script about a couple, Freddie and Alice, in
romantic and sexual crisis. He cast many
different pairs of actors to play the roles in
New York’s Central Park, while three cam-
era operators (including Greaves) filmed the
performances, the surrounding activity, and
each other. What results is also a documen-
tary about the crew on location; situations
that arise along the way—a mounted police
officer asking to see the production’s permit,
a crowd of teen-agers gathering to watch the
shoot—are integrated into the action. Greaves
also includes lengthy scenes that crew members
made by themselves, without his knowledge,
in which they debate his methods and his mo-
tives. With ingenious visual effects, he puts
multiple images onscreen simultaneously. The
film is anything but a cramped theoretical
exercise; fuelled by the power of Greaves’s
vision and personality, the frame-breaking,
frame-multiplying reflexivity lends the local
stories a vast, world-embracing scope.—R.B.
(BAM, Sept. 16, and streaming.)