8 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
COURTESY JANUS FILMS
In “Mandabi,” from 1968, the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène
ranged widely through private and public settings in the capital city of
Dakar to satirize corruption born of misrule. The film (streaming on Film
Forum’s virtual cinema starting Jan. 15) is centered on the sixtysomething
Ibrahima, the long-unemployed husband of two wives and the father of
seven children, who receives a money order from a nephew in Paris. He’s
supposed to cash it for the young man’s mother but, lacking the necessary
documents, must endure a bureaucratic odyssey of bribery and favoritism
to fulfill his duty. Meanwhile, Ibrahima and his wives, who can barely feed
their family, rely on the money order to get credit from local merchants
as neighbors besiege them for loans and alms, and shady businessmen
vie for the deed to their home. Unredressed inequality is reflected in cul-
tural conflict between the Francophone élite, in Euro-style suits, and the
Wolof-speaking masses. Sembène looks ruefully yet tenderly at the ruses
and wiles of the poor, whose desperate struggles—with the authorities and
with one another—distract them from political revolt.—Richard BrodyWHATTO STREAM
doctor who checks into a grand but faded hotel
in the Egyptian city of the title, where she has
gone to recover from the trauma of her work in
Jordan with victims of the Syrian civil war. She
has history with the city—two decades before,
she took part in an archeological project there—
and runs into an Egyptian archeologist named
Sultan (Karim Saleh), a former lover who at-
tempts to rekindle their relationship. Hana is
open to his friendship but may be too unsteady
for love; her self-healing involves extended
wanderings through the city, as if to rediscover
lost aspects of herself. The dialogue is thin and
the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana’s
travels—and the places that she visits—with an
ardent attention that fuses emotional life with
aesthetic and intellectual exploration.—R.B.
(Streaming on Amazon, iTunes, and other services.)Margaret
The writer and director Kenneth Lonergan’s
2011 feature (shot in 2005) is a wildly ambi-
tious strain of the Upper West Side bourgeois
blues; it embraces large themes and deep moods
with remarkable scope and nuance. It starsAnna Paquin as Lisa Cohen, a headstrong pri-
vate-school teen-ager whose innocent distrac-
tion of a bus driver leads to a fatal accident.
Lisa tries to expiate her guilt by seeking out
the victim’s best friend (Jeannie Berlin, in an
electrifyingly freewheeling performance). As
Lisa’s little world comes up against the realm of
public power (via brilliant turns from Stephen
Adly Guirgis, as a detective, and Michael Ealy
and Jonathan Hadary, as lawyers), the movie
rises to a grand symbolic pitch; it’s a city sym-
phony, romantic yet scathing, lyrical with street
life and vaulting skylines, reckless with first ad-
venture, and awed by the intellectual and poetic
abstractions on which the great machine runs.
The inspired cast includes J. Smith-Cameron,
Matt Damon, Allison Janney, Jean Reno, Mark
Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick, Kieran Culkin,
and Rosemarie DeWitt—and Paquin holds her
own with all of them.—R.B. (Streaming on HBO
Max, Amazon, and other services.)Saving Mr. Banks
One Disney film tells the story of another—or,
at least, of its begetting. For twenty years, Walt
Disney (Tom Hanks) has fought for the rights to
the “Mary Poppins” stories, only to bump into
the immovable object of P. L. Travers (Emma
Thompson), their creator. Now, at last, she is
lured to Hollywood, much concerned at the fate
of her characters on their journey to the screen.
The light comedy of her clash with Disney and
his minions is interleaved with flashbacks to
her childhood in Australia, where she saw her
beloved father (Colin Farrell) succumb to
drink. The director John Lee Hancock’s 2013
film arranges for past traumas to be dissolved in
present laughter and in the catharsis of creative
endeavor; the outcome is, for the most part, no
more troubling than a trip to Disneyland. Yet
the story is borne along by the expertise of the
cast, which includes Paul Giamatti and Jason
Schwartzman, and is made more piquant by
Thompson. In her blending of snappiness and
solitude, she hints that some sorrows are too
stubborn to be wished away.—Anthony Lane
(Reviewed in our issue of 12/23/13.) (Streaming on
Netflix, Disney+, and other services.)When Tomorrow Comes
John M. Stahl’s 1939 melodrama has a spare ro-
mantic simplicity—a New York hash-house wait-
ress named Helen (Irene Dunne) has an affair
with a big-time concert pianist named Phillipe
(Charles Boyer), who turns out to be married. It
begins with a thrilling set piece, in which Helen
and her colleagues, while serving customers
during the busy lunch hour, covertly pass word
about a union meeting—sparking the lovers’ first
encounter. Stahl’s studio-crafted city vividly
evokes sweaty and teeming street life (including
an abrasive encounter with the police), but the
film’s vital energy dissipates when the couple
heads to Phillipe’s Long Island estate. Helen,
a frustrated singer, shares his artistic ideals but
not his upper-crust habits, and, with him, she
leaves behind both her harsh practical cares and
her hearty social—and union—life. Despite the
creaky script, Stahl conjures the lovers’ stifled
passion with rapt stillness; he makes frozen
frames and static actors shiver with forebod-
ing.—R.B. (Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)by a hearing laborer, Arthur Jones (John Earl
Jelks)—and as Malaika Brown, a printer and
artist in the nineties, who begins a relationship
with Nico Jones (Jelks), a children’s librarian.
Both relationships pivot on the transmission
of Black American culture (the work of Paul
Laurence Dunbar is prominently featured) and
of deaf culture, and both involve medical matters
that are central to their times—tuberculosis in
the earlier episode, AIDS in the later one. Davis
evokes history with a virtually archeological
imagination, presenting the earlier story as a
silent movie that seemingly brings archival pho-
tographs to life; in the later story, with a blend
of drama, music, text, dance, and documentary
views of modern Chicago, she portrays modern
life as historical in real time.—Richard Brody
(Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)
Luxor
The tension between the grip of memory and
the power of immediate experience is poi-
gnantly portrayed in this documentary-rooted
drama, written and directed by Zeina Durra. It
stars Andrea Riseborough as Hana, a British
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