8 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town COURTESY THE CRITERION COLLECTIONThe earliest of the fourteen films by John Ford that dropped on the Cri-
terion Channel on April 1 is “Kentucky Pride,” from 1925, a hearty and
rowdy—and silent—comedic melodrama in which the main character is a
thoroughbred racehorse named Virginia’s Future. As a colt on a Kentucky
estate, Virginia’s Future, who “speaks” by way of the movie’s intertitles,
can tell her friends from her enemies. She distinguishes the admiration
of her rich breeder (Henry B. Walthall) from the mercenary chill of his
gold-digging wife (Gertrude Astor), and she thrives in the loving care of her
Irish trainer ( J. Farrell MacDonald), who fights for her through thick and
thin. The drama follows Virginia’s Future through the rise and fall of her
athletic career amid her owners’ financial troubles and family conflicts; the
main love story involves her and a famous studhorse, resulting in a multi-
generational saga, of horses and humans alike, in which Virginia’s Future
assumes the archetypal role of a self-sacrificing mother—a career-long
trope of Ford’s. The stoic steed lives to see her colt redeem her sufferings
as well as those of the people who’ve stood up for her.—Richard BrodyWHATTOSTREAM
as Darren’s money manager, Mason Marzac, a
lonely gay man from a decimated generation
who leaves his heart on the field.—Alexandra
Schwartz (Helen Hayes Theatre; through May 29.)
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MOVIES
Aline
This fictionalized bio-pic of Céline Dion is a
large-scale one-woman show for its director and
star, Valérie Lemercier, who plays Aline Dieu,
a small-town Québécois musical prodigy and,
eventually, a worldwide celebrity. The family
name means “god,” befitting the sense of destiny
with which Aline’s thirteen older siblings and
her wily, decisive mother, Sylvette (Danielle
Fichaud), guide her into the spotlight. The
twelve-year-old Aline is signed by a Montreal
manager, Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel),
who discerningly shapes her repertoire and her
persona. They also fall in love. As a teen-ager,
she’s already smitten, and to her mother’s dismay
they become a couple when Aline is twenty and
he’s more than twice her age. The melodrama—
Aline’s difficulty conceiving, Guy-Claude’s fail-
ing health, and the burden of life in the public
eye—is schematic and conventional, but its in-
genuous intensity resembles Aline’s music itself.
The supporting cast’s performances are vigorous
and tangy, but the film’s main distinction is Le-
mercier’s idiosyncratic decision to play Aline at
every age; the movie fortunately never shakes
that sense of homemade peculiarity.—Richard
Brody (In theatrical release.)Nathalie Granger
Marguerite Duras’s obliquely intimate and
grandly pictorial 1972 drama is both a star ve-
hicle for Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosè and
a home movie filmed at Duras’s cluttered old
house near Paris. The title character (Valerie
Mascolo) is a remote, insubordinate child whose
mother, Isabelle (Bosè), is sending her to board-
ing school. They share the house with a calm,
orderly girl, Laurence (Nathalie Bourgeois), and
her mother (Moreau). While the two mothers
are busy with chores—sewing, ironing, dredging
the back-yard pond—Duras evokes the house-hold’s artistic side by contrasting Laurence’s
methodical piano playing with Nathalie’s key-
board noodlings of ostensible genius. (They
resemble Duras’s own piano improvisations,
the movie’s score.) The headily feminine am-
bience is disrupted by a hulking door-to-door
washing-machine salesman—a young Gérard
Depardieu—who suffers, in the women’s blankly
skeptical presence, a comical existential break-
down. The acclaimed cinematographer Ghislain
Cloquet’s velvety black-and-white images peer
through windows and doorways, down corridors,
into mirrors, and at walls and floors; Duras
deploys his imposing technique to scrutinize
her surroundings and to elevate them to living
legend.—R.B. (Playing April 16 at Metrograph.)Predestination
Adapting a story by Robert A. Heinlein, the
Spierig brothers, Michael and Peter, confected
a brisk, twisty, and atmospheric science-fiction
thriller, from 2014, that piques the imagination
and the senses with the low-rent exuberance of
fifties drive-in classics. Ethan Hawke stars as
a nameless agent in the Temporal Bureau; his
mission is to travel to 1970 to prevent a mad
bomber’s devastating attack on New York City.
Working undercover as a bartender in a down-
town dive, he encounters a lonely pulp-fiction
writer with a story to tell, and the new friends
do some unplanned time-leaping together.
With eye-catching design and pugnacious
camera strokes, the Spierigs summon thick,
hyperbolic moods of period grit and meta-
physical conspiracy. A long exposition—with
its voice-over narration, interior monologues,
and flashes back and forth throughout the late
twentieth century—sets up delightful riddles
of shifting identities and multiple worlds. The
desperate pursuit is flecked with surprising
moments of sincere tenderness. The dénoue-
ment, though rushed, gleefully conjures a
supernatural pileup of epochal proportions.
With Sarah Snook.—R.B. (Streaming on Tubi,
Prime Video, and other services.)Reign Over Me
Mike Binder wrote and directed this drama,
from 2007, starring Adam Sandler as Charlie
Fineman, a dentist who lost his wife and three
daughters in the horror of 9/11. He is reduced
to a murmuring wreck, roaming New York on
a scooter, until he has a chance encounter with
his old dental-school roommate, Alan Johnson
(Don Cheadle). Alan has troubles of his own,
though they seem paltry by comparison—a
frozen marriage, plus a patient (Saffron Bur-
rows) who keeps offering sex. Slowly, and
not without mishap, the two men rediscover
their friendship. The result could well have
turned cheap and maudlin, but Binder grasps
the stubbornness of grief; Charlie may be
hauled back from the verge of suicide, but he
will never be cured. Even viewers allergic to
Sandler may concede that his air of mumbling
drift is right for the role, and Cheadle never
misses a beat. With Jada Pinkett Smith, Liv
Tyler, Donald Sutherland, and a soundtrack
of needle drops: the film’s title echoes a song
from the Who’s “Quadrophenia.”—Anthony
Lane (Streaming on Showtime, Prime Video, and
other services.)