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MOVIES
The Army of Crime
Robert Guédiguian’s vigorously heroic
yet mournful Second World War drama
recounts the real-life story of a group of
French Resistance fighters—Communist
immigrants from elsewhere in Europe,
many Jewish, all led by an Armenian poet,
Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian),
whose survival of genocidal massacres in
Turkey stiffens his resolve to battle the
German occupiers. The independent an-
ti-Nazi assassins and saboteurs unite under
Manouchian’s command—and that of the
Communist Party—to form a band of un-
intentional outsiders whose schemes are
dramatized with less attention to detail
than to motive. Guédiguian offers an an-
tidote to the acclaimed but tendentious
“Army of Shadows.” He makes painfully
explicit the relentless rattle of anti-Semitic
invective in print and on the radio; shows
French police officers tracking, capturing,
and torturing Resistance fighters; and de-
picts French officials arresting Jews and
deporting them to French concentration
camps. Guédiguian depicts history in its
human essence: in the face of persecution
and exclusion, the Communist Party, in his
view, offered these unmoored and unwel-
come refugees the warmth and common
cause of a tight, extended family. Released
in 2009.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Tubi.)Detective Story
William Wyler’s 1951 drama shows the
dangers that women face when abortion
is illegal—and suggests that an underlying
sociopathology, the control of women’s sex
lives, drives men to ban abortion. The film
is based on a play by Sidney Kingsley, and
most of the action takes place on a single
set, at a Manhattan police station. Kirk
Douglas stars as Detective Jim McLeod, a
brutal officer whose violent hatred of crim-
inals is rooted in his childhood—his father,a criminal, abused his mother and drove her
insane. The prime target of Jim’s hatred
is an abortionist named Karl Schneider
(George Macready), whom he has previ-
ously arrested and assaulted. When deep
secrets about Jim’s wife, Mary (Eleanor
Parker), emerge, Jim implodes under the
force of his own unrelieved fury. The dra-
ma’s tension involves the destructive ex-
tremes of masculinity, linking strength and
courage with pitiless judgment and sexual
domination; the essential subject is soci-
ety’s—rather, men’s—obsession with wom-
en’s virginity, and the film’s liberal-minded
perspective brings a hint of reality to rigid
Hollywood mores.—R.B. (Streaming on Pluto
and other services.)Monstrous
In Chris Sivertson’s movie, written by Carol
Chrest, we meet Laura (Christina Ricci),
who flees a cruel husband and takes her
son, Cody (Santino Barnard), to Califor-
nia. Their new home is an isolated rental
property beside a pond, from which a malign
and dripping figure—reported, or imagined,
by Cody—emerges. The era, apparently, is
the late nineteen-fifties or the early sixties,
to judge by Laura’s hulking Chevrolet and
by the full skirts and polka dots in which
she is arrayed. Although the period styling
feels overripe, that very sense of surfeit is
a clue. Something more than a marriage,
we feel, has gone awry for Laura. Mystery
buffs will see a twist coming from afar, and
connoisseurs of horror will be underscared,
yet the film sits squarely in the Ricci canon.
Once again, she leaves us wondering: Is her
character the victim of menace and disorien-
tation, or could she herself be the wellspring
of strangeness?—Anthony Lane (In theatrical
release and on video on demand.)Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Eliza Hittman’s third feature, from 2020,
tells a spare story in compelling detail:
Autumn Callahan (Sidney Flanigan), a
seventeen-year-old high-school student
in a small Pennsylvania town, learns that
she’s pregnant. Unable to get an abortion
in that state without parental consent, she
travels to New York, with her cousin Skylar
(Talia Ryder), for the procedure. Hittman,
who also wrote the script, stays intimately
close to Autumn, spotlighting her cramped
life at home and in school, her indepen-
dent-minded ferocity, and her physical suf-
ferings (including attempts at ending the
pregnancy herself). But, above all, this is
a drama of social fabric—of the impact of
policy and prejudice on the daily thicket of
administrative details, the nerve-jangling
tension that women endure from ambient
sexual aggression, and the oppressive air
of surveillance and terror sparked by the
war against abortion. The young women’s
journey to New York—and their encoun-
ter with a Philadelphia hipster (Théodore
Pellerin)—offers an anguished apprentice-
ship in the wider world’s network of money
and power.—R.B. (Streaming on Freevee and
other services.)
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-towna protracted defiance of art-world fashion.
First came her stubborn fidelity to figu-
ration in times favoring abstraction, and
then her eschewal of Pop and postmodernist
irony—as opposed to humor, a wellspring
of her creativity. (Those tendencies toward
representation and sincerity happen to tri-
umph, retroactively, in the penchants of
many younger contemporary artists today.)
An intermittently active participation in
feminist and identity politics has also caused
the Black artist to be embraced in some cir-
cles and discounted in others. Both estima-
tions obscure the truth of Ringgold’s artistic
originality, which registers powerfully in
this six-decade survey, at the New Museum,
of more than a hundred works, with effects
that can be deeply moving and feel as fresh
as this morning. A profound personal essay
in the show’s catalogue by Michele Wallace,
an important critic and one of Ringgold’s
two daughters, expertly tracks her mother’s
mergers of racial content and art history,
both African and European. These culmi-
nate in such pictorial epics as “We Came
to America: The American Collection #1”
(1997), in which Black survivors of a distant,
burning slave ship swim in seething waters
toward a Black Statue of Liberty who is
cradling a Black child. Victimhood is rarely
at issue in Ringgold’s work, however awful
the circumstances; irrepressible vitality
always is.—Peter Schjeldahl (New Museum;
through June 5.)
Alan Saret
Since the nineteen-sixties, this New York
artist has coaxed wire, whether single
strands or rolls of mesh, into wild, ethereal
forms. The sculptures assembled in this ex-
hibition seem less like objects and more like
abstracted angels and demons, each imbued
with unique personalities and powers. A
two-part piece titled “In Love,” first con-
ceived in 1983, features a stunning volume of
galvanized-steel hex netting (simultaneously
suggesting a storm cloud, a charred bush,
and a Balenciaga creation in tulle) leaning
toward a smaller, teardrop-shaped partner
made of multicolored magnet wire. “Spring
Breath Be,” from 2012, is a hanging snarl
of spiked curlicues, and the new “Willow
Creek,” completed in 2022, is an elegantly
irregular column that plays on the vapor-
ous potentials of weblike fencing. Saret is
often described as a post-minimalist, in
part because of his fondness for industrial
materials, but his work, with its mystic,
anthropomorphic, and even feral qualities,
defies isms, and his misfit alchemy feels
especially fresh right now.—J.F. (Karma;
through June 4.)
“Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept”
This startlingly coherent and bold exhi-
bition is a material manifesto of late-pan-
demic institutional culture. Long on instal-
lations and videos and short on painting,
conventional sculpture, and straight pho-
tography, it is exciting without being espe-
cially pleasurable—geared toward thought.
The innovative, intimately collaborative
curators David Breslin and Adrienne Ed-
wards ignore rather than oppose pressures
of the ever-romping art market, which
can see to itself. Delayed for a year by
COVID-19, the show consolidates a trend
that many of us hadn’t suspected: a sort of
fortuitously shared conceptual sensibility
that suggests an in-group but is open to all
who care about art’s relations to the wide
world. My favorite work in the show is the
indelibly disturbing and enthralling “Your
Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” (2021), by
the veteran Cuban American artist and
singularly plainspoken social activist Coco
Fusco—a gorgeous twelve-minute video
exploration of Hart Island, New York’s pot-
ter’s field, for unidentified or unclaimed
corpses. Shots of the artist laboring in a
rowboat along its shores alternate with
drone overviews of a really quite lovely
place where rows of small stone markers
perfunctorily memorialize innumerable lost
lives. Beauty stands in for unconsummated
mourning. The work can seem to invoke
both the cascading fatalities of the COVID
pandemic and, by chance, the remorseless
current carnage in Ukraine.—P.S. (Whitney
Museum; through Sept. 5.)