ily relationships is oversimpliied and sweetened
to the vanishing point. The schematic action is
enlivened by the whimsical supporting perfor-
mance of Gillian Jacobs, in the winningly idio-
syncratic role of an older student who spent eight
years in a coma and has become a social-media
celebrity.—R.B. (In wide release.)
Mary Shelley
If you’re going to smooch a romantic poet, do it
in a graveyard. Such is one of the many lessons
delivered by this bio-pic of Mary Godwin (Elle
Fanning). She falls for Percy Shelley (Douglas
Booth), and they elope together, with predict-
able results. “Hey, a baby!” he exclaims. Their at-
tempts at a radical life, however, founder on a lack
of funds and her lingering moral scruples. To add
to the disarray, her stepsister Claire Clairmont
(Bel Powley) is attracted to Shelley and seduced
by Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), who chooses to
model himself on a pop video from the nineteen-
eighties. The main characters join forces beside
Lake Geneva, where Mary’s “Frankenstein” is
brought to life. These fraught events, prodded
by a keening musical score, and so overwrought
at times that they could be mistaken for a spoof,
are a long way from the inesse—and the femi-
nist vigor—that the director, Haifaa Al-Mansour,
displayed in her début feature, “Wadjda” (2012).
Still, the movie has a solemn asset in Stephen
Dillane, who made a stern impact as Lord Hal-
ifax in “Finest Hour,” and who returns here as
Mary’s father, William Godwin—the grizzled
idealist, still smoldering in middle age.—A.L.
(In limited release.)
Regular Lovers
Philippe Garrel, who, at the age of twenty, made
a ilm in Paris during the turmoil of May, 1968,
revisits those times in this intimate epic, from
- Centered on a love afair between François,
a young poet (played by Garrel’s son Louis), and
Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), a working-class sculptor,
the drama is as symbolic as it is realistic. Garrel
ilms the uprising with a lat theatrical abstrac-
tion, turning it into a dimly recalled dream. This
is May ’68 minus the politics—an outpouring of
desire, a yearning for sensual utopia on earth—
and, as such, it’s doomed. Garrel shows that the
world after the revolt belongs to practical people
with their feet on the ground. If someone other
than this aesthetically radical director said so, it
might seem reactionary, but here Garrel gives an
original artistic form to his rueful view of his own
youthful illusions. The cinematographer William
Lubtchansky’s grainy black-and-white images have
the feel of cold stone, and, when the pragmatic
Lilie challenges François to get on with his life,
the chill of hard reality is all the more brutal. In
French.—R.B. (Metrograph, May 24.)
The Seagull
This new version of Chekhov’s play, adapted by
Stephen Karam and directed by Michael Mayer,
is brisk to the point of haste. Running just over
an hour and a half, it hurries through the arrival
of Irina (Annette Bening), a noted actress, at the
rural home of her brother, Sorin (Brian Den-
nehy); the woodland staging of a play by her son,
Konstantin (Billy Howle), and his moony adora-
tion of an ingénue, Nina (Saoirse Ronan), clad in
pristine white; the lamentations of Masha (Elis-
abeth Moss), who, in contrast, wears funereal
black; and the scribblings of a modish writer,
Trigorin (Corey Stoll), who neglects his duties
as Irina’s beau. (You cannot miss his wandering
and predatory eye.) Though the light haze of idle-
ness through which the characters usually drift is
dispersed, the story, far from acquiring a sharper
focus, seems to grow more inconsequential. But
the cast, which includes Mare Winningham, is
devoted to the Chekhovian cause, and Bening’s
Irina is a ine addition to her gallery of complex
heroines, in ilms such as “20th Century Women”
(2016) and “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool”
(2017), who gird themselves to ight of time and
trouble.—A.L. (5/21/18) (In limited release.)
Sollers Point
The title of Matthew Porterield’s quietly an-
guished drama refers to a Baltimore neighbor-
hood that’s near a now-shuttered steel mill and
is still home to many of its former employees.
There, the twenty-six-year-old Keith Cohoe (Mc-
Caul Lombardi), recently released from prison
(apparently for a drug-related ofense), is under
house arrest and living with his father, Carol (Jim
Belushi), a retired mill worker. Keith is white;
many of his friends and neighbors, including
his former girlfriend, Courtney (Zazie Beetz),
are black, but, in prison, Keith belonged to a
white-supremacist gang, and when his house ar-
rest ends its ex-con members expect him to re-
join them. Meanwhile, unable to ind work and in
need of quick money, Keith begins dealing drugs
again. His increasingly desperate rounds thrust
him into wary yet yearning contact with a wide
range of characters, including his grandmother
(Lynn Cohen), two young women who work as
strippers, a terrifying white-supremacist leader,
an art-school student, and a heroin addict hop-
ing to break her habit. Sketching Keith’s innerMOVIESconlicts and practical struggles with a graceful,
mood-rich lyricism, Porterield presses gently
but painfully on some of the most inlamed and
sensitive parts of American society.—R.B. (In
limited release.)
Wild Girl
This turbulent and tangled Western, from 1932,
directed by Raoul Walsh, depicts a rustic post-
Civil War outpost in California in all its sor-
did, violent, and romantic energy. Salomy Jane
(Joan Bennett), a barefoot backwoods maiden,
innocently arouses the lust of the neighboring
town’s local grandee (Morgan Wallace), whose
predatory past catches up with him in the per-
son of a Virginia stranger (Charles Farrell),
a Confederate veteran who comes to town to
avenge his sister. Meanwhile, Salomy is being
courted by a pair of rivals—a smooth-talking
saloon gambler (Ralph Bellamy) and a crude
rancher (Irving Pichel)—and protected by Yuba
Bill (Eugene Pallette), a jolly and fast-witted
coachman. But the deck is shuled anew when
she and the newcomer cross paths. Walsh’s richly
textured populist panorama, with its simmer-
ing feuds, casual gunplay, and corrupt local pol-
itics, along with the shoddy justice of vigilante
mobs, blends the comic hyperbole of long-ago
tall tales, the sentimental power of domestic-
ity, and the tense spectacle of life and death in
the daily balance. With Minna Gombell, as a
sharp-tongued madam; Sarah Padden, as a lay-
about’s long-sufering wife; and Louise Beavers,
as Mammy Lou, who doesn’t live separately but
isn’t treated equally.—R.B. (MOMA, May 26.)Preview: June 1, 10-6; June 2, 12-5; June 4, 10-6; June 5, 10-
104 East 25th St, New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COMHarrison Cady, Peter Rabbit and His Friends (detail), ink and watercolor cover art for People’s Home Journal,
April 1926. Estimate $7,000 to $10,000.
Illustration Art
June 5
Christine von der Linn • [email protected]