16 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
PALOMAR/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
As both a director and an independent producer, Robert Aldrich made
a batch of movies about the film business, centered on actors’ volatility
and vulnerability, including “The Killing of Sister George,” from 1968
(screening Sept. 26-27, at Anthology Film Archives). It’s based on a play
by Frank Marcus and is set in London, where an acerbic middle-aged
actress named June Buckridge (Beryl Reid) plays a chipper character
named Sister George in a television series. She’s so closely identified
with the role that she’s called George in her private life, including by her
girlfriend, a young office worker and poet (Susannah York), who lives
with her. When producers plan to kill off the character and write June out
of the show, she spins out of control, endangering both her relationship
and her career. Aldrich looks empathetically at the furtive lives of lesbian
couples in the nineteen-sixties (one sequence emphasizes their inabil-
ity to marry) while peering derisively behind the scenes at the media’s
heedless waste of talented artists on trivial productions.—Richard BrodyINREVIVAL
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newyorker.com/goings-on-about-townkids are trained to fight for a revolutionary cause
that seems both urgent and faraway; often, they
receive commands over a crackling radio. Some
viewers may be vexed by this lack of specificity,
yet the movie is most compelling when it verges
on abstraction—note the mountainous land-
scapes, misty and vertiginous, and the ritualistic
games in which the warriors engage. One of the
youths, Bigfoot, is played with great intensity
by Moisés Arias, who has journeyed a long way
from his days on “Hannah Montana.” With
Julianne Nicholson as a desperate hostage, whose
efforts to escape consume much of the movie’s
second half. In Spanish and English.—A.L.
(9/23/19) (In limited release.)Santiago, Italia
The Italian director Nanni Moretti crafts this
fiercely earnest documentary with a frank sim-
plicity that feels remarkably original. The film
tells a historical story with personal passion
and grand drama: he interviews a wide range
of Chileans—factory workers, filmmakers, doc-
tors, writers—about Salvador Allende’s jubilant
rise to power, in the early seventies, the Chil-
ean Army’s 1973 coup (aided by the United
States), and the monstrous cruelties to which
the junta subjected Allende’s sympathizers.
One embassy in Santiago—Italy’s—allowed
Chileans to take refuge within its walls, and
then managed to negotiate their safe passage
to Italy (where many live even now). With his
blunt and probing discussions, Moretti carefully
parses Allende’s movement, looking at it with
uninhibited admiration—and catches premo-
nitions of tragedy. He exalts the heroism of
Italian diplomats, but he keeps the main focus
on the struggles of Chileans, some of whom
speak with an anguished candor about their
experiences of torture. While interviewing an
imprisoned junta officer, Moretti, a master of
autofiction, finally comes out from behind the
curtain to declare his point of view. In Spanish
and Italian.—R.B. (New York Film Festival, Sept.
30 and Oct. 2.)The Sound of Silence
An exciting idea and a cast with the skill to
convey it go to waste in this overplotted, un-
derdeveloped science-fiction mood piece. Peter
Lucian (Peter Sarsgaard), awkward and guarded,
is a Manhattan-based tuner of homes—a con-
sultant who identifies and fixes, with the help
of high-tech sound equipment and his own
supersensitive ears, the frequencies and har-
monies that drive people to distraction in their
apartments. A music scholar and a 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 con-
fronts the chicanery of a research assistant (Tony
Revolori), two professors (Austin Pendleton and
Tina Benko), and a tech executive (Bruce Alt-
man). 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.)European Union. They pursue an arduous and
dangerous journey to reach Europe nonethe-
less—and they film it on cell phones, yielding
the footage assembled in this documentary.
Hassan does much of the camerawork, and
Fatima and the children pitch in, too, detailing
intimate experiences that unfold with global
and historical scope. Passing through Iran en
route to Turkey, Bulgaria, and Serbia, dealing
with smugglers (some sympathetic, others
predatory), travelling hazardously on foot
through forests, confronting violent nationalist
gangs, becoming the subjects of news reports,
being held behind barbed wire: the Fazili and
Hosseini family endures and depicts the crises
of the century. Discussing their circumstances
incisively, they offer trenchant views of reli-
gious and popular culture—and the role and the
power of the cinema itself.—R.B. (Film Forum.)Monos
The child soldiers who populate Alejandro Lan-
des’s film have names like Wolf and Dog, and
you can see why: whatever bound them to nor-
mal human society has all but fallen away. The
drama is set in the high hills and hostile jungles
of an unnamed Latin-American land, where thedating back to her childhood stardom, Garland
desperately seeks custody of her children, Lorna
and Joey Luft, but is penniless and homeless.
She only accepts the London gig to earn enough
money to support them. Although she flings
herself devotedly into the concerts, her initial
triumphs crumble in the face of fresh troubles,
including an unhappy new marriage and failed
business plans. Flashbacks to her teen-age years
at M-G-M reveal the abusive studio regime that
brought her worldwide fame at the expense of
her private life. Tom Edge’s script, based on a
play by Peter Quilter, lapses into clichés, but
the dialogue is often sharp, and Zellweger offers
it up with flair and fury. She also sings, and,
though her voice hardly resembles Garland’s,
she commands the stage majestically. Directed
by Rupert Goold.—R.B. (In wide release.)
Midnight Traveler
When the Afghan filmmaker Hassan Fazili
received death threats from the Taliban, in 2015,
he fled the country with his family—his wife,
Fatima Hussaini, who is also a filmmaker and
an actress, and their young daughters, Nargis
and Zahra. Despite a thick dossier citing these
threats, the family was denied asylum in the