Contradictions abound in movie theaters right now: one of the screen's most athletic leading men spends his entire thriller strapped to a chair; one of its most articulate (in English) leading ladies spends hers speaking French, an optimistic kid-flick with a rainbow theme depicts a world literally on fire … and more.
Haunting international features, an Oscar-nominated Kate Hudson and a table tennis thriller are still playing, too.
Mercy
In theaters now
The year is 2029, and an artificial intelligence entity called Mercy sits as judge, jury and executioner over certain Los Angeles criminal proceedings in director Timur Bekmambetov's thriller. Detective Raven (Chris Pratt), an alcoholic and also apparently a poster boy for LA law enforcement, after having brought in Mercy's first conviction, awakens at the film's start, hungover and shackled to the "Mercy Chair" which will kill him if he's found guilty. Facing him on screen is Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), an AI jurist who icily informs him that he has 90 minutes (cue on-screen timer) to prove he didn't kill his wife, an event of which he has no memory. He's to do this by availing himself of the city's vast archive of surveillance and bodycam footage, drones, phone records and the like. He can also make a few calls to family and colleagues.
So, not RoboCop, but RoboCourt — kind of a nifty premise, except that no one involved seems terribly intent on interrogating the central notion of AI fallibility. "Human or AI," says Raven in a spectacularly unpersuasive copout, "we all make mistakes." Still, the setup allows Bekmambetov to indulge his fondness for storytelling with doorbell cams, iPhone screen grabs and computer searches, all edited frantically to make the use of so much low-res footage less annoying. A smartly choreographed chase sequence finally widens the focus and turns the last act of Mercy mercifully brisk. But the overall effect is derivative and secondhand — almost literally Minority Report, conceived not by the director of the 2012 film Lincoln, but by the director of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
The Testament of Ann Lee
Now in wide release
Ambitious, stylized, intense, and thoroughly unorthodox, Mona Fastvold's religious biopic tells the story of Shakers founder Ann Lee (a wild-eyed, fiercely committed Amanda Seyfried) as a full-scale musical drama. That's not to say there are finger-snapping tunes. The score adapts 18th century Shaker spirituals, and the choreography involves the thrusting limbs and clawing fingers of the seizure-like dancing that earned this puritan sect of "Shaking" Quakers their nickname.
We meet Ann as a pious youngster more interested in spiritual matters than matters of the flesh. Marriage to a man who enjoys inflicting pain during sex, and the deaths of her four children in infancy lead Ann to the conclusion that lifelong celibacy is among the keys to salvation. With the help of her younger brother (Lewis Pullman), she finds adherents to a religious philosophy that also emphasizes gender equality and simple living, and leads them to found a utopian, crafts-based community in America. Director Fastvold and her co-writer Brady Corbet (the couple flipped roles from last year's The Brutalist) serve up Ann's spiritual journey in ecstatically musical terms, which is at once distancing and … well, ecstatic, though it pales a bit over the course of two-and-a-quarter hours.
Arco
In limited theaters
A little boy travels from a distant future where humans live in the clouds to a more recognizable, droid-filled 21st-century future in Ugo Bienvenu's charmingly cautionary debut feature. The director and co-writer, a graphic novelist, imagines the distant future in utopian terms — families living in colonies that look like arboretums atop giant artificial trees, from which they leap to travel through time on the leading edge of rainbows. Children under 12 aren't allowed to time-travel, a restriction that strikes our 10-year-old title character as arbitrary, so little Arco swipes his sister's rainbow-patterned cape and takes his first leap, which doesn't go quite as planned. He ends up in 2075, where droids perform many functions — teaching in schools, policing the streets, delivering packages — and whole neighborhoods have been outfitted with clear glass domes as protection against out-of-control wildfires and extreme rainstorms. Iris, who is about Arco's age, follows a rainbow and discovers Arco has crash-landed in the woods. She takes him home and they bond, though there's still the problem of getting him back to his home.
The story is action-packed and, especially when a wildfire rages nearby, decently suspenseful. Though the film incorporates a pretty dark vision of where the planet is headed ecologically, it leans heavily into solutions (those domes), so the story seems unlikely to seriously scare kids, its target audience. It's also uncommonly beautiful, with animation that suggests the work of Hayao Miyazaki, with a slightly harder, more realistic edge.
Sound of Falling
In limited theaters
Eerie, and not always signposted in ways that make its connections comprehensible, director and co-writer Mascha Schilinski's dark portrait of a German family farm and the women who inhabit it across four generations could be described as a cinematic poem of yearning and guilt. It includes tales of Fritz, a boy of draft age during World War I who loses a leg, and the sterilization and abuse of female servants. There's also a girl's erotic fixation on Fritz some years later, a disco-loving young woman abused by an uncle in 1980s East Germany as his son pines for her, and a friendship between a tween from the family in modern reunified Germany and an intense stranger whose mother has died. One little girl participates in the family's odd tradition of "death photos" — posed post-mortem photos with loved ones — then sees a photo that appears to foretell her own death. Not cheerful, in short. Also, not always coherent, but beautifully shot, and compellingly acted.
A Private Life
In limited theaters
Jodie Foster, elegantly bilingual as Lilian, a French psychiatrist, is the most compelling reason to see director and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski's decorous but mildly idiotic psychological mystery. Receiving word that her patient Paula (Virginie Efira), appears to have taken her own life, Lilian attends a memorial service and has odd enough interactions with Paula's daughter (Luàna Bajrami), and husband (Mathieu Amalric) that she begins to suspect foul play. She contacts her ex-husband, who's also her ophthalmologist (Daniel Auteuil) because she can't stop tearing up — her tears spatter a man's hand on the subway. She then contacts a medium (Sophie Guillemin) who hypnotizes her and successfully stops the tears, but also allows her to access a dream state in which she and Paula were violinists and lovers playing in a Paris orchestra during the Nazi occupation, with Lilian's estranged son (Vincent Lacoste) among the Nazi militiamen.
None of this makes any more sense in the film than it does as I'm describing it, nor does the crime-solving odyssey she and her ex embark on (which would almost certainly result in both of them losing their medical licenses). Foster is sublime, and she has such easy chemistry with Auteuil that their scenes together make temporary sense of unlikely plot detours. If all of this were being played for laughs it might have had a Hitchcock-meets-Only-Murders-in-the-Building vibe, but it isn't, and it doesn't.
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