Bilge Ebiri

“Gosh, you really got some nice toys here.”

Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty speaks those words more than halfway through Ridley Scott’s 1982 film “Blade Runner.” They’re not the character’s first lines (he has a brief scene earlier, threatening an artificial eye designer) nor his most famous. That honor goes to his unforgettable dying soliloquy about all the memories that “will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” But the words are, perhaps, the first to offer a window into his conflicted, synthetic soul.

With his shock of blond hair and imposing figure, the Nexus-6 replicant Batty, a lifelike android meant for combat who has turned on his human masters, seems like a science-fiction villain par excellence. But the anxious wonder with which he gazes at the lair of the genetic engineer J.F. Sebastian resembles that of a nervous child. A steely surface masking a tender, wounded inner world — the description could apply just as easily to “Blade Runner” itself, which is why Batty, and Hauer’s portrayal of him, remains the sci-fi classic’s beating heart.

The actor, who died on Wednesday at 75, had a long and distinguished career that included titles as diverse as the Dutch war classic “Soldier of Orange,” the medieval romance “Ladyhawke,” the Italian fable “Legend of the Holy Drinker” and whatever the hell “Hobo With a Shotgun” was. Arriving from Holland, Hauer made his American film debut in 1981, as a remorseless terrorist in the Sylvester Stallone thriller “Nighthawks.” But his performance as Batty was, after all these years, still his most indelible turn, in part because it spoke to his unique gifts.

At first glance Hauer might have looked like just another in a long line of European musclemen who steadily found work in Hollywood throughout the 1980s, ready to play their share of killer robots, stoic soldiers and disposable blond henchmen.

But Hauer brought to this particular killer robot a mixture of physical menace, regal charm and psychic anguish. He moved with melancholy grace, his eyes alternately darting and serene. The character, we’re told, has a life span of only four years, and probably even shorter if the film’s protagonist, the gruff cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), has anything to say about it. What’s only implied, and then suggested through performance, is that Roy Batty will cram into that short period the existential journey of an entire human life.

So, in his early scenes, he speaks in clipped, hesitant tones. Batty has clearly researched his predicament — he knows he doesn’t have long to live, and he has ideas about all the scientific methods that could be used to prolong his existence — but he sputters the words out, as if saying them for the first time: “EMS recombination,” “a repressive protein.”

That childlike nervousness evokes genuine pathos, even as we witness the violence he’s capable of. When he finally viciously kills his creator, the scientist-businessman Eldon Tyrell, rage, sadness, fear and exaltation all dance across Batty’s face. And are those tears in his eyes, or just the ever-present sweat caused by “Blade Runner’s” apocalyptic climate? Is there even a difference? This world is as broken as the humans and near-humans who populate it.

Had Hauer played Batty as another stone-faced Eurobaddie, “Blade Runner” itself might have been a more comfortably classifiable genre effort, the kind of movie that many viewers expected in 1982, the kind that promised to pit Ford, the star so familiar to us as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, against a new kind of futuristic nemesis. Instead, audiences were thrown off by the knotty neo-noir that Scott and the screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples delivered, the film flopped, and a cult masterpiece was born.

Look no further than Batty’s extended final battle with Deckard to see both the evidence of the movie’s idiosyncratic tone and how Hauer’s remarkable performance enhances it, practically deconstructing the simple plot before our eyes. The replicant chases the beleaguered, frightened Deckard around an abandoned building, toying with the cop and playing singsong children’s games. But there’s still a catch in Batty’s words, slight pauses scattered in unusual places. Seeing that Deckard has killed his replicant lover, Pris (Daryl Hannah), Batty offers, “I thought you were good. Aren’t you the … good man?” The awkwardness of the words, combined with the pause before “good man” seems to question the film’s very moral universe.

And maybe, when Batty strips down to his underwear for the final pursuit, it’s a sign that he has nothing to hide, that he is finally fully himself and self-aware — in contrast to our hero, who never really suspects that he himself may well be a replicant (a much-speculated-upon theory that years later was confirmed by the 2017 sequel). We see Hauer’s impressive physique, and sense Batty’s growing confidence, which turns first to bewilderment, and then to a kind of joy when Deckard fights back and actually wallops him in the face.

Hauer’s delivery of Batty’s dreamily immortal final lines is certainly perfect, but what’s even more heartbreaking is what he says right before, as he saves the seemingly defeated Deckard from plunging to his death: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” Scott shoots Hauer in extreme close-up, and captures in the actor’s eyes an instant of almost explosive awareness. It’s the kind of moment that still catches a viewer off-guard, many decades later. It’s the look of a man who has finally unlocked himself, and a brave, cruel new world.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/movies/blade-runner-rutger-hauer.html" id="8d6a96bd-b23d-3382-a343-716239833665">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

Even Now, Rutger Hauer's Performance in 'Blade Runner' Is a Marvel

Movies about war are a dime a dozen, but how do you film peace? In “Angels Are Made of Light,” director James Longley trains his camera on a school in Kabul, Afghanistan, where young children and weary adults attempt to imagine something resembling a hopeful future. Though much of the country is still troubled by conflict, the capital appears to be slowly working toward a sense of stability. And while the specter of war looms over Longley’s documentary, its shadow is subtle. The director is more interested in showing ordinary people trying to live some semblance of a normal life.

The film was shot over three years, and when it begins, the Daqiqi Balkhi School that is the subject occupies a cluster of tents in the courtyard of a devastated mosque; it will later move to its own building. The neighborhood school serves as a structuring presence, but it’s a loose one, as the picture detours into the lives of students and administrators. We meet three brothers — Rostam, Sohrab and Yaldash — whose mother teaches at the school and whose father insists that they decide between going to work and getting an education. The children seem wise beyond their years, haunted by the horrors of the past and the desperation of the present. “I worry about what will become of us in the end,” one says. “This thought consumes me.” However, they’re also gleefully ambitious and competitive, eager to place first in their classes. They understand that education can mean a better life, but that survival may need to come first.

The grown-ups around them have their own concerns. The school’s determined principal, Faiz Mohammed, questions religious dogma even as he continues to teach it, though always with an emphasis on the power of rational discourse. The adults in the film — among them an artistically inclined teacher of Dari as well as the school’s cleaning woman — relate the sad history of Afghanistan in impressionistic interludes that Longley illustrates with archival footage. These simple recollections lack detail, but they capture the hesitant quality of this moment. The return of war never feels far from anyone’s mind, and this sense heightens the importance of this fragile peace.

Longley likes to shift perspective, and the film often basks in a collective, many-voiced consciousness. We can’t always tell who’s talking, and our focus may drift among individuals and stories. In the hands of a lesser director, such a gambit could easily lead to tedium and confusion, but Longley — whose Oscar-nominated 2006 effort “Iraq in Fragments” portrayed the United States’ occupation through the eyes of individuals in parts of Iraq — has a knack for composition and for capturing telling details. Long shots of Kabul reveal the ragged majesty of the city; footage of streets, shops and doorways absorbs us in the hustle and bustle of neighborhood life; attentive close-ups convey people’s complicated thoughts. The director finds beauty everywhere — in a cloud of dust, a traffic jam, the raucous din of children at play. And wherever such beauty exists, we imagine, hope can never be entirely absent.

Not rated. In Dari, Pashto and Arabic, with English subtitles.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/movies/angels-are-made-of-light-review.html" id="8e2c5582-d705-3c30-a5f8-e2c499c768ca">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

'Angels Are Made of Light' Review: Despair Meets Hope in Kabul

In January 2015, 14-year-old John Smith fell through the frozen surface of a lake in St. Charles, Missouri, and remained submerged for 15 minutes. He had no pulse when emergency workers pulled him from the freezing water, or for nearly 45 minutes after. It was reportedly only after audible prayers by his mother, Joyce, that his heart finally started up again. And over the next several days, as his community vigorously prayed for him, the young man made a full, seemingly impossible recovery.

Roxann Dawson’s faith-based film, “Breakthrough,” tells the story of John’s miraculous ordeal with an unassuming simplicity, focusing on the harrowing details of the case without an overreliance on proselytization. Though faith is ever-present — particularly through the devotion of Joyce (Chrissy Metz) and the town’s struggling young pastor (Topher Grace), who remain with John (Marcel Ruiz) every step of the way — the film also wisely dedicates plenty of screen time to the emergency workers and doctors struggling to bring the boy back to life. Here, religion is not in contention with medicine, but seems to work in tandem with it.

The filmmaking may at times be direct and inelegant, but “Breakthrough” isn’t without nuance. Dawson (a TV veteran directing her first feature film) doesn’t sidestep the thorny issue of selective miracles — after returning to school, John wrestles with the fact that he was spared from death while many others aren’t. “Breakthrough” is more suggestive than evangelical, and its willingness to let the mystery of the young man’s survival linger enhances the film’s power. You don’t have to believe in divine intervention to be moved by this story.

Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/movies/breakthrough-review.html" id="bb0671fe-ff95-3974-ad5a-312aa8330779">The New York Times</a>.

'Breakthrough': A Remarkable Story of Survival, Told Through a Religious Lens

The 20 Best Action Movies on Netflix to Watch Right Now

Children in peril. The subject appears to be all the rage right now, if we judge by this year’s Oscar-nominated live-action short films, which are screening alongside their animated and documentary counterparts before the Feb. 24 awards ceremony. Four of the titles in question feature a child in some kind of horrific danger — whether it involves kidnapping, murder, accidental death or racial violence.

Emotional manipulation is nothing new to cinema but can be particularly repellent if a film’s story feels pointless. And sadly, some of this year’s live-action nominees — which range from a drama about the real-life 1993 murder of Liverpool toddler James Bulger (“Detainment”) to a stylized thriller about two boys stuck in quicksand (“Fauve”) — may seem cheap in that regard, with ghastly images and scenarios that appear designed to make us feel like we’ve seen something important and meaningful, without delivering on either import or meaning.

By contrast, the one live-action short that doesn’t cavalierly put children in jeopardy, Marianne Farley’s “Marguerite,” a drama about an older woman who learns that her caretaker is a lesbian and has a surge of memories about thwarted love, feels like a reprieve.

The animated shorts offer an even stronger corrective. These pictures can have a formal advantage over their live-action counterparts: Animated characters’ ability to move quickly and express clearer emotions allows filmmakers to pack more elaborate stories into shorter running times. Several of these efforts are able to focus on children’s emotional lives without turning them into opportunistic plot devices.

To wit: Andrew Chesworth and Bobby Pontillas’s “One Small Step” portrays a young woman’s dreams of going to space and tells a complex, tender story in seven quick minutes. Trevor Jimenez’s surreal “Weekends” follows a young boy as he moves between his father’s busy, big-city apartment to his mom’s modest rural home. Then there’s Domee Shi’s Pixar short “Bao,” (which also screened theatrically before “Incredibles 2” last summer) about a woman whose charming vision of raising a steamed dumpling as if it were her child turns out to be a moving metaphor for an emotional impasse with her real son.

Documentary shorts, meanwhile, also provide their share of sad tales, but here, engaging filmmaking can temper the despair — as in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s intimate “End Game,” which looks at doctors and patients at two end-of-life facilities in San Francisco, and Skye Fitzgerald’s immersive “Lifeboat,” which follows volunteers trying to save refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean in small, fragile vessels.

But perhaps the most disturbing film in this category is the shortest. Marshall Curry’s seven-minute-long “A Night at the Garden” presents moments from a 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in which 20,000 people came together to hear speeches extolling Hitler and warning of a Jewish menace. In the current climate of intolerance, this footage is especially chilling.

The 2019 Oscar Nominated Short Films

Documentary Program A: 1 hour 21 minutes

Documentary Program B: 1 hour 14 minutes

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/movies/2019-oscar-nominated-short-films-review.html" id="e0f18ac5-ab05-3bc5-a594-1d9794a7265a">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

'The 2019 Oscar Nominated Short Films' Review: Heartbreak, Abbreviated

Suddenly, into his quiet life some strange new visitors fall. First, a human manifestation of the family dog shows up and reveals that he felt similarly abandoned when Kun was born. Next, his younger sister’s future teenage self arrives and enlists his aid on a minor adventure. One of the charms of Hosoda’s film is that it assumes its protagonist’s childlike point of view, and so doesn’t waste much time questioning these magical travelers: This girl is Mirai visiting from the future because of course she is.

With the doors of perception now opened a mite wider, little Kun finds himself sporadically traveling through time and witnessing some of his family’s ordeals, from the seismic to the minute. And slowly, this tyke, his understanding limited but his vision seemingly infinite, starts to feel a gathering existential unease.

Fluctuating between the minor daily occurrences of Kun’s life and his touching sojourns into the past and the future, Hosoda’s film privileges moments of emotion over belabored story mechanics. Thus, it gathers complexity without sacrificing any of its guileless modesty. In the best possible way, “Mirai” feels like the dream of a very wise child.

Rated PG for jealous older brothers and mild ontological unease. In Japanese, with English subtitles.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/movies/mirai-review.html" id="068ed98b-b639-340e-aeb2-bc7c002d13a6">The New York Times</a>.

A young boy’s jealousy of his newborn sister fuels an intimate and time-hopping emotional journey in Mamoru Hosoda’s animated drama “Mirai.” When 4-year-old Kun meets the baby, Mirai, he’s initially affectionate. But as his parents have less and less time for him, he starts to feel left out, even resentful toward the family’s new bundle of joy.

'Mirai' Review: A Charming Animated Trip Into a Family's Past

The film focuses on the brave, sometimes eccentric souls who have devoted their lives to caring for the city’s cat population. As we watch their often heroic efforts, we get the nauseating sense that whatever they do will never be enough.

In many cases, these people catch the animals, then arrange to have them spayed and vaccinated, before releasing them back out into the streets. There probably aren’t enough prospective owners for these cats, and many of the animals brought to shelters wind up being euthanized; the film’s most heart-rending sequence involves watching different people from all walks of life bringing their beloved pets to one such shelter, in the full knowledge that these creatures, if they can’t find a home, will eventually be killed.

This is a fascinating, difficult topic — one that has a lot to do with the measure of our own humanity, and with the role such creatures can play in the social fabric of a community — and while “The Cat Rescuers” movingly portrays the unique individuals committed to helping these cats, it doesn’t quite tackle the full complexity of this subject. Still, no animal lover should be surprised to find themselves holding back tears while watching this documentary.

Not rated. 1 hour 27 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/04/movies/the-cat-rescuers-review.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

'The Cat Rescuers' review: A portrait of New York's street cats and their loyal humans

New York’s cat lovers are probably familiar with the feeling of wanting to help out the city’s many stray felines, but Rob Fruchtman and Steven Lawrence’s modest, effective documentary “The Cat Rescuers” captures the peculiar anxiety of not being able to help all of them.

For documentary film viewers, sometimes it feels like the dronepocalypse is already here.

Over the past few years, shots taken by drone — steadily gliding images looking down at houses and cities and fields below — have become epidemic in documentary, no matter the subject. You’ll see them in Alex Gibney’s Theranos exposé, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” as the camera hovers repeatedly over Theranos labs and other tech businesses in the valley, presumably helping make some point about the startup culture that led to the company’s crooked practices. You’ll see them in Werner Herzog’s “Meeting Gorbachev,” as the camera drifts over the former Soviet leader’s impoverished home village of Privolnoye. They’re in Amazon’s “Lorena” as well, lingering over cities, making some point (I think) about the American dream. You can certainly see some drone use in last year’s Oscar winner for best documentary, “Free Solo,” about climber Alex Honnold’s attempt to scale El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without ropes — though there’s some debate over which scenes were shot with drones, since they’re illegal in Yosemite.

For those of us who watch documentaries on a regular basis, the temptation to yell, “Make it stop!” can be overwhelming. But it’s also worth remembering that not all such footage is created equal. The technology has revolutionized nature documentaries by allowing filmmakers access to worlds they could not previously enter. Herzog opens his remarkable 2016 picture “Into the Inferno” with an astounding aerial sequence that soars up a mountain and then into the volcano at its center. For “Planet Earth II,” drones helped capture footage of rare pale Araguaia River dolphins in the remote jungles of Brazil. And you can’t not have drone shots in a movie about drones, like Sonia Kennebeck’s “National Bird,” which follows whistleblowers on the American military’s controversial use of drones in combat. There, eerie bird’s-eye views of ordinary streets and homes weave an appropriately paranoid atmosphere.

And even some of those documentaries that don’t seem to need a sky-high point-of-view can have their own, fascinating internal logic. The copious drone shots in Dan Reed’s “Leaving Neverland,” about two men who allege that pop singer Michael Jackson raped them when they were children, help offset the excruciatingly intimate interviews about sexual assault. Such techniques also make a thematic point: Reviewing the film for New York Magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz observed that “the majestic gliding rhythm of the shots evokes the flights in J.M. Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan,’” suggesting both that these men’s childhoods were stolen at Neverland Ranch, and that this documentary represents their final flight from Jackson and his legacy.

In Ceyda Torun’s “Kedi,” about the street cats of Istanbul, dreamy aerial views of the Turkish city work in tandem with the ground-level shots following the felines. The high angles add an additional, perhaps necessary perspective: Torun’s thesis is that the street cats provide a vital sense of caring and connectivity in a city that has become fragmented as it’s transformed into what the government hopes will be a gleaming, Dubai-like metropolis of the future. “Kedi” shows this conflict playing out over Istanbul’s skyline and the competing cacophony of its architecture, thus introducing a subtle political edge to a work that otherwise avoids directly addressing topics of a sensitive nature.

But even when such footage is used well, or interestingly, it can still contribute to an overall sense that the technique has become something of a cliché. Writing in Film Comment magazine last year, critic and curator Eric Hynes argued that watching drone imagery was “like watching everybody play with the same new toy.” He added that “if your film’s currency is intimacy, is access, is humanity, why are you floating above everyone’s heads?”

Documentarian Jeremy Workman, who utilized them sparingly in his 2018 “The World Before Your Feet,” likened the ubiquity of such shots to wallpaper. “So audiences can now spot them,” he said. “That takes them out of the movie, which has the opposite effect of what the shot’s intention was.” When considering the technology for his film, about a man named Matt Green who is determined to walk every street in New York, Workman set strict parameters for himself: “Every drone shot had to include Matt,” he recalled, “and say something more than just, ‘Look at New York.’ It had to say, ‘Look at this guy within this city.’”

At the same time, Workman, who also edits trailers, admitted that he often found himself including drone footage in trailers because it gives the clip a larger scale, “cuing the audience that this is a bigger story and translates beyond one small character.” Aerial imagery, he added, once prohibitively expensive for the average documentarian, has gone from being a rare luxury to something of a stylistic crutch, there to give even the lowest-budget film visual pizazz and instant gravitas.

That speaks to the weird dichotomy in viewers’ opinions of drones right now. Do a search for “Drone shots” and “Documentary” on Twitter and you’re likely to find as many people complaining about their overuse as people marveling at their beauty, even presenting footage of their own experiments. The technology is just new enough to dazzle some, and just old enough to annoy others.

Filmmakers struggle with this quandary, too. Robert Greene’s “Bisbee ’17” last year told the story of an Arizona town reckoning with its history of copper mining and class warfare. He said that while he mostly hates drones, he was drawn to them as he raised money for his film. “We went to the town of Bisbee for 10 days to shoot and cut a short trailer, for investors,” he recalled. “And of course it opens with these drone shots! Because they add, quote-unquote, production value.” Greene said he also used them to capture footage of off-limits slag heaps and chemical waste around the town.

But as a teacher of documentary journalism at the University of Missouri, Greene also finds himself regularly advising students against drones. “When you’re making documentaries, you’re so hungry for something that works,” he said. “People are so fearful when making nonfiction: fearful about being boring, or not important, or misrepresenting the subject. You’re worried your close-ups might be out of focus, or your sound isn’t as good as you wanted it to be. The drone shot is the answer to fear. It’s something that works. It’s epic, and it’s easy.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="2a2b3d52-4db5-49e2-b5a5-997d32221752" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/movies/drones-documentaries.html">The New York Times</a>.

The dronepocalypse is here -- in documentary footage, at least

(Critic's Notebook): In the modern dystopian imagination, the menacing shadow of the drone looms large. Unmanned aerial vehicles have already transformed warfare and surveillance in alarming ways, and many worry that the bleak, not-so-distant future will be one in which drones rule our ordinary lives — policing our streets, peering through our windows, delivering our mail and God knows what else, as their mechanical buzzing replaces the chirping of birds and the laughter of children.

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