New Directors, New Films
This year’s edition of the New Directors/New Films series, an annual collaboration between MOMA and Film at Lincoln Center that began in 1972, highlights a diverse array of movies with invigorating approaches to narrative form—foremost, “Variations on a Theme,” the second feature by the South African filmmakers Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, which weaves together multiple story lines in its hour-and-five-minute span. The film is set in a mountain village where an elderly woman named Hettie (Hettie Farmer) lives alone on a small farm, tending her flock of goats with increasing difficulty. The village’s Black residents, including Hettie, are energized by a promising but tangled effort to redress a long-standing injustice—the unequal compensation received by Black South African soldiers in the Second World War. Meanwhile, a man obsessively seeks buried treasure beneath his home. The life of the rural region is framed in airy and luminous wide-screen images that recur with a lyrical vision of vast arcs of time amid dramatic social change.
A simple setup gives rise to quiet complexity in the Tibetan American director Tenzin Phuntsog’s first dramatic feature, “Next Life,” set in an unnamed American suburb (filmed largely in his parents’ house, in California). There, an old Tibetan man (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar) requests a Tibetan doctor to tend to his ever more troubling ailments. As the patient weakens, he hopes to visit Tibet once more, prompting his son (Tenzin Phurpatsang) to seek out a visa for him from a Chinese consulate; meanwhile, the family turn toward their religious traditions, which Phuntsog strikingly and movingly embodies in poised and serene images of a rare, modest, yet exalted spirituality.
Pete Ohs’s modernist melodrama “Erupcja” stars Charli XCX as a young woman who, while vacationing in Warsaw with her boyfriend (Will Madden), reconnects with an old friend (Lena Góra). The two women’s powerful, mysterious bond is sketched in sharp yet subtle dramatic strokes that are all the more thrilling for their breathless rapidity. It will be released in theatres on April 17; its festival screenings are an enticement to the aptly impatient.—Richard Brody
About Town
Much has been said about opera recently—that it’s out of touch, that it’s a dying art, that it doesn’t have enough Ping-Pong in it. No matter what we’re willing to admit, there’s a reason why this is a prevailing perception, so how do we rise to the challenge of changing it? The Met’s latest attempt is by putting on “Innocence,” the final opera by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, which tells a story of grief and trauma after a devastating school shooting. Told in two time lines, one near-present and one past, with a libretto by Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” dissects the personal impact of gun violence, taking on a tragically common occurrence. One can imagine more irrelevant things.—Jane Bua (The Metropolitan Opera; select dates April 6-29.)
Cannibalism, rape, a severed tongue and hands, filicide . . . Quentin Tarantino has nothing on Shakespeare. In the Bard’s early tragedy “Titus Andronicus,” acts of revenge pile up like so many bodies. The bloodletting begins with Titus (Patrick Page), a Roman general who returns from a victorious campaign against the Goths, carting along their deposed queen, Tamora (Francesca Faridany), and her three sons, one of whom is executed to avenge Titus’s own sons slain in battle. It’s a credit to the director, Jesse Berger (for Red Bull Theatre), that he doesn’t shy away from the play’s gore, especially vivid against the set’s ghostly columns, whose sleekness aligns with the neofascist chic of the costumes. It’s a credit to the agile cast that they find humor in the gallows.—Dan Stahl (Pershing Square Signature Center; through April 19.)
The 2021 album “Skin” introduced the bruised songcraft of the British singer-songwriter Joy Crookes to the wider world. After several EPs and a nomination for Rising Star at the 2020 Brit Awards, she met the moment with a soulful pop sound, smuggling in references to her London upbringing, as the child of Bangladeshi and Irish immigrants, and meditating on the awakenings of young adulthood. “Skin,” shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, cultivated a lithe, jazzy voice that eased through the hushed rhythms of mellow R. & B. production, and her follow-up, “Juniper,” from September, is just as subtle but even more refined, its sonic acuity mirroring its clarity of thought.—Sheldon Pearce (Irving Plaza; April 13.)
In his twenties, the title character of Chekhov’s “Ivanov,” played by Zachary Desmond, was filled with passion and purpose. Now, at thirty-five, he’s a self-loathing, debt-ridden farmer who bemoans “a lethargy in my soul.” His disaffection baffles his acquaintances and pains his tubercular wife (a superb Quinn Jackson), whose doctor (Lambert Tamin) has only contempt for her husband’s agonizing. To convey Ivanov’s world-weariness without wearying the audience is a challenge that Michael DeFilippis’s production doesn’t always meet—despite its well-acted, artfully designed, energetic staging of Paul Schmidt’s resonant translation. There’s a built-in repetitiveness to the material, not unlike the thought patterns of depression itself, that constitutes a Russian rebuke to myopic American optimism: sometimes it doesn’t get better.—Dan Stahl (West End Theatre; through April 12.)
A century ago, the choreographer Martha Graham cobbled together an evening of original works at a Broadway theatre, her first. Could she have known then that it was the start of a momentous career? The troupe she created, Martha Graham Dance Company, has survived, despite tall odds. In its centenary season, it performs three of Graham’s most well-known dances, all about love: “Appalachian Spring” (1944), with its spacious score by Copland, is about hopeful, expansive love; “Diversion of Angels” (1948), about different facets of love and its twin, passion; and “Night Journey” (1947), inspired by the Oedipus myth, chronicles love (and lust) gone horribly wrong.—Marina Harss (New York City Center; April 8-12.)
“The Drama,” the writer and director Kristoffer Borgli’s earnest story of love forged and fraying, is set in Boston and spans about two years in the lives of Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya); not even these stars’ vibrant and thoughtful performances can rescue the film from ridicule. During a wine-drenched evening, the soon to be married couple, along with two friends (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), confess the worst thing they’ve ever done; one such admission puts the wedding at risk, as well as friendships and even professional standing. Borgli offers a childish view of romance, leaping from acquaintance to engagement with no substance in between, and the fancy editing scheme of flashbacks and leaps ahead merely calls attention to the underlying void.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
Pick Three
Michael Schulman on spring fabulosity.
1. “The Rocky Horror Show”—the louche sci-fi musical that went from underground stage sensation in London to cult movie and queer touchstone—returns to Broadway, directed by Sam Pinkleton (“Oh, Mary!”) and starring Luke Evans, Stephanie Hsu, Juliette Lewis, and Rachel Dratch. In anticip-p-pation, I suggest streaming the documentary “Strange Journey,” which came out last year, for the film’s fiftieth anniversary. It’s directed by Linus O’Brien, the son of Richard O’Brien, the British New Zealander who wrote the show (and played Riff Raff) and then went on a gender odyssey.
2. If your idea of heaven is flipping through a 1982 issue of Interview, good news: Library180, a chic, by-appointment magazine reference library, now occupies a bright room on the twenty-sixth floor of an office building on Maiden Lane. Created by Nikki Igol and Steven Chaiken, who worked together at the fashion magazine V in the early two-thousands, the place is stocked with vintage issues of Paper, Vogue, and more. Through a red chain-link curtain is a back room containing the likes of Screw, Al Goldstein’s erotic tabloid from the sixties and seventies.
3. Julio Torres, one of the most original minds in comedy, wrote surreal sketches for “Saturday Night Live” before unveiling his brilliant 2019 HBO special, “My Favorite Shapes,” in which he sat at a conveyor belt in futuristic silver garb and narrated the inner lives of objects that rolled by. He’s back on HBO with a companion piece, “Color Theories.” Using a synesthetic logic all his own, Torres explains why Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson is orange, Catholicism is purple, and navy blue is the nefarious color that secretly runs the world.
On and Off the Avenue
Spring in the trenches.
Springtime, at least in New York City, is, in this writer’s humble opinion, somewhat overrated. Sure, it has its pleasures: the vibrant return of window-box buttercups, the reopening of the Central Park boathouse, the ornate millinery of the Fifth Avenue Easter Bonnet Festival, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s “Cherry Watch” live map tracking exactly when each Sakura blossom blooms, the thrift stalls at the Hester Street Fair, the annual New York Botanical Garden Orchid Show, the renewed chance to drink a cold beer at a baseball game. But, mostly, city dwellers are deprived of the true glories of the season. We aren’t watching chicks hatch or witnessing the miracle of foaling or plucking clumps of wild ramps from the earth. Instead, we continue traipsing through concrete, burdened with utter confusion about what, exactly, to wear: spring is a time of meteorological fakeouts; one day it will be balmy, the next frigid. Or, mornings are crisp and call for bundling up, but dress in too many layers and you’ll overheat by noon. Rain, April’s rude house guest, visits erratically and unannounced.
So, what to put on? One timeless solution is the trenchcoat, a relic of the First World War, which has, over the last century, become the go-to topper for sensible urbanites during these mercurial months: blocking wind and moisture without ever feeling too heavy makes it the ideal garment for unpredictable conditions. The original trenchcoat, designed by Thomas Burberry for the British Army, was made of Burberry-invented waterproof gabardine. Now you can find trenches (or at least trench-ish coats) in nearly every material under the sun—crêpe, suède, twill, jacquard, Gore-Tex. What makes a trench a trench? Some say it’s the cut; traditional trenches are long and double-breasted, with epaulettes, a waist belt, and storm flaps. But these days, trenches come in all shapes: cropped, batwing, even backless. The classic Burberry trench ($2,995) is khaki, but modern trenches adhere to no set color rules. Perhaps the definition is more spiritual than fixed. If it looks like a trench and feels like a trench, then it must be one. The market is teeming with options, but a few that caught my eye this season include the Riva from the Frankie Shop ($495), a streamlined tan number with an unexpected shoulder detail; the Lana from Apparis ($325), a playful approach in sheer leopard-print organza, and, for those in a splurge-y mood, the Aspen from Aligne ($849), in smooth green leather the shade of a Castelvetrano olive. I’m still no spring evangelist, but to stroll through the park in a new coat? It’s enough to make you feel reborn.
—Rachel Syme
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: