August 2017 Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP

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Friday, September 1, 2017 at 4:04 p.m.

TriStar Pictures Terminator 2: Judgment Day: In 1991, when James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out, the Iron Curtain had recently fallen, effectively ending the Cold War and seemingly lifting the nuclear threat. I distinctly remember Sarah Connor’s ruminations on the fate of the human race eliciting chuckles in my theater at the time. Today, however, as T2 arrives again in theaters, converted to 3-D, its overwhelming despair is impossible to ignore. This is one of the most upsetting blockbusters ever. 3/13

4 Palm Pictures Memories of Murder: Moving from atmospheric mystery to political allegory, with pit stops into slapstick comedy along the way, Bong Joon-ho's second film remains impossible to categorize. Newly restored and re-released, the director's breakthrough feature (he would go on to direct The Host, Snowpiercer and this year's Okja, among other films) has lost none of its power to unsettle, and today it feels even stranger than ever. 4/13

Netflix Icarus: Give Putin this: The man knows how to deny the elaborate, outrageous conspiracies with which his government violates international laws and norms. To this day, despite the 37 medals that have been stripped from his nation's Olympians, Putin insists that Russia never engaged in a long-running campaign of feeding its athletes performance-enhancing drugs and then faking samples for drug tests. Putin and his subordinates have sometimes placed blame for it all on one man, Grigory Rodchenkov, the scientist who served as the director of Moscow's (official) Anti-Doping Center — and also as the director of a program whose mission was precisely the opposite of what is suggested by that institution's name. The story opens with director Brian Fogel, a competitive amateur cyclist, shaken by the revelations that Lance Armstrong had managed to dope and long avoid detection. Fogel concocts the kind of elaborate scheme that crowd-pleasing docs get built on: He'd prove that the system to test athletes was "bullshit" by doping himself — and then beating the tests. His search for a scientist who will assist him leads to the cheerily corrupt Rodchenkov, who proves eager to spill on camera the ins and outs of his Moscow lab's WADA-beating trickery. But then news breaks of Moscow's state-sponsored doping. Fearing for his life, Rodchenkov flees Russia with the help of his new friend, Fogel. As Fogel interviews Rodchenkov about all the man knows, Icarus becomes something like an amateur Citizenfour. The Russians, of course, endeavor to discredit Rodchenkov, but their lies — practically "Fake news!" — are shredded by the footage that Fogel collected back when this was all a prank. 5/13

Courtesy of Wild Bunch Nocturama: Often populated with voluptuaries, the films of Bertrand Bonello unerringly distill mood and milieu. In the dread-drenched, bifurcated and bold Nocturama, the French filmmaker's seventh narrative feature, recounts roughly 14 hours — from about 2 p.m. to 4 a.m., sharply juxtaposing the micro details of a massive attack on Paris with the vague ideology guiding the coed band of multiethnic millennial and Gen Z terrorists who carry out the assault. The film mesmerizes and alienates equally. 7/13

Babilla Cine This Time Tomorrow: The latest domestic study from Lina Rodriguez (Señoritas) tenderly circles an absence. After an opening that invites us to regard, at some length, a tree, Rodriguez presents a series of sharply observed moments in the life of a middle-class Bogota family, often in unbroken shots in which silence — sometimes companionable, sometimes fraught — is allowed to stretch between the characters. Like real kids, rebellious teen daughter Adelaida (Laura Osma) alternates between a pitiless selfishness and a sneaky sweetness, visiting abuse or kisses upon her parents based on whichever approach will help her get her way. Mother Lena (Maruia Shelton), a party planner, and father Francisco (Francisco Zaldua), an art teacher, strive to maintain their authority in the face of Adelaida's squalls, but you can see how the effort taxes them. Rodriguez shows us the parents out with friends and celebrating a birthday at home; sometimes we see Adelaida out with her younger set, talking sex and making out. Most memorable are the glimpses of life at its most mundane: Lena and Adelaida navigating around each other in the family's small bathroom as they prep for their days, their silent awareness of each other touchingly routine. Halfway through the film, we discover that something awful has happened to this family, and suddenly frames that have been alive with three characters now seem depleted with only two. This Time Tomorrow's significant power comes from watching the survivors slowly fill the screen — and their lives — back up again. 12/13

Cinema Guild 4 Days in France: A pleasingly discursive road movie for our geosocial age, writer-director Jérôme Reybaud's debut narrative feature navigates la France profonde with the help of Grindr. "France is huge. Full of men, full of possibilities," says Pierre (Pascal Cervo), a Sorbonne appointee, to one of the temporary passengers in his white Alfa Romeo during an aimless excursion through the country. Pierre has abandoned his sleeping boyfriend, Paul (Arthur Igual), and their haut-homo-bourgeois life in Paris for reasons unknown; on his odyssey south, he meets people, whether by happenstance or via app, of different genders and ages — for sex, for conversation, for something else. With its occasional intergenerational man-on-man carnal pairings and provincial settings, 4 Days in France suggests an affinity with the films of Alain Guiraudie. But Reybaud favors more voluble characters, most of whom belong to a widely defined creative class: a retirement-home chanteuse, a Rimbaud scholar now running a tiny bookshop, a tavern owner homeschooling his teenage godson on granular French geography. "Parthenay, La Mûre, Écuisses, Issoire," that dutiful pupil recites, each place name enunciated with incantatory power. Traversing wooded enclaves in the center of the nation to hamlets deep in the French Alps to towns overlooking the Mediterranean, Reybaud's film similarly serves as a tonic lesson in physical specifics, each location populated with richly idiosyncratic conversation partners. 13/13

August 2017 Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP

Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for some of the best films of August 2017. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen, or they may go into wider release in September.

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