Film reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘The Mastermind’ and ‘Nouvelle Vague’

Bugonia

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (R)

★★★

“If Emma Stone didn’t exist, some of her movies couldn’t exist—especially not the ones she’s created with edgy director Yorgos Lanthimos,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. The two-time Oscar winner “can play shrewd, silly, gorgeous, repellent, frail, and frightening simultaneously,” and she hits all those notes in her fourth feature with the Poor Things auteur. Stone portrays Michelle Fuller, a Big Pharma CEO who is kidnapped by two men convinced she’s an alien who’s working to destroy Earth. And while a rundown of the abuse Michelle suffers “would sound like a Saw film,” Stone renders the character so slickly insincere that she “makes it OK for us to laugh at Michelle’s torment.” Jesse Plemons, who plays Teddy, the lead kidnapper, “matches her intensity and manages to outdo her craziness,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Teddy orders Michelle’s head shaved because he believes her hair is her means of communicating with fellow ETs. But Lanthimos leaves open the possibility that Teddy is onto something, and “the director’s askew aesthetics are a natural fit for his absurd material,” the use of low-angle imagery adding to the film’s “wobbly sense of reality.” Still, though Lanthimos’ dramatization of the vast divide between the powerful and the powerless feels dangerous, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, it’s “not as dangerous as it could have been.” At least Bugonia gets at a core trouble with our times: There’s no truth we can all agree on.

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The Mastermind

Directed by Kelly Reichardt (R)

★★★

If you go into The Mastermind expecting a typical heist film, “you’re going to be disappointed and puzzled,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. Kelly Reichardt’s latest is “a relatively quiet movie that takes its time laying out its plot,” and the director uses the crime that dominates the first half mainly as a pretext to probe the character of the title figure, “a soft-spoken hustler whose profound selfishness becomes more apparent with each scene.” Josh O’Connor stars, playing J.B. Mooney, a privileged, underemployed father of two who in 1970 chooses to nick four abstract paintings from a small Massachusetts museum, and the actor proves again that “he’s one of the great recent finds in world cinema.” It’s “exciting just to watch him sit and think.” Unlike the recent smash-and-grab at the Louvre, J.B.’s hands-off scheme involving two accomplices “goes awry immediately,” said Shirley Li in The Atlantic. “But the robbery isn’t the primary focus.” As J.B. “clumsily goes on the lam,” unnecessarily leaving hurt feelings, The Mastermind builds “a remarkably precise exploration of hubris as a self-destructive force.” Because J.B. makes so many avoidable mistakes, the film may also be “Reichardt’s funniest thus far.” Like Reichardt’s other films, including Certain Women and First Cow, “The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. J.B. is a man who’s gotten by for years on charm and his parents’ support. When he eventually seeks sanctuary with two old friends, though, we suddenly see him through their eyes, and “it’s unbearably sad.”

Nouvelle Vague

Directed by Richard Linklater (R)

★★★

“When a movie makes you want to weep, you know something is happening,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Richard Linklater’s second film released in recent weeks is a tribute to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which means it “may end up being appreciated by only 2.6% of the general population.” But Linklater has poured great care into dramatizing the 20-day shoot in 1959 Paris that produced Godard’s New Wave masterpiece, and to watch this film’s Godard and his crew make the thing is “a particular kind of bliss.” It should inspire many viewers to create something themselves. But there’s “a major problem with Nouvelle Vague,” said Rory Doherty in The A.V. Club, and it’s that it wasn’t written as Breathless was. Godard, who in 1959 was a critic eager to join several peers in making the leap to directing, wrote his crime tale meets love story on the fly. The screenplay for Nouvelle Vague, by contrast, “conforms to the soft, putty-like structure of filmmaker biopics”: An undiscovered genius strains against conventions and at last breaks through. Shot in black and white and acted in French, “Nouvelle Vague is heady with meticulous reconstitutions of period style,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Mostly, though, it’s “a vision of the risks that filmmakers incur in order to seize the freedom needed for their art,” including the risk of driving actors mad. Linklater has been making movies for 35 years now, and this effort, in the end, is “a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.”