twi-ny recommended events

RETURN ENGAGEMENT: MAC BETH

Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) reaches out to her royal husband (Isabelle Fuhrman) in inventive reimagining of Shakespeare tragedy (photo by Richard Termine)

Hunter Theater Project
Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College
East 68th St. between Lexington & Park Aves.
Monday – Saturday, January 6 – February 22, $49 ($15 for students)
www.huntertheaterproject.org

If you missed Erica Schmidt’s Red Bull Theater production of Mac Beth at the Lucille Lortel Theater in mid-2019, it will be back for a return engagement at the Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College as part of the Hunter Theater Project, running January 6 to February 22. Below is my original review of this inventive and engaging work, which features much of the original cast, with Brittany Bradford now as the title character and Dylan Gelula taking over for AnnaSophia Robb.

Erica Schmidt’s beautifully frenetic Shakespeare adaptation Mac Beth — yes, she has made the title two words, perhaps to emphasize the more feminine second half of the title — is an exhilarating demonstration of grrl power, ratcheted up to the nth degree. The Red Bull production is set at a girls school where seven students enact an all-female version of Macbeth. They are dressed in schoolgirl uniforms of buttoned white shirts under tartan tops and skirts, with bloodred socks reaching up to their knees; aggressively ominous and gender-neutral hooded capes are added for the Weird Sisters. (The costumes are by Jessica Pabst.) Catherine Cornell’s set juts into the audience, covered in fake grass with a partially overturned couch, an iron bathtub, a campfire, and water-filled craters, as if the aftermath of a wild sorority bash. (When the characters imbibe, they do so from red plastic cups, a party staple.) And although they speak in the traditional iambic pentameter, they don’t disguise their voices to be more adult, instead sounding like a bunch of kids invigorated by putting on a show exactly the way they want to.

The Weird Sisters (Sharlene Cruz, AnnaSophia Robb, and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick) stir the boiling cauldron in Mac Beth (photo by Richard Termine)

Macbeth (Isabelle Fuhrman) is returning from a successful military campaign with the loyal Banquo (Ayana Workman) when they come upon three witches (AnnaSophia Robb, Sophie Kelly-Hedrick, and Sharlene Cruz, who play multiple roles) who predict that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor, then king, while Banquo’s sons will one day rule. Fear, jealousy, and revenge take over as the power grab is on, but with delicious twists; in the Bard’s day, his plays were performed by an all-male cast, but this twenty-first-century all-woman cast — armed with smartphones — revels in the gender shifts without altering the original text. “Are you a man?” Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) asks her husband. Facing a ghost (hysterically played by Workman), Macbeth declares, “What man dare, I dare: be alive again, / And dare me to the desert with thy sword; / If trembling I inhabit then, protest me / The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow! / Unreal mock’ry, hence!” It’s as if they are caught up in a teenage horror flick, with all the adolescent tropes in place but seen only from the girls’ point of view. Even one of the witches’ prophecies takes on new meaning when she predicts, “Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” At one point Lady Macbeth tells a witch, “Unsex me here.”

AnnaSophia Robb and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick play witches and other characters in Bard play set at a girls school (photo by Richard Termine)

Schmidt’s (A Month in the Country, Invasion!) breathlessly paced version flies by in a furious ninety minutes, both sexy and sinister, gleefully performed by the terrific cast led by Fuhrman’s (All the Fine Boys, Orphan) tortured Macbeth and Mendes’s (Marys Seacole, Orange Is the New Black) malevolent Lady Macbeth. Robb (The Carrie Diaries, Bridge to Terabithia), NYU Tisch freshman Kelly-Hedrick, and recent CCNY grad Cruz make strong off-Broadway debuts, playing the witches as well as Duncan, Malcolm, Fleance, Rosse, Angus, Lenox, and other minor characters; in particular, Kelly-Hedrick captures the essence of girlhood — tinged with menace — in her squeaky delivery. Schmidt’s inventive staging also boasts a thrilling storm, a creepy doll, and a touch of gymnastics, although if there was one more loud bang against the tub I was going to scream. Schmidt was inspired to revisit Macbeth by reading stories about girls being murdered in the woods. In Mac Beth, she takes back the power, putting the girls in charge in a gender swap that is as exciting as it is, in this day and age, necessary. Schmidt makes us look at the bloody power plays of Scottish kings as if they are the social dominance battles of high school — and vice versa — and every audience member comes out a winner.

THE CONTENDERS 2019: UNCUT GEMS

Adam Sandler plays a diamond dealer in danger in Uncut Gems

UNCUT GEMS (Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie, 2018)
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, January 3, 7:00
Series continues through January 8
www.moma.org
a24films.com

“That was manic, pure mania,” the Safdie brothers narrate at the end of a trailer for their latest film, Uncut Gems. You can hear Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie say more about the film, a manic gem, when they discuss it following the January 3 screening at MoMA as part of the “Contenders” series, consisting of 2019 films that the institution believes will stand the test of time. Uncut Gems is a furious, unrelenting movie that sucks you into its claustrophobic frenzy and never lets go. Adam Sandler is a force, reaching new heights as Howard Ratner, a Diamond District dealer with a gambling addiction. He’s deep in debt to Arno (Eric Bogosian), who has sent his two goons, Phil (Keith Williams Richards) and Nico (Tommy Kominik), to make sure Howard knows just how much trouble he is in. His wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel), is fed up with him, not in the least because he has an apartment with his mistress, the much younger Julia (Julia Fox), and is not the most reliable father to their children, Eddie (Jonathan Aranbayev, who was discovered on Forty-Seventh St. in front of his parents’ jewelry store), Beni (Jacob Igielski), and Marcel (Noa Fisher).

Howard has a master plan to break free of all his problems by selling a chunk of Ethiopian black opals at an auction, with the help of one of his assistants, Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), who has lured in Boston Celtics center Kevin Garnett (terrific in his acting debut), who is fascinated by the rare, uncut gems, which sparkle with promise. The last half hour of the film is a brilliant, claustrophobic tour-de-force in which everyone onscreen is physically trapped, just like the audience is pinned to their seats, holding on for dear life. The Safdies, whose father worked in the Diamond District, use a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors as well as famous people playing themselves; the cast includes sports-radio legend Mike Francesa as a bookie, Garment District legend Wayne Diamond as a big-time gambler, Judd Hirsch as Howard’s father, Natasha Lyonne and Tilda Swinton as phone voices, and restaurant owner Nino Selimaj, writer Larry “Ratso” Sloman, actor John Amos, the Weeknd, and others as themselves.

Written by the Safdies (Daddy Longlegs, Heaven Knows What) with longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, Uncut Gems, which has been in process for ten years, is anchored by a career-redefining performance by Sandler, who previously revealed his significant acting chops in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 Punch-Drunk Love and Judd Apatow’s 2009 Funny People. In a performance that will make you forgive him for The Waterboy, Big Daddy, Little Nicky, and Mr. Deeds, among other silly effluvia, Sandler is a whirlwind throughout the film’s 135 minutes, which fly by. Darius Khondji’s camera is practically glued to him, Sandler’s unshaven, gruff face a character unto itself, Howard’s eyes always at least one step ahead of what’s happening in front of him. He’s a dreamer, and although you can’t not root for him, he is far from a likable hero. He is singlehandedly responsible for the dangerous mess he’s in, whether he admits it to himself or not. But he is also a kind of everyman, peering through the looking glass (in this case, the seductive, multicolored opals in the stone), trying to survive in a hectic, frenetic world that can be overwhelming and spin out of control at any moment. You can’t just sit back, relax, and enjoy Uncut Gems; instead, you can’t help but be fully immersed in its nonstop, feverish intensity. “The Contenders 2019” continues through January 8 with such other recent, well-received as Jérémy Clapin’s adult anime I Lost My Body, Sam Mendes’s WWI drama 1917, and Melina Matsoukas’s Queen and Slim.

SHOW ME LOVE — INTERNATIONAL TEEN CINEMA: TORMENT

A sadistic teacher (Stig Järrel) torments a student (Alf Kjellin) in Ingmar Bergman–written Torment

TORMENT (FRENZY) (HETS) (Alf Sjöberg, 1944)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, January 4, 1:30, and Monday, January 6, 4:30
Series runs January 2-19
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

MoMA explores the treatment of adolescence on the big screen in “Show Me Love: International Teen Cinema,” a twelve-program series that begins January 2 with Satyajit Ray’s Teen Kanya (Two Daughters) and Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Åmål (Show Me Love). You won’t find any John Hughes or American Pie flicks on the schedule, which focuses on a more global appeal; the US films in the lineup are Patricia Cardoso’s Real Women Have Curves, Michael Schultz’s Cooley High, and Gregg Araki’s Totally Fucked Up. On January 4 and 6, MoMA will present Alf Sjöberg’s intense 1944 expressionistic noir, Torment, which had its US premiere at the museum in 1962. Although directed by Sjöberg, Torment, also known as Frenzy, was written by Ingmar Bergman, who also served as assistant director and made his directing debut in the final scene, which Bergman added at the insistence of the producers when Sjöberg was not available. A kind of inversion of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, the film is set in a boarding school where high school boys are preparing for their final exams and graduation. They are terrified of their sadistic Latin teacher, whom they call Caligula (Stig Järrel), a brutal man who wields a fascistic iron fist. He particularly has it out for Jan-Erik Widgren (Alf Kjellin), the son of wealthy parents (Olav Riégo and Märta Arbin) who think he should be doing better in school. One night Jan-Erik helps out a troubled woman in the street, tobacco-shop clerk Bertha Olsson (Mai Zetterling), who is being mentally and physically tormented by an unnamed man who ends up being Caligula. The stakes get higher and the teacher becomes even harder on Jan-Erik when he finds out the young man is having an affair with the wayward woman. When tragedy strikes, Jan-Erik’s soul is in turmoil as lies, threats, and danger grow.

Tobacco-shop clerk Bertha Olsson (Mai Zetterling) is terrified of life in Alf Sjöberg’s Torment

The twenty-five-year-old Bergman was inspired to write his first produced film script by his experience in boarding school, which led to a public disagreement with the headmaster. In a public letter to the headmaster, Bergman explained, “I was a very lazy boy, and very scared because of my laziness, because I was involved with theater instead of school and because I hated having to be punctual, having to get up in the morning, do homework, sit still, having to carry maps, having break times, doing tests, taking oral examinations, or to put it plainly: I hated school as a principle, as a system and as an institution. And as such I have definitely not wanted to criticize my own school, but all schools.” Throughout his career, Bergman would take on institutions, including religion and marriage, but his defiance began with this hellish representation of education, which oppresses all the boys in some way, including Jan-Erik’s best friend, self-described misogynist Sandman (Stig Olin), and the geeky Pettersson (Jan Molander). While the headmaster (Olof Winnerstrand) knows how frightened the boys are of Caligula, he is willing to go only so far to protect them. The opening credits are shown over a dreamlike sequence of Jan-Erik and Bertha desperately holding on to each other, but Torment is so much more than a treacly melodrama, as if Sjöberg (Miss Julie, Ön) is setting us up for one film before switching gears into an ominous, haunting thriller.

Järrel, who played an evil, jealous teacher in his previous film, Hasse Ekman’s Flames in the Dark, is indeed scary as the devious, malicious Caligula, while adding more than a touch of sadness. Zetterling, in her breakthrough role — she would go on to star in such other films as Frieda and The Witches and direct such feminist works as Loving Couples and The Girls — brings a touching vulnerability to Bertha, a young woman who can’t find happiness. It’s all anchored by Kjellin’s (Madame Bovary, Ship of Fools) central performance, so rife with emotion it evokes German silent cinema. Torment suffers from Hilding Rosenberg’s overreaching score, although it is usually offset by Martin Bodin’s cinematography, filled with lurching shadows and deep mystery. The film was produced by Victor Sjöström, the legendary director of The Phantom Carriage, The Divine Woman, The Wind, and so many others in addition to his work as an actor, starring as Professor Isak Borg in another Bergman masterpiece, 1957’s Wild Strawberries, and as the conductor in 1950’s To Joy. “Show Me Love: International Teen Cinema” continues through January 19 with such other films as Jaromil Jires’s Valerie a týden divu (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders), Diane Kury’s Diabolo Menthe (Peppermint Soda), Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s Tenkousei (I Are You, You Am Me aka Exchange Student), and Claire Denis’s Nénette et Boni (Nenette and Boni).

CURATORS’ CHOICE 2019: ASH IS PUREST WHITE

Qiao (Zhao Tao) how her life is turning out in Jia Zhang-Ke’s Ash Is Purest White

ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Jia Zhang-Ke, 2018)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, January 4, 7:00
Series continues through January 12
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.ashispurestwhitemovie.com

Museum of the Moving Image curator Eric Hynes and assistant curator Edo Choi look back at the best of 2019 in its annual series “Curators’ Choice,” consisting of a wide range of works from different platforms, from movie theaters to streaming sites. On January 4 at 7:00, MoMI turns its attention to Jia Zhang-Ke, who reaches into his recent past, and China’s, in his elegiac Ash Is Purest White. In the film, the Sixth Generation writer-director’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao, stars as Qiao, a combination of the characters she played in Jia’s 2002 Unknown Pleasures and 2006 Still Life. It’s the spring of 2001, and Qiao is living in style with her handsome, ultracool jianghu boyfriend, well-respected local gangster Guo Bin (Liao Fan). She runs a gambling parlor, where she asserts her power with men who are in awe of her. But when a rival gang attacks Bin and Qiao pulls a gun, their lives take a series of unexpected turns as the story moves first to 2006 and then to 2018, when things are decidedly, and sadly, different for both of them in a China that has changed as well.

Things are about to change for Guo Bin (Liao Fan) in Ash Is Purest White

As in many of his fiction works, Jia includes documentary elements as he touches upon China’s socioeconomic crisis, primarily exemplified by the Three Gorges Dam project, which led to the displacement of families and the literal disappearance of small communities. Working with a new cinematographer, Eric Gautier, who has lensed films for Olivier Assayas, Walter Salles, Leos Carax, Alain Resnais, and Arnaud Desplechin, among others — his longtime cameraman, Yu Lik-Wai, was unavailable — Jia incorporates general footage he shot between 2001 and 2006 of everyday people and architecture that underscores China’s many changes. There are many gorgeous shots of towns and cities, at one point bathed in white volcanic ash, with costumes of bright yellow, red, and blue, as Gautier goes from digital video to Digibeta, HD video, film, and the RED Weapon camera to add distinct textures. (Jia took the title from what was supposed to be Fei Mu’s last work, which was later made by Zhu Shilin.)

Qiao and Bin try to go back, but little is the same, except for some of their old friends, who are still trying to hold on to the way things were. Zhao (A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart) is slow and deliberate as Qiao, her wide eyes telling a story all their own as she wrestles with disappointment, searching for some meaning in her life, while Fan (The Final Master; Black Coal, Thin Ice) is bold and forceful as a proud, powerful man who undergoes a radical shift. “The city is developing fast. It’s ours for the taking,” Bin says early on. But in Jia’s moving, heartfelt epic, there’s nothing for them to grab on to anymore. “Curator’s Choice 2019” continues through January 12 with such other gems as Apollo 11, with director Todd Douglas Miller in person; Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé, with editor Alexander Hammer; American Factory, with Julia Reichert, Steve Bognar, and Jeff Reichert; Hail Satan?, with director Penny Lane; and The Hottest August, with Brett Story.

MANET: THREE PAINTINGS FROM THE NORTON SIMON MUSEUM

Three works attest to Manet’s vast skill in small but powerful show at the Frick (photo courtesy the Frick Collection)

The Frick Collection
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Through January 5, $12-$22
212-288-0700
www.frick.org

The Frick’s seventh collaboration with Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum might not be a large-scale blockbuster, but that doesn’t make it any less of a must-see. “Manet: Three Paintings from the Norton Simon Museum,” which ends January 4, features three canvases hung side by side in the Frick’s glorious, intimate Oval Room that show off the vast skills of French modernist Édouard Manet. The 1864 still-life Fish and Shrimp reveals Manet’s masterly brushwork, the paint at times almost sculptural; the salmon appears to slither on a chest, its tail flapping. “A painter can say all he wants to say with fruit or flowers or even a cloud,” Manet related to artist Charles Toché. Manet says plenty here with seafood. To the far left is a small portrait of Manet’s wife, pianist Suzanne Leenhoff, who posed for him often. Painted around 1876, Madame Manet shows Leenhoff, who was the family’s music teacher before marrying Édouard, looking slightly away, her dress slightly darker than the shadowy gray background. Tiny parts of the canvas peek through, but the work is not unfinished; it has a sketchy quality despite many layers of paint, lending a mysterious air to the subject.

The Ragpicker, ca. 1865–71, possibly reworked 1876–77 Oil on canvas 76 3/4 × 51 1/2 in. (194.9 × 130.8 cm) The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, California

Édouard Manet, The Ragpicker, oil on canvas, ca. 1865–71, possibly reworked 1876–77, (the Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, California)

In between those two canvases, rising above the fireplace, is The Ragpicker, Manet’s bold and provocative portrait of a bushy-bearded older man in tattered clothing, grapsing a cane, refuse in the foreground. Painted between 1865 and 1871 and possibly reworked in 1876-77 — Manet was a constant reviser — it was the final piece in the artist’s “4 Philosophers” series, focusing on beggars and men on the margins of society. Inspired by Diego Velázquez’s style and Manet’s friend Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Ragpicker’s Wine,” the work, at more than six feet tall, elevates the subject’s importance in a way generally reserved for the wealthy and powerful, yet another reason why the Salon, the arbiter of Parisian artistic success, was not always fond of Manet, who did not gain critical acclaim until after his death in 1883 at the age of fifty-one. While at the Frick, be sure not to miss “Bertoldo di Giovanni: The Renaissance of Sculpture in Medici Florence,” which includes the dazzling bronze sculptures Battle, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, and Crucifixion by the Florentine artist (ca. 1440–91).

THE CONTENDERS 2019: DIAMANTINO / LITTLE JOE

Giant fluffy puppies get in the way of a Portuguese soccer star’s dreams in Diamantino

DIAMANTINO (Daniel Schmidt & Gabriel Abrantes, 2018)
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, January 1, 2:00
Series continues through January 8
www.moma.org
www.kinolorber.com

The Museum of Modern Art’s annual “Contenders” series consists of films released over the past twelve months that the institution believes will stand the test of time, regardless of how much money it made at the box office or how many awards it might win. On New Year’s Day, MoMA is screening two under-the-radar gems to welcome in 2020. At 2:00 on January 1, you can catch a documentary, foreign-language picture, political thriller, high-tech crime chiller, comedy, romantic melodrama, fantasy and sci-fi, and more — all in one wildly entertaining film. Diamantino, Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s full-length feature debut, is an absurdist multigenre mashup that is as tense as it is funny, an unpredictable romp that evokes Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Michel Gondry, Philip K. Dick, South Park, Cinderella, James Bond, Being There, Minority Report, and Au Hasard Balthazar while feeling wholly original. Carloto Cotta stars as the title character, Diamantino Matamouros, a Portuguese soccer star à la Cristiano Ronaldo (pre-sexual assault allegations) who sees giant fluffy puppies when he is on the field. After botching a penalty kick in the World Cup Final, the stupendously beautiful star learns that his beloved father and mentor (Chico Chapas) has died. His evil twin sisters, Sónia (Anabela Moreira) and Natasha (Margarida Moreira), become his agents and make a secret deal with the mysterious Dr. Lamborghini (Carla Maciel) and a government minister (Silva Joana). Meanwhile, investigators Aisha Brito (Cleo Tavares) and Lucia (Vargas Maria Leite) — lovers who are soon to be married — are looking into Diamantino’s finances and devise a plan to get close to him by having Aisha pose as a male refugee named Rahim who Diamantino adopts as his son.

Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta) is surrounded by images of himself in Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s dazzling feature debut

Everyone except his sisters, who know better, thinks he is some kind of genius mastermind, but Diamantino is actually an addled simpleton who understands very little about life. He enjoyed playing soccer, likes eating Nutella and whipped cream sandwiches, and, following his tearful retirement, hangs out with his cat, Mittens, and dedicates himself to raising Rahim, who he does not realize is actually a grown woman. He’s reminiscent of Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers) in Being There, but his airheaded statements — which are outrageously funny — are seldom mistaken for brilliance, except when he’s manipulated into making fascistic political statements he doesn’t understand. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week, Diamantino is stunningly photographed by Charles Ackley Anderson, who quickly adapts the film’s visual style as it switches from fantasy to love story to futuristic thriller, with numerous memorable shots, including Lucia in a white nun’s habit on a motorbike, Diamantino and Rahim sleeping on pillows with large images of the soccer star’s head, and a huge fluffy puppy playing goal in the championship game. American-born directors and longtime collaborators Abrantes and Schmidt, who edited the film with Raphaëlle Martin-Holger, show a deep love and respect for movies, infusing Diamantino with charm and energy, humor and compassion, honoring, in their own way, the history of cinema. The rest of the cast and crew do their part as well, from art director Bruno Duarte and composers Ulysse Klotz and Adriana Holtz to the Moreira sisters and multidisciplinary Portuguese star Manuela Moura Guedes as television interviewer Gisele.

Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) surveys her creation in Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe

LITTLE JOE (Jessica Hausner, 2019)
Wednesday, January 1, 5:00
www.littlejoefilm.com

Emily Beecham was named Best Actress at Cannes for her role as a scientist and single mother who creates a different kind of monster in Jessica Hausner’s tense and gripping Little Joe, screening at MoMA at 5:00 on January 1. The Austrian director’s first English-language film was inspired directly by Frankenstein and Invasion of the Body Snatchers while evoking elements of Rosemary’s Baby and Little Shop of Horrors as it plays with horror, sci-fi, teen drama, and other genre conventions. Beecham is Alice Woodard, a plant breeder who is developing a flower she believes can make people happy through its “mood-lifting, antidepressant” scent. She names the new species Little Joe, after her son, Joe (Kit Connor), and even sneaks one plant home for him from the highly secured lab, which is blatantly against the rules.

She works at a science institute — a pristine environment with sterile-looking halls and researchers walking around in white lab coats — with Chris (Ben Whishaw), who has a crush on her, Bella (Kerry Fox), who goes everywhere with her dog, assistants Ric (Phénix Brossard) and Jasper (Andrew Rajan), and their boss, Karl (David Wilmot), who is hesitant to release the plant to the public until rigorous testing proves its safety, even though there’s an important plant show coming up where it would be perfect to introduce it. But after the lovely red blooms start emitting clouds of white spores, first Bella’s dog, then Alice’s coworkers and son, along with his friend Selma (Jessie-Mae Alonzo), begin changing.

Joe (Kit Connor) and his mother, Alice (Emily Beecham), sit down for takeout in stylized, atmospheric Little Joe

Written by Hausner (Lourdes, Amour Fou) with Géraldine Bajard, Little Joe is thick with foreboding, as scenes play out slowly to creepy electronic music by late Japanese composer Teiji Ito, who scored films by Maya Deren. The film is set in a timeless world of brightly lit, vividly contrasting pastel yellows, reds, greens, pinks, purples, and blues that conjure the 1970s but there are cell phones; cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, editor Karina Ressler, costume designer Tanja Hausner (the director’s sister), and production designer Katharina Wöppermann invoke the atmosphere of such cult faves as auteurs John Carpenter and David Cronenberg and novelist Ira Levin — who wrote The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, and Rosemary’s Baby — as Alice soon finds herself fighting against what appears to be a spreading conspiracy, all the while exploring her fears with her understanding psychotherapist (Lindsay Duncan). Alice’s bowl-cut red hair is reminiscent of Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby (and her last name, Woodard, is similar to Rosemary’s, Woodhouse). Like that classic horror film, Little Joe focuses on the concept of birth and parenthood from a female point of view; even as Alice tries to protect her scientific creation, she is attempting to hold on to her pubescent son as he and his father, Ivan (Sebastian Hulk), become closer. “The ability to reproduce is what gives every living being meaning,” Bella says.

Perhaps the scariest part of the film is how realistic it feels despite its heavily stylized artifice. Hausner consulted with neuroscientist James Fallon, biologist Hanns Hatt, and other experts to research the validity of her plot, particularly in an age where there is global controversy over the efficacy of genetically modified food and animal and human cloning. Beecham (Sulphur and White, Into the Badlands) is superb as Alice, a stand-in for all of us, someone who just wants to bring happiness to the world but, in this case, may not fully understand the price it comes with. “The Contenders 2019” continues through January 8 with such other recent favorites as Uncut Gems, followed by a discussion with directors Benny and Josh Safdie; Sam Mendes’s WWI drama 1917; and Melina Matsoukas’s Queen and Slim.

SURROUNDS: 11 INSTALLATIONS

Sarah Sze’s Triple Point (Pendulum) is an architectural wonder (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, sixth floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 4, $14-$25 (sixteen and under free)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

The new MoMA is all about making the most of its collection via diversity, which is just what it does with “Surrounds: 11 Installations,” ten key twenty-first-century architectural works, and one from 1998, that have never been displayed at the museum before. The show includes work by living artists from America, Cuba, Germany, Japan, India, Brazil, and the Netherlands, taking up all of the sixth floor. Inspired by her love of nature as a child, Sheila Hicks’s Pillar of Inquiry / Supple Column, which is outside the gallery space, is composed of lushly colored thick strands of acrylic fiber that pour down through the ceiling of MoMA’s top floor, evoking a kind of rainbow beanstalk reaching into the heavens. Hito Steyerl compares climate change to the 2008 financial crisis in Liquidity Inc. in telling the story of former financial analyst Jacob Wood, who became a mixed-martial-arts fighter; viewers sit on torn judo mats, which Steyerl describes as a storm-ravaged raft, while watching DIY-style news reports that are hijacked by masked anarchists. Arthur Jafa’s APEX features eight-plus minutes of 841 fast-moving images focusing on black culture, from Tupac and Miles Davis to Mickey Mouse and Mick Jagger, set to electronic club beats.

Sheila Hicks’s Pillar of Inquiry / Supple Column pours out from above — or reaches into the heavens (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Sou Fujimoto’s Architecture Is Everywhere comprises dozens of miniature constructions made of common objects on small plinths with tiny little white figures on them. Twigs with a woman sitting on a bench and a man standing nearby are accompanied by the statement “The forest is always to me the archetype of architecture.” Screws with figures relaxing on top of them are joined by the words “Different heights are in fact different worlds. A new set of relationships between people.” Visitors contribute to Rivane Neuenschwander’s Work of Days merely by walking through a room of transparent adhesive contact sheets from her studio that collect dust from each of us. Press the button to start Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Killing Machine, a kinetic sculpture, based in part on Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” that transforms a dentist visit into an execution, with multiple television screens and a disco ball but no apparent victim.

Two boy sopranos perform as part of Allora & Calzadilla’s Fault Lines in MoMA installation exhibition (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Every hour on the hour between eleven and four, two boy sopranos enter Allora & Calzadilla’s Fault Lines and perform beautiful choral music composed by Guarionex Morales-Matos with confrontational words taken from major literary sources as the singers make their way through a room filled with stone sculptures. The exhibition, which also includes works by Sadie Benning, Mark Manders, and Dayanita Singh, concludes with Sarah Sze’s crowd-pleasing Triple Point (Pendulum), a delicate large-scale intimate circular environment of hundreds of objects, from books, rocks, photographs, and styrofoam cups to water bottles, cracker boxes, lamps, and levels. A tenuously attached pendulum swings from above, in danger of bringing the whole thing down like a wrecking ball, but it never quite makes contact with any of the detritus, which also evokes Sze’s studio. There’s an inviting opening at one side, but viewers know not to step inside this intricately created world, the title of which refers to water’s ability to exist in three states: ice, liquid, and steam. “Surrounds: 11 Installations” bodes well for what the new MoMA has in store.