On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is the second feature from Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni, following I Am Not a Witch. Like that film, it’s an indictment of patriarchy and her birth culture’s inability to transcend or even confront the generations of harm done to women by men. (Nyoni migrated with her family to Wales when she was nine.) Though the tone is superficially naturalistic, surreal, perhaps magical echoes flit through its consciousness. The arresting opening scene introduces Shula (Susan Chardy), clad in a bizarrely poofy outfit and sporting a sparkling, rave-ready cowl, driving home from, it turns out, a costume party. (The raiment is, further research reveals, an homage to a Missy Elliott video.) She comes across the body of, it turns out, her uncle Fred, lying in the road, not apparently injured but definitely dead. Coincidentally, Shula’s cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) drunkenly happens along while Shula is trying to figure out how to deal with the situation. Neither of them seems particularly surprised or upset by Fred’s sudden demise, and it won’t be long before we learn why.

Shula’s mother—Fred’s sister—flies in (it’s not clear from where), and the extended family gathers for an epic, days-long funeral, during which the women stay in the home of Shula’s mother, cook meals, and prepare for the burial. Meanwhile, the men seem to do little more than sit on the lawn, drink, smoke, and eat. (In the film’s press notes, Nyoni describes how these customs are drawn from the Bemba tribe to which she belongs.) At one point, Shula is charged with retrieving another cousin, Bupe, from her college dormitory, but when she arrives, Bupe is unconscious, having attempted suicide. She has left a video message describing her sexual assault by Uncle Fred, a man whose depredations also affected Shula and Nsansa. Fred’s widow, perversely, is treated like a pariah by his relatives throughout the funeral, which only Shula seems to find upsetting.

Shula, like Nyoni, is Westernized, and exhibits a clearly ambivalent attitude toward her family’s traditions. She’s also something of a cipher—we expect her to object more quickly and vehemently to the whitewashing of Fred’s reputation by the collected mourners, most of whom seem quite aware of his perversions, but prefer to sweep them under the rug and avoid speaking ill of the dead. But the perhaps too obvious metaphor of the film’s title refers to the African bird that, we’re explicitly told through clips from a vintage kid’s educational show, often serves as a vocal warning system to other creatures when predators approach. The question, then, is when and whether Shula will work up the requisite levels of desperation and disgust to call out the archaic enabling of her dead uncle’s abuse and, by extension, the entire gender- and class-based system that enables it in turn. (Opens Friday, Mar. 21, at Cinema 21.)

Magazine Dreams: The sophomore feature from writer-director Elijah Bynum would be an intense and uncomfortable experience even without the intrusion of real-world scandal. Its star, Jonathan Majors, had been tapped to play the next major villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Kang the Conqueror, before being convicted of assault and harassment after choking his girlfriend during a domestic dispute in 2023. The incident put an abrupt halt to his career trajectory, and doubtless was a factor in the delayed release of this film, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023, two months before Majors’s arrest. Without weighing in on what the appropriate level of cancellation is for the actor’s violent crimes and apparent pattern of behavior, it has to be said that, based on his incendiary performance in Magazine Dreams, it’s a shame that his personal demons cost audiences a chance to see how far this talent would go.

Making things especially awkward, Majors plays a character with severe (one is tempted to say Hulk-like) impulse control issues who tends to express his frustrations by smashing windows. Killian Maddox, an orphaned only child who lives with his “Papaw,” a disabled Vietnam veteran, has one dream: to achieve bodybuilding immortality by gracing the cover of the one of the subculture’s glossy magazines. Early on, he’s warned by a doctor that his steroid use is life-threatening, but the glute injections keep on coming as Killian, demonstrating that names are destiny, pursues oiled glory and fumes over a years-ago judge who told him his deltoids were too small. The critiques of the “sport” in Magazine Dreams run the gamut, with musclebound Black men in tiny Speedos parading themselves for pasty white judges like so many enslaved men on the auction block. The self-destructive quest for physical perfection doesn’t only plague women like Demi Moore’s character in The Substance, but can be a pathology for men like Killian as well. And the barely latent homoeroticism of all that oiled skin and raised abs gets a mention as well.

Throughout, Majors is scarily impressive and just plain scary. It’s a phenomenal physical performance and what looks like a psychically draining one, especially considering that Bynum starts his cautionary tale with his tragic hero already on the precipice of disaster, and then cranks the dysfunction up from there. Some of the plot points are overly familiar in a Travis Bickle Fan Club way: Killian goes on a disastrous date with a female co-worker at the grocery store where he stocks shelves, and he develops an obsession with a celebrity bodybuilder who ultimately rebuffs his clumsy fawning. The sense of violent inevitability is both the film’s most compelling aspect and its weakest link. Once it’s clear Killian is on a downward spiral, the only question is how dark things will get before the credits roll. But Bynum, whose only previous directing credit is 2017’s Hot Summer Nights, starring a not-yet-famous Timothée Chalamet, isn’t afraid to plumb the depths of toxic masculinity. Here’s hoping that his career, at least, isn’t too derailed by the justified repulsion towards his talented but problematic star. (Opens Friday, Mar. 21, in limited release.)

The Assessment: Anyone with experience in dystopias, either fictional or actual, can tell you that authoritarian control over human reproduction is kind of a given. In this inventive take on that trope, Mia and Aaryan (Elisabeth Olsen and Hamish Patel), who inhabit an isolated compound in a postapocalyptic desert landscape, come face-to-face with that sort of authority. It comes in the form of an assessor named Virginia (Alicia Vikander), who arrives at their home to live with them for a week and judge their fitness as parents. (Should they pass the audition, of course, all gestation will occur in a facility rather than a uterus.) What gives this particular test some panache, however, is Virginia’s tactical approach: she frequently behaves as a child, petulantly throwing food and disrupting any serenity, in order to (presumably) gauge the prospective parents’ reactions. Her antics, however, eventually include a determined effort to play favorites, up to and including sexual come-ons to Aaryan, as well as forcing the stressed-out couple to host a dinner party that descends into juvenile chaos. Mia is a botanist working in her lab to preserve endangered species, while Aaryan tries to create virtual, but solid, animals to replace the pets that everyone apparently had to give up when the world, or most of it, went to hell. They are, in other words, a successful, accomplished couple, at least as much as one can be with most of the planet’s population apparently consigned to “the old world” while humanity’s remnants try to carve out a new existence. All three leads are committed to the bit, but Vikander takes the cake with the showy role of the enigmatic minder whose mischievousness competes with her officiousness and whose secrets are only revealed in the final act. Director Fleur Fortune, a music video veteran helming her first feature, creates a believably absurd future, with a nice assist from art director Jan Houllevigue and costume designer Sarah Blenkinsop (The Lobster). (Opens Friday, Mar. 21, in limited release.)

Ash: I know it’s old-fashioned and perhaps cultural insensitive of me, but I have a hard time referring to an individual human being as Flying Lotus. Rationally, I fully support the idea that people should be called, whether in proper noun or pronoun form, whatever the heck they want to be called, but somehow the idea that record producer (and now film director) Steven Ellison can just declare that he wants to be referred to by a moniker derived from the Adult Swim program Sealab 2021 and we’re all supposed to go along makes me want to tell y’all that from now on I shall be known as Strawberry Alarm Clock. Anyway, Mr. Lotus (as I assume the New York Times refers to him) has made his feature directing debut with this visually interesting but narratively ordinary sci-fi flick. The most intriguing question it prompts, in fact, is why Aaron Paul has had such a hard time finding good roles post-Breaking Bad. He did some good voice work on BoJack Horseman, and that turn on Season 3 of Westworld was kind of interesting, but for a performer who showed the ability to swing between gut-wrenching pathos and goofball humor as Jesse Pinkman, it’s been a middling run. Here he plays second fiddle and foil to Eiza Gonzalez, who was a Hot Physicist in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem and here stars as a Hot Astronaut who wakes up one day to discover that she’s the only survivor of her team, which had established an outpost on a distant, barren planet. As she tries to piece together what happened (and whether she’s responsible), the support staff (i.e., Paul) on the craft orbiting the planet arrives to either lend a hand, create moral ambiguity, or both. The music video aesthetic and droning score make this a prime candidate for a head movie, even though both aspects can only be fully appreciated in a big-screen environment, which is not how the vast majority of viewers will experience it. (Opens Friday, Mar. 21, in wide release.)

Eephus: One of my favorite baseball books is Daniel Okrent’s Nine Innings, which uses a single unremarkable game between the noble Milwaukee Brewers and the then-hated Baltimore Orioles in June 1982 as the framework for meditations upon the sport, the men who play and manage it, and the culture it embodies. In the same vein, this modest effort from director Carson Lund takes place entirely over the course of a single contest between a pair of New England recreational teams, Alden Paint and the Riverdogs. It’s the last such faceoff before the field where they play will be torn up to make way for, of all things, a new middle school. Lund’s aversion to melodrama, or really any drama, serves the film well, as it meanders along in the way all baseball games should. It doesn’t matter who wins or loses, just so long as the game is finished, even if it means playing by the glow of the players’ cars’ headlights once dusk has descended and the umpire has gone home. If the game but unpolished performances of the unheralded cast could have achieved a bit more naturalism, Eephus might have ended up a classic of the sad-dad sports genre. As is, it remains a pleasant enough way to spend a couple hours. There are two cameos worth noting, one for film fans (legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman provides the voice of the local radio deejay) and one for baseball nuts (legendary Red Sox lefty Bill “Spaceman” Lee as an old-time hurler who wanders into the proceedings). I was mighty grateful for both. (Opens Friday, Mar. 21, at Living Room Theaters.)

ALSO THIS WEEK

Found Footage Festival: 20th Anniversary Show: Those VHS vagrants, those analog aces, those thrift-store tyrants, those Midwestern miscreants Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher have been unearthing the hidden gems of pop culture detritus for a fifth of a century. It’s kind of like what the folks at the Nyback Archive are doing, but with cringe-inducing exercise videos and batshit TV ads instead of cringe-inducing educational films and batshit vintage musical shorts. They’ve got two shows this weekend at the Hollywood Theatre, plus an in-store appearance at Movie Madness. (Friday and Saturday 3/21 & 3/22, Hollywood Theatre)

Every Little Thing: You can’t hardly swing a dead cat these days without hitting something that’s been designated as an antidote to our anxiety-ridden daily lives, but most of the time these are just vaporous distractions from the end of the American Dream—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But this documentary about a woman who tends to injured hummingbirds in Los Angeles is both a balm for the soul and a reminder that empathy, even towards the smallest critters, is a feature and not a bug of the way humans have been able to create societies and civilizations. Terry Masear fields an endless series of calls from civilians who’ve come across tiny wounded birds, and she either guides them as best she can to save their lives, or has them bring the birds to her personally for her care. She, and the film, remind us that we engage in such acts of kindness and humanity not because of the benefits they give others, but because of what they teach us about ourselves. (Sunday, Mar. 23 and Thursday, Mar. 27, Living Room Theaters)

The Magic Toy Shop: “When her parents are killed in a plane crash, Melanie and her siblings are sent to live with her tyrannical Uncle Philip and his strange family in an unsettling toyshop. There she comes to womanhood, the toys come alive, and a rebellion against the family’s grim patriarch foments.” (Wednesday, Mar. 26, Church of Film at Clinton Street Theater)

Out of Control: A monthly French film series kicks off at PAM CUT. “Julien and Marie have enjoyed 15 years of seemingly stable marriage until Anaëlle, Julien’s childhood flame, returns. Her sudden presence awakens old insecurities in Marie, who begins to doubt Julien’s devotion and question her self-worth. Amid this emotional storm, Marie is drawn to Thomas, a charismatic stranger who offers her the validation she craves.” (Wednesday, Mar. 26, Tomorrow Theater)

Zurawski v. Texas: This enraging documentary chronicles the heroic fight of Amanda Zurawski in her legal efforts to hold the state of Texas accountable for denying her the right to control her own reproductive life, endangering her own life in the process. It was a must-see last fall, when it never received any real distribution, and now it’s just a relic of what could have been, although still a powerful one. (Thursday, Mar. 27, Living Room Theaters)

ALSO OPENING

The Alto Knights: Two of New York City’s most notorious organized crime bosses (both played by Robert DeNiro) vie for control of the city’s streets. Once best friends, petty jealousies and a series of betrayals set them on a deadly collision course. (wide)

Snow White: A princess (Rachel Zegler) joins forces with seven dwarfs to liberate her kingdom from her cruel stepmother the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). A live-action adaptation of the 1937 Disney animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (wide)

Locked: A thief (Bill Skarsgård) breaking into a luxury SUV realizes that he has slipped into a sophisticated game of psychological horror.

REVIVALS

Friday 3/21

• Chopping Mall [1986] and Night of the Comet [1985] (Clinton St. Theater, with star Kelli Maroney in attendance)
• Enter the Dragon [1981] (Cinemagic, also 3/22, 3/24, 3/27)
• Legally Blonde [2001] (Tomorrow Theater)
• The Lord of the Rings trilogy [2001-2003] (Academy Theater, through 3/27)
• Maniac [1980] (Academy Theater, through 3/27)
• Paris Is Burning [1990] (Academy Theater, through 3/27)

Saturday 3/22

• 10 Things I Hate About You [1999] (Tomorrow Theater)
• The Adventures of Robin Hood [1938] (Cinema 21)
• Broken Blossoms [1919] (Hollywood Theatre, with live pipe organ accompaniment)
• Creating Rem Lezar [1989] (Hollywood Theatre, with star Jack Mulcahy in attendance)
• Lynch/Oz [2022] (Salem Cinema)
• Police Story [1985] (Cinemagic, also 3/23, 3/25, 3/26)
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire [2019] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Romeo + Juliet [1996] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [1990] (Cinemagic, also 3/23, 3/24, 3/27)

Sunday 3/23

• Flashpoint [1983] (Living Room Theaters, with director William Tannen in attendance)
• Rouge [1987] (Cinemagic, also 3/25, 3/26)
• Mars Attacks! [1996] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Scarecrow [1973] (Salem Cinema)
• School of Rock [2003] (Hollywood Theatre, benefit for PDX Pop Now!)
• Y tu mamá también [2001] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Zardoz [1974] (Hollywood Theatre)

Monday 3/24

• How to Blow Up a Pipeline [2022] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Rebel without a Cause [1955] (Hollywood Theatre, in 35mm)

Tuesday 3/25

• Chained Heat [1983] (Hollywood Theatre, in 35mm)
• Girlfriends [1978] (Clinton St. Theater)

Wednesday 3/26

• Xena: Warrior Princess [1995] (Hollywood Theatre)

Thursday 3/27

• The Love Witch [2016] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Sondtrack to a Coup d’Etat [2024] (Hollywood Theatre)