Paulette
Paulette is a penurious widow trapped in a decaying housing project. Ridiculously unlikable, she is bitter about the Africans and Arabs who have “taken over” Paris—and that includes her son-in-law, a narcotics cop. Unable to live on her pension, she starts dealing drugs, using hashish as spice in the high-end desserts she whips up with her seniors club in the kitchen. Jérôme Enrico’s Paulette is a delightfully absurd comedy about prejudice and the silliness of Hollywood crime dramas.
Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise
“Earth is not sufficient without the sun,” says Sun Ra, referring not to himself, but the star at the center of our solar system. Ra—a bandleader casting himself as a seer in an Afrocentric interplanetary cosmology—fills Robert Mugge’s 1980 documentary with such monologues. Mugge includes plenty of footage by The Sun Ra Arkestra, wearing colorful garb and swinging in disciplined, ritualized cacophony that makes much free jazz look bloodless.
Turner Toward the Sun
British author Micky Burn could have been a character from a novel. A friend of aristocracy, the lover of Soviet spy Guy Burgess, a happily married man, an admirer of Hitler who participated in commando raids against Nazi Europe and ended the war as a German POW—there’s enough here for a trilogy. Director Greg Oliver’s documentary drags but its lethargic pace doesn’t eclipse the story of this engaging 90-something filmed before his 2010 death.
Stonewall
Gay bars across the U.S. were once subject to periodic police raids. But in 1969 the denizens of New York’s Stonewall bar fought back and gay liberation began. The riot is the culmination of Roland Emmerich’s dramatization whose protagonist, a small-town boy, gravitates to Greenwich Village’s notorious Christopher Street. He’s taken aback by the druggy, cross-dressing hedonism, and is slowly caught up in the rising change of consciousness sparked by the social upheavals of the ’60s.
