In-Theater Releases of the Week 

The great French actress Léa Drucker adds another sharply etched characterization to her résumé as Stéphanie, an internal-affairs investigator in the Paris police force on a case of police brutality during the “yellow jacket” protests of 2018 in Dominic Moll’s low-key procedural that persuasively encompasses the complicated political aspects of class and race hanging over the investigation.

 

 

Drucker is unwaveringly good whether subtly taking the temperature of those she’s looking into or handling her skeptical ex-husband (a fellow cop), loving young son, and cantankerous mother. A top-notch supporting cast and Moll’s documentary-like visuals also strongly contribute to this deeply moral, unnerving drama. 

 

 

 

My Undesirable Friends, Part II: Exile 

Following up on her original monumental five-plus-hour documentary about the state of opposition journalists in Russia, director Julia Luktov returns with an even more mesmerizing six-hour chronicle that shows most of the same journalists leaving Russia as soon as Putin’s Ukraine invasion begins.

 

 

We follow them as they head to places as far flung as Prague, Amsterdam, and New York City to continue their reporting on Putin’s authoritarianism in overdrive—which also takes the form of some of them being tried in absentia for treason. Their bravery in the public sphere is often infused with sadness or anger in private as they discuss their fears of wondering whether there will ever be a different Russia to return home to. Luktov’s extraordinary document of the precarious state of journalism—not just in Russia, but by design here too—is even more urgent than the first film.

 

 

 

Trust Me, I’m a Doctor 

The story of model Anna Nicole Smith’s 2007 death from an overdose of painkillers and the trial of her prescribing doctor Sandeep Kapoor is recounted in this scruffy but glib dramatization by writer-director Thane Economou, who relies on cutesiness and rib-nudging (direct address to the camera, TMZ recreations) instead of concentrating on the colorful personalities on hand.

 

 

Kal Penn is a sympathetically goofy Kapoor and Linda Hamilton is solid as his attorney Ellyn Garofalo, but Abbie Cornish steals the film by humanizing instead of caricaturing Smith—she should have been given her own starring vehicle instead.

 

 

 

Winter of the Crow 

Based on the succinct short story “Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw” by Olga Tokarczuk, this tense, terse drama stars Lesley Manville as Joan Andrews, a British scholar who arrives in Poland for a conference the day before Russia cracks down with martial law, in 1981—and after she witnesses (and photographs) an extrajudicial killing, she finds that she is also in danger.

 

 

Kasia Adamik directs persuasively from Sandra Buchta’s savvy script about the quotidian lunacy of authoritarianism through minions taking orders, and Manville’s tremendous performance of subtlety and strength climaxes with her suggestive glare at the camera.

 

 

 

Streaming Release of the Week