“Malcolm & Marie,” Reviewed: A Film About Filmmaking That’s Desperate to Push Buttons

The tangle of art and life gets a vanity workout amid the pandemic lockdown.

Save this story Save this story The new film “Malcolm & Marie” (coming Friday to Netflix ), written and directed by Sam Levinson, leans blatantly on a row of hot buttons and shamelessly strives to make them loudly buzz while, at the same time, pontificating about art. It points to the familiar abyss where life and art meet, but it does so from a safe distance. It’s a movie about moviemaking, but it’s one of a diabolical vanity, in which Levinson, who’s white, creates a Black filmmaker-character as his stand-in and his mouthpiece, an artistic hero whose character and practice he then undercuts

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