News

For French musician Émilie Simon, the flamenco-meets-gypsy vibe writer-director John Turturro was seeking for the soundtrack to his movie “The Jesus Rolls” turned out to be in her musical and genetical DNA.

“This music originally comes from where I grew up in the south of France,” says the 41-year-old electronic musician, who has released five albums in France since her self-titled 2003 debut. “It was something deep in my genes, my blood, my childhood. It’s a language I understand and am very sensitive to.”

“The Jesus Rolls,” which opens this weekend, picks up the story of Puerto Rican bowling kingpin Jesus Quintana, who made his infamous ball-licking cameo in “The Big Lebowski” to the tune of the Gipsy Kings’ cover of “Hotel California.” He returns here having been released in jail to join up with Bobby Cannavale and French chanteuse Audrey Tatou. What few people know is the character was...

A remake of a controversial 1974 French comedy that also doubles as a feature-length spin-off for a character who appeared in two scenes of a Coen brothers movie 22 years ago, “The Jesus Rolls” is a picaresque curio about an accused pedophile named “The” Jesus Quintana — a cartoonish Puerto Rican man played by the film’s Italian-American writer-director — who gets out of jail, reunites with his best friend, and immediately embarks upon a sweet and breezy crime spree that’s fueled by stolen cars and borrowed women. In other words, .

That isn’t always a bad thing, of course. The freewheeling Jonathan Demme energy only grows more infectious as the film drifts along, Émilie Simon’s buoyant flamenco score finds the zest in each scene, and the lightly fantastical “none of this matters” attitude feels like manna from heaven in an age of interconnected cinematic universes (Turturro’s utter disinterest in rehashing...