Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Karate Kid: Legends’ Review: The Student Becomes the Teacher

    The latest installment to the long-running franchise is a messy entry that tries to throw too many legacies into a blender.“Karate Kid: Legends,” the latest installment to the franchise that spawned from the 1984 team of Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita, a.k.a Mr. Miyagi, certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise. And yet, among the modern crop of revamped movie franchises, it is, in fact, a somewhat bizarre outlier.In many ways, the original film should by all means have become a fond and nostalgic relic of the 1980s, a sleeper hit that almost wholly symbolizes the retrospective cheesiness we project onto that decade. Instead, its remarkably simple story, of a master fighter teaching a kid how to defeat bullies, has retained tremendous staying power, spawning, across decades, several sequels and reboots, a Netflix spinoff show and now a revamp merging its past iterations.As if fully aware of the humble and ultimately thin material for another franchise restart, “Legends” tries to make practically three movies in one, tossing all of its legacies into a blender that’s powered more by Macchio and Jackie Chan’s names than anything else.Adhering to its blueprint, “Legends,” directed by Jonathan Entwistle, starts with a kid traveling to a new city, falling in love with a girl and facing a violent bully. Li (Ben Wang) is a martial arts student in Beijing, studying under his Uncle Han (Chan), until his mom (Ming-Na Wen) moves them to New York City. While there, Li quickly takes a liking to Mia (Sadie Stanley), much to the chagrin of Conor (Aramis Knight), a vicious karate student who begins harassing Li. But rather than learning how to fight off Conor, Li instead trains Mia’s father, Victor (Joshua Jackson), who enters a boxing tournament to pay off his debts to a local thug (who is also Conor’s karate teacher).That’s all in the first two-thirds of the film. In the latter third, Jackson disappears entirely, Li must prepare for his own fight tournament, and Chan and Macchio are clumsily looped in, as if the film suddenly remembered who was on its poster. What we end up with is a “Karate Kid” movie with three teachers, two students in two tournaments and many training montages.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Tornado’ Review: She Wants Revenge

    In the title role, the singer-songwriter Koki is both charming and indomitable as she goes after a band of thieves led by Sugarman (Tim Roth).This crackling movie begins with what some might take for a bit of misdirection: a quotation from a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky, the father of the great filmmaker Andrei. “I would readily pay with my life / For a safe place with constant warmth / Were it not that life’s flying needle / Leads me on through the world like a thread.”Given that the movie concerns Tornado, a young swordswoman who has to make her way through a hostile British countryside after wastrels kill her father, one might wonder what Tarkovsky has to do with it. But first consider the statement rather than its origin.Tornado (Koki) has been touring with her samurai father (Takehiro Hira) through rural England, performing a charming puppet show. An initially prankish bit of business involving two sacks of stolen gold gets the duo in big trouble with a pack of thieves led by Sugarman (Tim Roth).The writer-director John Maclean, who deftly played with genre in his 2015 feature debut “Slow West,” is similarly sure-handed here. The movie quickly establishes itself as a revenge narrative, and each bad guy goes down in a way designed to suit the viewer’s justified bloodlust.In the title role, the singer-songwriter Koki is both charming and indomitable; when she announces “I am Tornado,” you feel your internal applause sign light up. And Nathan Malone, who plays the little boy following Tornado as she eludes the bad guys, is reminiscent of the nervy star of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood.”TornadoRated R for lots of violence, some raw language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Ghost Trail’ Review: A Cat and Mouse Thriller

    A hypnotizing Adam Bessa anchors this tale about a Syrian refugee living in France who believes he has found the man who tortured him.The fuzzy line between justice-seeking and vengeful vigilantism is by now a common staple of the crime thriller, casting a dark shadow of moral ambiguity over even the most righteous crusades. Jonathan Millet’s “Ghost Trail” takes a mostly conventional approach to this blueprint, in which a protagonist loses their head (and their humanity), but it offers a novel context: the Syrian refugee crisis.Hamid (a hypnotizing Adam Bessa), a former literature professor, was imprisoned and tortured under the authoritarian Assad regime — which was toppled in 2024, with the end of the 13-year presidency of Bashar al-Assad. We meet the somber Hamid in Strasbourg — at the border of France and Germany — scouring refugee centers and questioning other Syrian refugees about the figure in a blurry photograph, whom he claims is a relative.Bessa’s brooding performance, which conveys devastating inner struggles without appearing clichéd, adds to the mystery of this first act. Millet keeps his cards close, slowly and inventively revealing the stakes. From the point-of-view of a computer game, in which a soldier runs aimlessly around a desert battlefield, we hear Hamid conversing in code with other users whom we soon realize are members of a clandestine group seeking to bring down Syrian war criminals in hiding. Though Hamid has never seen his torturer’s face, he knows his smell and voice — and he’s convinced that a man studying at the nearby university (Tawfeek Barhom) is the same guy.The cat-and-mouse game, which involves Hamid tracking his suspect throughout campus, plays out in a relatively low-key manner, with the film relying on Bessa (and eventually, an eerie Barhom) to deepen the survivor’s dilemma. Hamid’s calls with his mother, who is living in a refugee camp in Beirut, and his hapless flirtations with another Syrian refugee working at a laundromat, remind him that he’s meant to start a new life in Europe. He has this in common with Barhom’s student, which adds a provocative, more cerebral undercurrent to the film’s portrait of modern immigration. What is lost by forgetting the past? What is gained?Ghost TrailNot rated. In Arabic, French, English and Turkish with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Review: Benicio Del Toro Plans to Save His Soul

    Wes Anderson returns with another intricately designed film, and an inquiry into the meaning of goodness.With his diorama-like compositions and tales of longing — usually for a loving family — Wes Anderson has taken audiences most everywhere on the planet: Asia and Europe, New York City and the American southwest, a fox’s hole and an island inhabited by dogs. With “The Phoenician Scheme” he globetrots again, zigging and zagging about, but he adds an unusual place to the list: heaven.Or, more accurately, the pearly gates that stand just outside of heaven, guarding the way lest the unworthy sneak in. These scenes are really snippets, rendered in black and white. In them, we repeatedly glimpse the weapons dealer and generally shady business tycoon Anatole Korda, a.k.a. Zsa-zsa (Benicio Del Toro, who is perfect) standing on some clouds before a robed assembly of what the film bills as the “biblical troupe,” among whom are F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Hope Davis and Bill Murray, who, delightfully, plays God.That all of these screen luminaries apparently just popped to Anderson’s set for a day to film a tiny scene is indicative of where the auteur stands at this point in his 31-year career. Still boyish in appearance, he’s just turned 56, with a bevy of awards under his belt. He’s synonymous with his intricate aesthetic, which is perhaps one of the most recognizable in cinema. It’s turned him into a brand, with social media creators and critics alike drawn to examining and imitating him. He curated a show at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2018, and as “The Phoenician Scheme” was premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, he was simultaneously the subject of a show at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.He’s also built a career on an ever-expanding universe of returning collaborators and players. While some, like Murray, have been around for a long time, Del Toro is still relatively new to the fold, with “The Phoenician Scheme” only his second Anderson outing (he had a role as a seductive criminal in “The French Dispatch”). He plays the cold and aloof Korda who, upon surviving his sixth assassination attempt, finally admits he needs to appoint an heir to his business and vast fortune. He has nine sons who live in a dormitory across the street from his house — Korda is not a very good dad — but he also has an estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, all deadpan chain-smoking charm), who is on the verge of taking her vows at the convent. Liesl’s moral sense is as upstanding as her father’s is utilitarian, and when he lays out his plan to her, she senses she might be able to do some good even if she doesn’t trust him.So she convinces him to take the slightly higher ethical ground toward his big, well, scheme — the details of which are laid out so rapidly, and so sketchily, that it’s pretty clear Anderson doesn’t care if we really catch on to what Korda wants to do. Despite its title, this is not a movie about a plan, but about the man with that plan and, most important, his soul.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Bring Her Back’ Review: A Foster Mother Like No Other

    Sally Hawkins plays a menacingly unhinged foster parent to two bereaved siblings in this emotionally potent chiller.We ask a lot from our horror movies, which is perhaps the main reason they can be so divisive, and so difficult to get right. We want them to shock, but not traumatize; to disgust, but not sicken; to creep us out, but not bequeath a month’s worth of nightmares. On top of all that, can we please have some jokes?Instead of stressing over these pressures, some genre filmmakers, a number of them women, are determinedly carving their own idiosyncratic paths. Among these are the Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who have followed their wonderfully disquieting debut feature, “Talk to Me” (2023), with another three-word imperative, “Bring Her Back.” The two movies have more in common than their titular grammar: Both draw sustenance and momentum from familial grief, and both exhibit an extraordinary sensitivity toward their emotionally flayed central characters.When we meet Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger stepsister, Piper (Sora Wong), Andy’s father has just died and the siblings must be fostered for three months until Andy can assume guardianship of Piper, who is legally blind. At first, their temporary foster mother, Laura (a delicious Sally Hawkins), seems welcoming, if a little dippy, her somewhat rundown property boasting a taxidermied pup, a mysterious chalk circle and a strange little boy who is mute and near-feral. His name is Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips, incredible) and I could write several paragraphs just on what he puts in his mouth. Suffice to say that, during one horrifying episode, I didn’t exhale until it was over.Even so, the movie’s forceful visual shocks (executed mostly with practical effects) are easier to bear than its restlessly mounting anguish. Though more logically muddled than its predecessor, “Bring Her Back” operates from a core of tragedy whose weight offsets the nebulousness of the plot. Why is Laura, who recently lost her own daughter, so determined to drive a wedge between Piper and her fondly protective stepbrother? Why is she mesmerized by grainy camcorder footage of what appears to be a bloody satanic ritual? Why must Ollie be kept locked in his room and apparently starved?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Bruce Logan, Who Blew Up the Death Star in ‘Star Wars,’ Dies at 78

    A special effects artist and cinematographer, he also worked on “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Tron,” and took a detour to comedy with “Airplane!”Destroying the Death Star — the Empire’s space station and superweapon in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” — was a signature moment for the visual effects artist Bruce Logan.In the climactic scene of what is now known as “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” (1977), Luke Skywalker demolishes the Death Star by firing two proton torpedoes into it from his X-wing fighter, a triumph for the Rebel Alliance.“Blowing up the Death Star is my greatest P.R. coup, but was in fact very low-tech,” Mr. Logan told the Los Angeles Post Production Group, a filmmakers’ organization, in 2020. He added that he found newer effects to have “an unsatisfying synthetic gloss.”Mr. Logan — who was also a cinematographer and director — recalled that he could not film the Death Star’s detonation as if it were happening on Earth.“When you shoot an explosion conventionally, with the camera straight and level, with forces of gravity and atmospherics acting on it, what you get is a mushroom cloud which doesn’t look like it’s exploding in outer space,” he wrote on Zacuto.com, a film equipment website, in 2015.To achieve the needed effect, Mr. Logan manned a high-speed camera, which was surrounded by a sheet of plywood, with a hole cut out for the lens and a sheet of glass covering it. With the camera pointed upward, Joe Viskocil, a pyrotechnics specialist, set off a series of miniature bombs overhead, which created the illusion of the explosions occurring in zero gravity in outer space.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Smokey Robinson Accuses Housekeepers of Defamation in Countersuit

    Four of Mr. Robinson’s former employees had sued the Motown singer, saying he sexually assaulted them for many years. He argues their anonymity is a reason to dismiss their suit.Lawyers for the Motown singer Smokey Robinson, whom four former housekeepers have accused of sexually assaulting them dozens of times, filed a cross-complaint on Wednesday that accuses the women and their lawyers of defamation.Mr. Robinson’s lawyers also filed a motion to dismiss the women’s lawsuit, arguing that they should not have been granted anonymity.In the legal filings, Mr. Robinson’s lawyers said the housekeepers had “fabricated” the abuse allegations “in support of their extortionate scheme.” The countersuit describes a caring relationship that Mr. Robinson and his wife, Frances Robinson, had with the women, noting that they vacationed together, celebrated holidays and doted upon them with concert tickets and, in one case, a car.The court papers, which were filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court and ask for $500 million in damages, offered as evidence text messages in which the women wished Mr. Robinson a happy birthday, invited him to celebrations and gave other expressions of support. The filings said Ms. Robinson had considered at least one of the women a friend, including her in a will.“The Robinsons did not abuse, harm or take advantage of plaintiffs; they treated plaintiffs with the utmost kindness and generosity,” the countersuit said. “Unfortunately, the depths of plaintiffs’ avarice and greed knows no bounds.”John Harris and Herbert Hayden, lawyers for the former housekeepers, said in a statement that the countersuit was an attempt to silence and intimidate the women.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Kevin Costner Is Sued by ‘Horizon’ Actor Over Rape Scene

    A stunt double said she was left with trauma by an unscripted scene that did not include an intimacy coordinator. Mr. Costner’s lawyer said the claims were meritless.A stunt double who worked on the western “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2” sued its director, Kevin Costner, and producers on Tuesday for what she called forced participation in a “violent unscripted, unscheduled rape scene” without advance notice or an intimacy coordinator.The plaintiff, Devyn LaBella, who was the lead stunt double for the actress Ella Hunt, who plays Juliette, said she was left with permanent trauma after the scene and was seeking a public apology and unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. A lawyer for Mr. Costner said the claims were meritless.According to Ms. LaBella’s complaint, the unscripted rape scene took place in May 2023, one day after she had filmed a similar one without incident. Mr. Costner, the suit said, inserted additional scenes to be shot with a different male actor in which he would climb on top of Ms. Hunt and violently rake up her skirt.The additions, the suit said, were not outlined in the day’s call sheet and no arrangements were made for an intimacy coordinator, who works with actors before and during scenes involving nudity or simulated sex to make sure they are comfortable.“Ms. Hunt became visibly upset and walked off the set, refusing to do the scene,” the complaint said.At that point, Ms. LaBella was asked to stand in. She had not been prepared for the scene, the suit said, and learned its details after filming had already begun. There were multiple takes of the scene, according to the lawsuit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More