Aurelia Butler

For the furry sidekick, Krypto, in “Superman,” the director James Gunn found inspiration — and a physical model — in his own unruly pet.About three years ago, the director James Gunn was trying to figure out the arc of what would become his new blockbuster “Superman.” Then he adopted a dog.He named the scruffy rescue Ozu, after the Japanese filmmaker known for his serene works. At about 8 months old, Ozu the dog was not at all peaceful. After surviving a hoarding situation, Ozu was fearful of humans and intensely destructive. He chewed up furniture, shoes and even a $10,000 computer. He also ate one of Gunn’s wife’s tampons out of a wastebasket, necessitating a trip to the vet. Gunn realized that if Ozu had been superpowered, the damage would have been even worse.“It was where the movie came together for me,” he said in a video call.Gunn decided that his version of Superman would have not just a dog, but a bad dog who could fly. He wrote the opening sequence in which Superman (David Corenswet), defeated for the first time ever, calls out to the canine Krypto to help drag him to the Fortress of Solitude. Krypto — who, like Ozu, is poorly behaved — jumps all over his master, seemingly causing more pain before doing his duty.“The universe we normally see Superman living in in movies is usually this lone, serious superhero and then people and then that’s it,” Gunn said. “This Superman exists in a different sort of universe where there are flying dogs.”While Krypto has a long history in the comic books, he has never been featured in any of the live-action Superman movies.Jessica Miglio/DC and Warner Bros. But Ozu served as more than just inspiration. Gunn’s pup also became the physical model for Krypto, who is computer-generated so he can do things like soar through the sky and attack villains. Krypto is a little bigger than Ozu and has white fur instead of gray, but otherwise he’s a dead ringer.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

Writing for The Daily Planet about his heroic alter ego raises thorny issues for Clark Kent. Lois Lane has her conflicts, too.If Superman’s greatest weakness is green kryptonite, then Clark Kent’s may well be the ethics of journalism — thanks to his work as a reporter who has to cover his own heroic alter ego. It is a conflict in the character apparent since his first comic book appearance.In his 1938 debut, Superman saves a woman wrongly sentenced to death. Clark is relieved that the front-page news of her release makes no mention of the Man of Steel’s intervention. Clark also likes that his job often leads him to tips on where Superman is needed. But when he is assigned to report on the hero, he feigns enthusiasm. He tells his editor, “If I can’t find out anything about this Superman no one can!” Disingenuous much, Clark?Flash forward to modern times.In the new “Superman” film, which opens in theaters on Friday, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) is surprised when Clark (David Corenswet) allows her to interview him as Superman for The Daily Planet. Her probing inquiries agitate him. She also chastises him on the ethics of reporting on himself, since he would know the questions in advance — generally a no-no in responsible journalism. But she shouldn’t judge him too harshly: She’s dating Clark and probably should recuse herself from the interview, too.It is a good moment for Lois, who does not always fare so well in comic books. In 1986, when Superman was rebooted by the writer and artist John Byrne, Lois is determined to get the scoop on the new hero. She lands an interview but too late. Clark has the exclusive, gives it to The Planet and is hired by the paper, which is when he and Lois first meet. In 1986, in a Superman reboot, Lois tries to get the scoop on the new hero — only to find Clark Kent has beaten her to the punch.John Byrne and Dick Giordano/DC“That has always been the conceit, that he gets his job by reporting on Superman and therefore proving himself to be an ace reporter,” Mark Waid, a comic book writer, said in an interview. “I personally reject that notion because I don’t understand what that proves other than he’s really good at taking advantage of the system.” 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

The director Petra Costa examines a rightward shift in her country by zeroing in on the rise of a televangelist.Here is one thing that makes Petra Costa’s new documentary, “Apocalypse in the Tropics” (in theaters and streaming Monday on Netflix), so powerful: It is very precisely not about American politics. Yet the temptation for a segment of viewers to see it as being about that will, I suspect, be insurmountable. But Costa is here to tell a bigger story.She begins with the extraordinary shift in her homeland of Brazil toward evangelical Christianity — over the past 40 years, the percentage of Brazilians identifying as evangelical has grown to 30 percent from 5 percent, by some estimates. That’s an immense, almost unprecedented change.What’s more, it’s had radical effects on that nation’s politics, leading directly to the election of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Costa wasn’t raised to be particularly religious, so she approaches the subject as something of an anthropologist who knows Brazil well. (Her parents are left-wing Brazilian activists who opposed the military dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985, and her fiery 2019 film, “The Edge of Democracy,” explored both her and her country’s political past.) Instead of focusing solely on Bolsonaro and his electoral battle with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president, Costa hones in on something else: the way the Pentecostal televangelist and celebrity Silas Malafaia has operated at the core of politics.She suggests that Malafaia, with the money and influence he wields, was extremely consequential in the rise and popularity of Bolsonaro. In other words, she argues that his media savvy, tied to capitalism and a certain strain of apocalypticism, accounts for the rightward lurch in Brazil’s politics.What she’s pointing out is how these three things — the lure of money, the lure of celebrity and the lure of power — constitute an unholy trinity, especially when held and venerated by a figure like Malafaia, who can dole them out. That has always been true. Humans love to be rich, popular and important, and a lot of the time those things can be woven into people’s religious beliefs, making those convictions even stronger.But it may be that elements of the present, like social media, internet misinformation and extinction-level threats to human life make that combination more potent than ever. That’s what “Apocalypse in the Tropics” draws out so well: This pattern in Brazil is infinitely repeatable. If you recognize it, well, it’s not because your country’s leaders are unique. It’s because while history may not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. More

Tyler Perry returns as a series of characters, and this time, the real struggle for the family is boarding a plane.Tyler Perry reached a milestone this year: Two decades of “Madea” movies. The bigger-than-life female character Perry created for the stage has been entertaining audiences and confounding critics since the first “Madea” movie, “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” hit theaters in 2005.As the title suggests, that picture leaned a little heavier into melodrama than broad comedy, despite the fact that Perry, as he would continue to do over the next two decades, played Madea as a kind of burlesque who wore outlandish dresses and substantial padding, and painted the character in broad strokes.In “Madea’s Destination Wedding,” the 13th “Madea” movie, she continues to take no prisoners when affronted. It begins with our heroine confronted by some would-be stickup kids at a service station; she douses their car with gasoline and lights it on fire as they speed away.The narrative gets more domesticated after this. Madea’s niece Tiffany (Diamond White), the daughter of her nephew Brian, is having a destination wedding in the Bahamas. Perry also plays Brian, in conventional guy clothing. Perry also plays Brian’s father, the white-haired, feckless Joe. In one scene, the three characters banter on the front stoop of a house. The sequence demonstrates Perry’s adroitness as a multicharacter performer; the dialogue is delivered with admirable timing and intonation. And his staging, shooting and editing show that he’s become an equally deft filmmaker.That said, the movie’s comedic family members yield a group workshop style of comedy that sometimes bogs down the narrative. The movie arguably has the longest plane-boarding scene in the history of cinema, followed by the longest hotel check-in scene. But if Madea speaks your movie love language, it’s all about the journey, not the destination.Madea’s Destination WeddingRated PG-13 for language and themes. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

In this French coming-of-age drama, a young woman auditions for a reality show to escape life at home.In “Wild Diamond,” the dream of reality TV stardom is one young woman’s salvation — a way out of her bleak life in southern France.But should a 19-year-old have to commodify her sexuality in the name of self-worth? Does it become more understandable — or more unsettling — when we learn she’s driven by emotional neglect?Even if we didn’t witness the fame-obsessed Liane (Malou Khebizi) shielding her younger sister from their mother’s sex sounds in the next room, or see the threat of eviction, we’d still sense trouble at home just by her frantic determination to make it onto “Miracle Island.”Liane auditions for the hit reality show, which might be her best shot at breaking free from the confines of her troubled family. But when she tattoos her abdomen — wincing in pain, then calmly flaunting the fresh ink for her thousands of TikTok followers — you want to show her another path. Moments like these crystallize, to heartbreaking effect, the movie’s uneasy compassion for influencer culture.Originally a short film by the writer-director Agathe Riedinger, this feature debut unfolds in waves of tension and release. Khebizi brings palpable desperation to the role of Liane, despite the limited script, while the cinematographer Noé Bach intimately frames Liane like we’re intruding on her space. Her glittering ambitions stand out all the more against this unadorned naturalist look.Eventually, we find out whether Liane got the role. But the film’s most haunting question remains: Which reality is safer — the one she’s learned to survive, or the one that tempts her with its illusion of hope?Wild DiamondNot rated. In French, Italian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

Nick Offerman stars as an anti-government widower whose extremist philosophy inches closer and closer to violent conflict.Much of the American moment — of distrust, violence and the inevitable collision between the fringe and the forgotten — courses throughout “Sovereign,” the crime thriller from the writer and director Christian Swegal. In other words, one can immediately recognize Jerry Kane (a remarkable Nick Offerman), even if they are not familiar with the true events his story is based on.A proponent of the sovereign citizen movement, Jerry is intensely anti-government and sees himself as exempt from its laws, a philosophy that hinges closer toward violent conflict as he has run-ins with the police and ignores the bank’s foreclosure notices on his house. A widower and father, Jerry brings his teenage son, Joe (Jacob Tremblay), along to his seminars in which he teaches his ideas. Close to his father but itching for a normal childhood, Joe soon begins to chafe against Jerry’s beliefs.Dual father-and-son stories — one between Jerry and Joe, the other between the local police chief (Dennis Quaid) and his son on the force — form the film’s emotional thrust, sometimes for worse. “Sovereign” is most intriguing for its subtle, if incomplete observations of the more complicated realities of both sides of the law that inform and ripple from Jerry’s paranoid world.Meeting in basement conference rooms, the attendees at Jerry’s seminars are not acolytes of an extremist philosophy, but just ordinary people crushed by bills and the latest family emergency. Disenchanted by a system that seems to have forgotten them, they’re desperate for any answer — even if they don’t know the dark places it might lead them.SovereignRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More