Aurelia Butler

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    ‘The Union’ Review: Old Flames and Spy Games

    When a mission goes pear-shaped, a covert operative (Halle Berry) turns to a secret weapon: her high school boyfriend (Mark Wahlberg).The “Mission: Impossible” series went missing in action this summer, but that’s no reason to settle for Netflix’s “The Union,” a depressing illustration of the wisdom that sometimes you shouldn’t buy — or stream — generic. The movie combines a catalog of elements from the Tom Cruise franchise (supersecret agents, exotic locales, stunts) with a high-concept twist so silly it might as well have been selected by A.I.: What if — hear this out — the lead operatives happened to be former high school sweethearts?“The Union,” directed by Julian Farino, kicks off in Trieste, Italy, with a blatant retread of the first “M:I” installment: The agents are on a mission to retrieve a traitor with a stolen hard drive. Suddenly, violence breaks out, and almost the whole team is killed. A survivor from the group, Roxanne (Halle Berry), pitches her boss, Tom (J.K. Simmons), on who to turn to for help: “If he’s anything like that guy I remember,” she says, “he’s exactly who we need.”“He” is her onetime boyfriend, Mike (Mark Wahlberg), now a construction worker in New Jersey who is hooking up with their seventh-grade English teacher (Dana Delany). Roxanne hasn’t seen him in 25 years when she approaches him in a bar. His credentials are that he is, in Roxanne’s words, “a nobody”: Because of the nature of the pilfered intelligence on the drive, she and Tom need someone who has left virtually no civic footprint.Besides, their spy outfit, the Union — so covert that half the intelligence community doesn’t know it exists and the other half regrets finding out, Roxanne says, as if reciting a tagline — prefers blue-collar guys to Ivy League suits. They are, in theory, way more fun than the C.I.A. (Stephen Campbell Moore appears as a stiff from Langley.) Mike used to be a star athlete and is accustomed to spending all day on a sky-high beam. With that background, shouldn’t a three-and-half-minute training montage suffice?The other Union members are defined largely by their specialties — physical force (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), psychology (Alice Lee), computing (Jackie Earle Haley) — and the movie makes a few feeble feints at fish-out-of-water humor. (Mike may never have left the tristate area before, but does he really not know what side of the road the British drive on?)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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    How Well Do You Know Disaster Movies? Revisit the Golden Years.

    In a world … where tornadoes launch livestock across the sky … … where faulty wiring turns a skyscraper into a death trap … … where a menace from above forces you to stop and look up … … one question remains … “What you are about to see could happen to any city, anywhere.” […] More

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    Popcast (Deluxe): A Word With Action Bronson

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the culture show hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes a rapid-fire questionnaire answered by the rapper Action Bronson, whose new album, “Johann Sebastian Bachlava The Doctor,” is out now. Topics covered include:The music of his childhoodParenting and his children’s tasteLearning to navigate successStress reliefHis lighthearted gourmand side and go-to ordersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Taylor Swift Returns to Stage for Eras Tour in London

    Fans at Wembley Stadium said they trusted British security officials to keep them safe and cheered loudly when the pop star came onstage.When Taylor Swift canceled three concerts in Vienna last week after officials there foiled a terrorist plot, Swifties soon expressed fears about the pop star’s next shows, in London.Would Swift go ahead with the concerts at Wembley Stadium? Given that the pop star once said her “biggest fear” was a terrorist attack at one of her shows, some fans had doubts. Was it even safe to attend?When Swift did not comment on the thwarted attack in Vienna or the upcoming London gigs, fan anxieties only grew.Yet when the singer took the stage on Thursday evening, worry gave way to excitement at the chance to see Swift perform during the European leg of her globe-spanning Eras Tour. As Swift walked onstage singing “It’s been a long time coming” — a refrain from her track “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” — the sold-out crowd cheered deliriously.She then launched into “Cruel Summer.”In the end, despite the interest in the Austrian plot, Swift did not refer to it even obliquely at the London show. Instead, she played an almost identical gig to the others on her Eras Tour, a joyous three-hour-plus spectacle featuring hits, costume changes and, at one point, a fake moss-covered wood cabin. For most of the concert, the 90,000 fans sang along to every word, including when she was joined by Ed Sheeran for an acoustic medley.In interviews before the show, more than a dozen fans, including many from the United States, all said they felt safe attending the event. Kyle Foster — wearing a Kansas City Chiefs jersey like Swift’s partner, Travis Kelce — said he had flown from North Carolina with his partner and two daughters for the show.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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    Gena Rowlands Shows Her True Power in ‘A Woman Under the Influence’

    In “A Woman Under the Influence,” her gloriously, terrifyingly imperfect Mabel was emblematic of the actress’s work, especially with John Cassavetes.Midway through “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) — one of a number of astonishing films starring Gena Rowlands, who died Wednesday, and directed by her husband John Cassavetes — the distance between you and what’s onscreen abruptly vanishes. It’s the kind of moment that true movie believers know and yearn for, that transporting instance when your world seems to melt away and you’re one with the film. It can be revelatory; at times, as with Rowlands’s performance here, it can also be excruciatingly, viscerally painful.Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky (Peter Falk), loves her deeply but doesn’t understand her. They’re home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who’ve fled. Now, as this husband and wife look at each other across their dining-room table, they struggle to push past the rancor and hurt. But Mabel is struggling harder because her purchase on everyday life has begun to badly slip, bewildering them both. Her love for Nicky and their children feels boundless, and it radiates off her like a fever, but Mabel is headed for a breakdown.Working with Cassavetes, Rowlands was helping find a new way to make American cinema.Faces InternationalAs the two begin working it out, Cassavetes cuts between them, framing each in isolating close-up. At first, Nicky looks at her with a faint, inscrutable smile that Mabel doesn’t return. Instead, she stares at him and holds up a thumb, as if she were getting ready to hitch a ride out, then she begins a strange pantomime. She screws her face into a scowl, waves her arms, mimes some words. Rowland had an incredibly expressive, near-elastic face and equally extraordinary control of it, and the quicksilver shifts she uses here are unexpected and destabilizing; you want to keep watching Mabel but aren’t sure you can.Within seconds, Nicky and Mabel are talking again and revisiting or, really, relitigating what just happened. “Wacko!” he yells. “I like your friends,” she answers, her voice rising. As Mabel keeps talking, Rowlands widens her eyes but she also shifts the character’s focus inward. Suddenly, Mabel isn’t looking at Nicky and she isn’t exactly talking to him, either. Instead, as Mabel animatedly continues, her gestures and expressions growing more exaggerated, she no longer seems present. She’s somewhere else and then just as abruptly she returns to the here and now, and everything shifts again. Mabel looks at Nicky, her face open and soft. “Tell me what you want me to — how you want me to be,” she says. “I can be that. I can be anything.”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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    Burning Man Has Sold Out Since 2011. Why Not This Year?

    The desert arts festival returns this month after two consecutive years of challenging weather, including mud that stranded attendees, and a Covid-19 hiatus.Burning Man, the Nevada desert festival that routinely sells out tickets, is set to return this month, and ticket sales have slumped for the first time in years.It’s too soon to pin down what has caused the ticket sales shift, but factors most likely include two consecutive years of extreme weather, economic conditions and the organization of the Burning Man community. Here’s what to know.Tickets usually sell out for the desert festival.This year’s festival begins Aug. 25 and ends on Sept. 2, bringing tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert to create a temporary community called Black Rock City, about 120 miles northeast of Reno.The festival began in 1986 on a San Francisco beach when people gathered to burn a wooden figure on the summer solstice. It moved to the desert in 1990 and sold out for the first time in 2011, and has continued to sell out, often quickly, every year since. Festival organizers had to cap attendance that year and stopped official ticket sales in early August, though last-minute tickets were usually still available on the resale market.The official ticket sale is done in segments, and this year, people can still buy a $575 ticket from the sale tier that opened on July 31. Tickets are also available for $225 for people with limited income. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported on this change earlier this month.Marian Goodell, the chief executive of the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that organizes the festival, said in an interview on Wednesday that organizers expected this year’s Black Rock City population, which includes guests and staff, to be in the low 70,000s. Last year, the population was 74,126.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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    ‘Red Island’ Review: Madagascar Is Shifting Beneath Their Feet

    Robin Campillo relies on the power of suggestion to sketch life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through a young white boy’s eyes.The striking rusty color that gives Madagascar the nickname the “great red island” comes from the rich iron content in its soil. The drama “Red Island” — about a white French boy from a military family living there in the early 1970s — suggests that a fair amount of blood has seeped into the earth, too. The boy is just 10 but he grasps more than other kids might because his experiences are filtered through the life of the French filmmaker Robin Campillo.The boy, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle, sweet and saucer-eyed), lives in a pleasant, airy house with plenty of room and a red-dirt backyard. There, tucked in a corner, he shuts himself up in a large wooden crate reading comics featuring Fantômette, a plucky female superhero whose adventures routinely come to life in his imagination. When he isn’t immersed in his comics, Thomas bikes around, gets into harmless trouble and observes his modest world, especially its people. He’s particularly attentive to his loving homemaker mother, Colette (a very good Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and his father, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez), an army officer.A drama about a child, his family, a social set, their adopted home and the larger world, “Red Island” is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult. As befits his autobiographical subject, he fills in the details of Thomas’s worldview, a limited vantage that’s manifested by the crate he hides in. Those limits are also evident in the awkwardness with which Campillo tries to do justice to history and to Madagascar, which solidified its independence from France a decade before the story opens. There’s a dreamy innocence about Thomas that never meshes with the movie’s very adult, historical backdrop.“Red Island” is a coming-of-age story in which not all that much happens to the protagonist even as everything around him changes. You can sense that Thomas’s home life will soon take a turn by the naturalistic conversations that he overhears as well as some of the fraught scenes he witnesses. Campillo, who directed the very fine drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” about young AIDS activists in the early 1990s, has a talent for catching the charged energy and the friction that a room of people can produce when they’re thrown together in close quarters. Here, when some drunken officers and their wives dance in the family’s home, bodies pressing in toward one another, the circuitry of desiring and resentful looks is electric.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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    ‘The Good Half’ Review: Only Half Good

    Nick Jonas and Brittany Snow play siblings coordinating funeral logistics for their mom in this drama, a cross between “Terms of Endearment” and a Hallmark movie.“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” Joan Didion once wrote. In “The Good Half,” that place is Cleveland, where 20-somethings with names like Renn, Leigh and Zoey frequent karaoke bars and banter about movies.Renn (Nick Jonas) is a struggling writer in Hollywood flying back for his mom’s funeral. He is prone to avoidant behavior, the screenplay, written by Brett Ryland, shows and tells us, and his homecoming is a big deal. On the plane, he meets Zoey (Alexandra Shipp), a ray of sunshine who likes ’90s action movies and quotes “Scarface.”In his fourth narrative feature, the director Robert Schwartzman (brother to Jason) takes us deep into young adult land. Over several days, Renn and his sister Leigh (Brittany Snow) coordinate post-loss logistics while rolling their eyes at Rick (David Arquette), their bellicose step-father. Breaking up the sibling repartee are periodic flashbacks to happier times with Mom (Elisabeth Shue).When, and to which female listener, Renn will confront his demons is the question that drives “The Good Half,” which feels caught between “Terms of Endearment” and a Hallmark movie. Wry gags, like a hoarder priest, butt up against heartfelt exchanges. Snow, as the daughter who always played second fiddle, brings real feeling to her role — suggesting that she may in fact be the good half of this insipid drama.The Good HalfNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More