Aurelia Butler

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    ‘A Working Man’ Review: Blue Collar, Bloody Hands

    Jason Statham plays a construction worker who’s as deft at breaking bones as he is at building high-rises.The writer-director David Ayer began his career concocting scripts for action thrillers that put some psychological nuance into their boom-boom pyrotechnics. Yes, Denzel Washington’s chest-beating boasts in “Training Day” (2001) made theaters quake even if they weren’t equipped with Dolby, but there were further dimensions to his character.It seems as if he threw all that sort of thing out of his tool kit around the time of “Suicide Squad” (2016). Ayer’s pictures are purely blunt-force objects now, and effective ones. And all the more persuasive when Jason Statham stars in them.In “A Working Man,” whose script was coauthored by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, Statham plays a construction worker with a violent past from which he’s trying to distance himself. (Fat chance in this kind of movie.) When the daughter of his boss is kidnapped, he’s is compelled to go to labyrinthine and brutal lengths to get her back.This movie follows up on Statham and Ayer’s 2024 “The Beekeeper,” a similar payback punishment picture whose forced premise wasn’t helped by its garishly dressed villains. The villains here are garishly dressed too, but there’s a rationale: They’re Russian. In any event, Statham racks up bad-guy kills like he’s collecting Pokémon.As the kidnapped daughter, Jenny, Arianna Rivas takes fruitful advantage of her character’s efforts to fight back, showing acrobatic action chops. The star’s old “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” mate Jason Flemyng plays a slimy oligarch, and David Harbour is Statham’s wise pal (and armorer); it’s a satisfying cast all the way down. In a peculiar touch, near the end of the movie, its slimiest villain, played by Kenneth Collard, puts on a costume that makes him look like the Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins’s legendary villain, Coffin Joe. I dug it.A Working ManRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Julie Keeps Quiet’ Review: Coping at Her Own Speed

    A teenage regional tennis star moves on at her own pace after her ex-coach is dismissed under a cloud of suspicion.“Julie Keeps Quiet” ignores the usual movie playbook on post-trauma drama with its unusually internal portrait of a teenage tennis player, Julie. After her ex-coach is suspended under murky circumstances, she prefers not to share details of his behavior. But her feelings in the aftermath run deep, and this Belgian film’s virtue lies in its fidelity to her path and her pace.Her life is rooted in the routine and repetition of training and school among (supportive) peers, whether serve-and-volleys or German class. She evades questions from administrators and friends about Jeremy (Laurent Caron), her former instructor, even though he still calls her with doom-laden pep talks. You wonder when the story, written by the director, Leonardo van Dijl, and Ruth Becquart (who plays Julie’s mother), will tip her into a spiral.Instead, her low-key confidence as a player — her biggest smile in the film comes with success on the court — slowly manifests in her growing resolve and clarity in addressing the Jeremy situation. She recalibrates with a new coach, Backie (Pierre Gervais), and takes breathers with her dog. (The tennis star Naomi Osaka lends her imprimatur as an executive producer.)Tessa Van den Broeck, a newcomer, plays Julie with zero affectation. She seems plucked from a high school roll call, or maybe from a film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose company co-produced this one. Nicolas Karakatsanis’s twilit 35-millimeter cinematography mirrors her character’s preoccupied state, echoed by Caroline Shaw’s cracked-lullaby score. It’s a film that maintains that Julie’s story is available only when she’s ready to tell it.Julie Keeps QuietNot rated. In Dutch and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Penguin Lessons’ Review: A Unique Approach to Teaching

    Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, an English teacher in 1970s Argentina, whose small new friend makes his class a hit.A movie aspiring to be a droll animal-led comedy and an examination of a dictatorship has an intimidating number of needles to thread. The director of “The Penguin Lessons,” Peter Cattaneo, also made “The Full Monty,” so he has some experience with crowd-pleasing films, at the same time being deft with unusual subject matter.The movie begins with a familiar disclaimer that it’s based on true events. The actor Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a teacher from southern England who is unhappily assigned to an upper-class boy’s school in 1970s Argentina. (Jeff Pope’s script is based on Michell’s memoir of the same title.)On an idle day at the beach in nearby Uruguay, Tom encounters a penguin emerging from an oil spill. Hoping to impress a woman he’s met there, Tom brings the creature back to his hotel, cleans it off and tries to return it to the ocean. No luck. The penguin believes he’s made a friend.Once Tom returns to Argentina, he contrives to make the penguin he has named Juan Salvador a teaching tool, and his English class becomes wildly successful. (While Juan Salvador is supposedly a creature of the wild, he executes all sorts of cute bits that only a trained performer can pull off.)Things get serious when one of Tom’s housekeepers is swept up in the military dictatorship. Tom opts to abandon his apolitical facade because the penguin has taught him how to care about others. While Juan Salvador is a shameless exhibitionist, Coogan’s performance is understated; he conveys Tom’s softening without nudging the viewer too much. On the other hand, the misuse of Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky” on the soundtrack is egregious. The rest of the picture is largely winsome and inoffensive.The Penguin LessonsRated PG-13 for language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Holland’ Review: Nicole Kidman Goes Dutch

    Set in a Michigan town designed to evoke the Netherlands, this thriller has red herring on the menu.“Holland” is set circa 2000 in Holland, Mich., a real town founded by Dutch settlers and distinguished by its windmill, tulips and other tributes to the Netherlands. Red herring is also on the menu in this second feature from the director Mimi Cave. The film’s unusual backdrop, unresolved subplots and dream-sequence fakeouts are ultimately all distractions from a story that doesn’t make much sense.Cave’s dating thriller “Fresh” (2022), starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan, was also not a model of narrative logic. This time, there are signs that connective tissue may have gotten lost in the editing. (Rachel Sennott, from “Bottoms,” appears for what barely qualifies as a cameo.) Yet there is just enough effort to tie up loose ends that “Holland” can’t be hand-waved as accidental avant-garde.Nancy (Nicole Kidman), a home economics teacher, suspects that her husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), an optometrist, is having an affair because he so often goes on business trips. She persuades Dave (Gael García Bernal), who teaches shop and harbors a reciprocated crush on Nancy, to help investigate. (Dave’s life before his move to Holland is one of many matters that Cave and the screenwriter, Andrew Sodroski, tip as important and then mostly ignore.)It is hard to catalog the plot holes without giving too much away, but between the gluteal surgery in “Fresh” and a stabbing here, Cave is apparently not a stickler for continuity when it comes to injuries. A framing device suggesting that some events might be imagined acts as little more than a shoddy excuse.HollandRated R for some violence and sex, but this is hardly Paul Verhoeven’s Holland. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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    ‘Grand Tour’ Review: A Quiet Knockout

    The Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’s black-and-white film follows a colonial official on a 20th-century odyssey across Asia, with his fiancée in pursuit.In “Grand Tour,” a lush, melancholy story of yearning, a man treks across Asia in flight from his fiancée. But this one-sentence plotline barely scratches the surface of the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s magnificent black-and-white film, which mixes mannered studio footage with fluid documentary images to build a world that doesn’t abide by traditional rules of time, space or scale.It’s 1917, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a colonial official working for the British who is stationed in Burma, is awaiting the arrival of his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate). Conflicted about the relationship, he abandons his bird of paradise bouquet and embarks on a jagged journey across the continent. As he traverses city and jungle, Molly scrambles behind, sending him telegrams as she follows his every move.Shot on soundstages during the pandemic, these narrative sequences evoke the refined grandeur of classic Hollywood epics. Cloaking the screen in moody chiaroscuro, Gomes finds mystique in Edward’s stoicism and poetry in Molly’s heartbreak. But “Grand Tour” also complicates this splendor. In pairing scenes of the couple with present-day footage from South and East Asia, Gomes gestures at a troubling history of cinematic distortions.He drives his ideas home by periodically cutting in footage of performances — marionettes, karaoke, puppetry. These cultural shows urge the audience to consider how we relate to entertainment, to grapple with what engages us and why. Beauty is pleasurable, but the film’s use of evocative visuals to focus on storytelling more broadly is what makes it a quiet knockout.Grand TourNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Viet and Nam’ Review: A Soft Kiss Underground

    Truong Minh Quy’s haunting romance between two Vietnamese coal miners contemplates war and loss with pained elegance.Portrayed with an entrancing hush by the actors Duy Bao Dinh Dao and Pham Thanh Hai, Viet and Nam are coal miners — and lovers. They are also the title characters in “Viet and Nam,” the director Truong Minh Quy’s haunting, meticulously paced drama set in Vietnam in 2001.If you surmise Quy is up to something with these two names, you’re right. From its start in the blackness of a mine shaft to an indelible image of a shipping crate adrift, the movie meditates on juxtapositions, among them: South and North, the public and the private, staying and going, darkness and light, mothers and fathers.Early on, as a television station broadcasts the names of the Vietnam War’s still-missing soldiers, Nam and his mother, Hoa (Nguyen Thi Nga), putter around their home. Count the two among the families still hoping to find their loved ones’ unmarked graves.While Nam, Hoa, Ba (Le Viet Tung), who fought alongside Nam’s father and carries a secret, and Viet travel south to find the burial site, Nam is also making plans to leave Vietnam. His impending departure injects another kind of melancholy into the picture. (The film was banned in Vietnam for what censors saw as its dark portrayal of the country.)Quy treats the love affair between Viet and Nam with exquisite tenderness. One of the movie’s scenes — startling for its frankness but also its visual beauty — finds the men reclined in the dark of the mine. The film makes clear that even though Nam and Viet must be wary they are also achingly in love.Viet and NamNot rated. In Vietnamese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Holy Cow’ Review: How to Become a Big Cheese

    Louise Courvoisier’s debut feature follows a teenager in the French Alps who, when thrust into caring for his sister, forges a path in cheese making.The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story “Holy Cow” emerge gradually but steadily. Set amid the rolling slopes of the Jura, a mountainous region in eastern France, the movie traces a teenager’s progression from carefree, at times careless youth to adulthood after a life-altering tragedy. That might lead to a rainstorm of tears elsewhere, but this is a world of dry-eyed pragmatism. And here everything does ripen, an eventuality that this movie charts with wry humor, appreciable regional sensitivity and many wheels of artisanal cheese.The writer-director Louise Courvoisier fills in the contemporary story with light, brisk economy. Shifting between the specific and the general, she quickly lays out the narrative coordinates, introducing a people and a place that are at once geographically isolated and interdependent. The first time you see the 18-year-old Totone (Clément Faveau) he’s at a county fair — where people are milling about with cows — soused and demanding beer. One moment, he is standing on a table and being goaded to take it all off by the raucous crowd; in the next, a cigarette is dangling from his mouth and his briefs are puddled around his ankles.Totone’s striptease turns out to be a prelude for his character’s ensuing, more freighted adventures. With quick-sketch portraits, Courvoisier fills in Totone’s life, including his testy relationship with his father, a cheesemaker who’s soon out of the picture. Abruptly unencumbered by parents (his mother is missing-in-action), Totone becomes the sole caretaker for his sober-eyed 7-year-old sister, Claire (Luna Garret). He also finds himself without much of a safety net. With only some friends to help — unlike in many French films, no government functionaries come to the rescue — he fends for him and his sister largely on his own. He sells most of his father’s equipment and takes a job with another cheesemaker.Courvoisier grew up in the Jura, where her parents are farmers. She has an insider’s unforced ease with this world, which she economically opens up with piquant details, lived-in spaces, careworn faces and just enough shots of the landscapes to convey both its beauty and its isolation. It’s never clear if Totone truly sees this loveliness and how pretty the cows look on the misty fields. Like all the performers in the movie, Faveau is an nonprofessional actor, and while he has a bright, expressive affect, Totone is one of those characters whose inner life is largely expressed externally through his grins and grimaces, his gestures and actions.Even so, from the movie’s amusing opening image of a calf inexplicably standing inside a small, otherwise empty car, Courvoisier underscores the intimacy between the region’s people and their world. These connections come more into play once Totone begins working at the dairy, a multigenerational family enterprise that produces prizewinning Comté. There, the story begins gathering momentum as he finds tension and trouble, along with a romance with the owner’s daughter, Marie-Lise (Maïwène Barthelemy), who tends the cows. Also crucially, Totone discovers that the awards the dairy has won come with hefty cash payouts so he does what you’ve expected him to do from the start: He tries to produce his own cheese.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 Friend’ Review: The Writer vs. the Great Dane

    Naomi Watts plays a writer in mourning who is given a formidable gift from a friend in this adaptation of the Sigrid Nunez novel.Across the compact space of a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, a frazzled writer and a dog the size of a small pony exchange pleading looks. It’s a classic odd-couple setup, and you might call the central duo in “The Friend” unlikely roommates. But, more to the point, they’re two grieving souls, brought together by the death of a man who was a pivotal figure in both their lives.As the writer, Iris, Naomi Watts is an engaging fusion of intellectual acuity and emotional translucence. The role of Apollo goes to a magnificent fellow named Bing, a harlequin Great Dane with one brown eye, one blue, and an exceptionally expressive pair of eyebrows. Left to Iris by her friend and mentor Walter, a literary lion and a bit of a cad played with a mournful gaze by Bill Murray in a few well-deployed flashbacks — or perhaps merely hoisted upon her by Walter’s dog-averse widow (Noma Dumezweni) — Apollo is no magical creature, no cuddly cure for writer’s block. He’s a full-fledged character, and a mysterious one at that.At first the screen adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s exquisite novel of the same name, a quiet miracle woven of wry glances at New York literati and a piercing ache, feels too smooth, too glossy. But if Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the writer-directors, can’t match the novel’s sharp first-person narration, they find the sweet spot between sardonic and openhearted as Iris and Apollo get to know each other, and as she sorts out the complexities of her friendship with Walter. Theirs was a bond that inspires a bit of envy on the part of his widow and former wives (a sympathetic Carla Gugino and Constance Wu, in hissable frenemy mode).Refreshingly, Iris’s single status is not viewed as a problem to be solved. The problem is whether she should keep Apollo, and given his size, it’s a situation that announces itself to the world, sparking the warnings of her building’s superintendent (Felix Solis), the concerns of a neighbor (Ann Dowd) and snarky cracks from strangers.McGehee and Siegel (“Montana Story”) juice this smart, affecting feature with sly nods to big-screen New York romances. This is a love story, after all, and one with a keen grasp of the mournful, curious glances between its two leads — of how much goes untranslated between them, and how much is conveyed.The FriendRated R for sexual references and doggie genitalia. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More