Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Lost on a Mountain in Maine’ Review: Peak Experience

    The true story of a 12-year-old’s survival in a vast mountain wilderness for nine days in the 1930s.The family adventure film “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” — based on the 1939 memoir of the same name by Donn Fendler with Joseph Egan — recounts the story of a 12-year-old boy alone in the wilderness of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak.An opening intertitle declares, if a tad defensively, “This Is a True Story.” Sure, the movie is inspired by actual events, but the truth the film yearns for is to be a story unencumbered by the insights or demands of our current moment. Even the film’s director, Andrew Bood Kightlinger, characterizes it lovingly as a “throwback.” (Sylvester Stallone is one of the producers.)After angrily arguing with his father, Donn (Luke David Blumm) gets separated from his twin brother and their energetic hiking guide amid a slashing summer storm. The movie alternates between the headstrong protagonist’s battles with bugs, leeches, hunger and disorientation, and his parents’ fraught limbo of guilt, hope and despair. Interspersed throughout is documentary footage filmed decades later of friends, family and others who witnessed those nine days that captured much of the nation’s attention.Caitlin FitzGerald portrays Donn’s steadfast mother, Ruth. Paul Sparks is the stern father whose brow is furrowed by muted but palpable economic woes. Before he took his boys on the hike, he’d been eyeing headlines and listening to radio reports of a slow, post-Depression recovery and of brewing international unrest.Theirs may not be a wonderful life — and “Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims — but an early scene of Ruth on the phone, rallying help in the search for Donn, is pure Mary Bailey.Lost on a Mountain in MaineRated PG for thematic elements, peril, language and some injury images. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘A Real Pain’ Review: Mourning as an Act of Survival

    Jesse Eisenberg directs and stars in a melancholic yet funny exploration of Jewish loss and belonging, with an outstanding Kieran Culkin.American movies about grief tend to end with sniffles and pasted-on smiles that reassure audiences that whatever horrors have come before — however brutal the tragedy, no matter how severe the torment — everything is going to be OK. It’s a crock, but that’s the Hollywood way, even in indies. No matter how distinct their subjects, their scale and scope, they insist on drying the tears that they’ve pumped. The pursuit of happiness was an inalienable right for the founding fathers, one that our movies have made a maddeningly enduring article of faith.Jesse Eisenberg races straight into life’s stubborn untidiness in “A Real Pain,” a finely tuned, melancholic and at times startlingly funny exploration of loss and belonging that he wrote and directed. He plays David, a fidgety, outwardly ordinary guy who, with his very complicated cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin), sets off on a so-called heritage tour of Poland. Their grandmother survived the Holocaust because of “a thousand miracles,” as David puts it, and they’ve decided to visit the house where she grew up. Theirs is an unexpectedly emotionally fraught journey, and a piercing, tragicomic lament from the Jewish diaspora.The journey begins and ends in the United States, but mostly unfolds during a compressed road trip through Poland that they set off on with a British tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), and five other travelers. Together, the group tours Warsaw, crosses pastoral countryside, peers into picturesque corners and makes a relatively brief, heart-heavy visit to the Majdanek concentration camp a few miles from the medieval city of Lublin. Eisenberg doesn’t delve into the history of the camp (also known as Lublin), but it became a killing center and was instrumental in a 1941 Nazi plan to murder the Jewish population of German-occupied Poland. An estimated 1.7 million Polish Jews were killed during this operation alone.That’s a profound history for any movie to grapple with intelligently, especially one that’s as modest and laugh-laced as “A Real Pain.” Eisenberg, though, deftly handles its weight, in part because it is a given for his characters. The Holocaust doesn’t need to be summarized for David, Benji and the rest of the tour group; they’re in Poland specifically because, in one attenuated way or another, it has been with them all their lives. It’s history, but for David and Benji it is, fundamentally, a history that’s inseparable from the existential reality of their grandmother, from the woman and the mother she became, and from the family that she had. It is, as this gentle movie plaintively suggests, an anguished generational bequest.Eisenberg brings you right into the story with a burst of jump cuts and the sight of an agitated David, who’s in a car en route to the airport in New York, leaving one anxious message after another for Benji. Eisenberg excels at playing live wires, characters who can seem so tightly wound you wonder if or when they will break. Like him, they tend to be fast talkers — Eisenberg’s clipped enunciation means that their words generally jab rather than flow — and David is no exception. He’s still leaving messages by the time he rushes into the terminal, where a widely smiling Benji is waiting. They embrace, Benji all but throwing himself at David, and by the time they’ve settled in their plane seats, it feels like you already know them.This sense of awareness, that these are guys you like and maybe even know, is crucial to the movie and how it uses intimacy to fortify its realism. “A Real Pain” is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama. These story forms add to the overall sense of familiarity as does the focus on David and Benji, who emerge more through the complexities of their relationship than through individual quirks of personality. We are who we are, Eisenberg says, because of the people in our lives, a truism that becomes more stark and affecting as his characters travel through a country haunted by Jewish ghosts.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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    ‘Here’ Review: Life Is Like a Box of Regrets

    Tom Hanks and Robin Wright reunite onscreen for a drama that showcases generations of existence.“Here” is an aeon-spanning experimental collage by Robert Zemeckis that plants the camera in one spot for give-or-take three billion years. The lens is static; the span, epic. An acre of New Jersey braves meteors, an ice age and dinosaurs. Sometime between the Pleistocene and Columbus, a deer tiptoes past. Alan Silvestri’s score swells triumphantly. Evolution!Mostly, however, we’re staring at two houses. The first was erected before the American Revolution and belongs to William Franklin (Daniel Betts), a British loyalist who calls his kite-flying father Benjamin Franklin (Keith Bartlett) a terrorist. Secure in its place in history, the colonial mansion lords its importance over the second house, the lesser house, that you’d never drive out of your way to visit. But these humble digs are the star. Around 1900, the home’s walls get built around the camera, and in turn, the film builds itself around the mundane goings-on inside. Hovering midway between the sofa and the kitchen, we witness a century-plus of holidays, lazy days, kisses, arguments. Nothing worth a commemorative plaque. It’s a tribute to banality.Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name and conceit used comic panels as a special effect, overlapping anonymous figures into a blurry rumination on time. One page illustrates the chronic popularity of Twister. Another captures the progression of swears: “Nincompoop.” “Dweeb.” “Dirt bag.”Zemeckis can be more interested in pixels than people. But this time, he wants recognizable people, too — heck, he wants movie stars — so he and Eric Roth tighten the screenplay’s focus to one family across six decades. There are glimpses of other characters: two Indigenous lovers (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum), a snippy suffragist (Michelle Dockery), a jazzy inventor and his wife (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond), and a modern family (Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird) who exist so close to our era that they come across bland.The design team does a fantastic job delineating the years. Yet, the film treats everyone else like parentheses around the baby boomers Richard and Margaret (played by a de-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright), who fall in love as teenagers. Infatuated and naïve, Margaret coos, “I could spend the rest of my life here.” Cut to the young couple pregnant and married (in that order) and inheriting both the furniture and the mistakes of the groom’s parents (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly).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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    ‘After: Poetry Destroys Silence’ Review: A Study in Trauma

    Richard Kroehling’s documentary presents a mixture of poets’ responses to the Holocaust and argues for the importance of the form in addressing trauma.“After: Poetry Destroys Silence,” directed by the multidisciplinary artist Richard Kroehling, positions itself as a counter to the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This experimental film, a combination of documentary, poetry reading and archival assemblage, insists on the need for poetry as a means of remembering and addressing trauma.Versions of the argument are made directly to the camera — and with unwarranted defensiveness — by the poets Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Edward Hirsch. The poetry featured onscreen makes the case for itself. The film highlights a variety of authors, including the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan (1920-70), heard in a haunting old recording reciting his poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), and the contemporary Brooklyn poet Taylor Mali, who shares a poem about his first wife’s death.The actor Geza Rohrig (“Son of Saul”) appears in a dual capacity as a documentary interviewee and as a poet himself; in addition to reciting his own work, he recalls the obsessive visits he made to Auschwitz. Melissa Leo turns up in something closer to an acting role in a segment based on Kroehling’s poem “Lost Photo.” Kroehling buttresses this already unusual mix of modes with a use of onscreen text that clearly evokes Jean-Luc Godard, while also demonstrating that Godard’s dense layering of image, language and sound is difficult to imitate. “After” presents a sincere plea for the right of artists to respond to horror, but it makes for an inert, academic viewing experience. The director hasn’t found a rhythm or pace to lend momentum to this exploration of disparate material.AfterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Their Songs Blew Up on TikTok, So These Musicians Tweaked Their Sets

    Social media platforms and streaming services are leading younger listeners to new (and old) music. Artists are making sure they feel at home at live shows.DJ Paul, a founder of the Oscar-winning Memphis hip-hop group Three 6 Mafia, was enjoying some tequila at a pool party in the Hollywood Hills two years ago when a friend shoved a cellphone in front of him. The rapper was surprised to see TikTok videos uploaded by “young white girls” dancing and rhyming along to one of the coarser moments from “Half on a Sack,” a slightly menacing song the group released 17 years earlier. The lyrics described sex and drug use on a tour bus.“I’m like, ‘Whoa,’” he remembered in an interview, laughing. “And when I do my concerts, you see the same kind of girls out there singing that line. They go crazy.”Paul said that “Half on a Sack” had long been a staple of the group’s live set lists, but the crowd response has been more uproarious in the wake of its viral moment.The rapper Project Pat, who has been touring with Three 6 Mafia this year, said he regularly performed “Life We Live,” his 23-year-old song that’s been used in almost three million TikTok videos. It’s seen a 130 percent increase in Spotify streams, as well.Project Pat has seen “Life We Live,” a song he released in 2001, gain a new life on TikTok.Aaron J. Thornton/FilmMagic, via Getty Images“I always looked at the rap game as a business,” Pat said. “I didn’t never look at it like I’m putting my pain and all that” into the art. “If you gon’ pay for this, I’m gonna tell you what you want to hear,” he added in his distinctive Memphis accent.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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    Shawn Mendes Walked Away From Stardom. He’s Ready to Talk About It.

    On a rainy summer night, on a club stage in Woodstock, N.Y., Shawn Mendes was ready for tears. Happy tears, overwhelmed tears. Just some processing-everything-as-it-happens mistiness. “There’s probably a high chance I cry a lot,” he told the small crowd, pressing the backs of his hands to his eyes, and emerging with a grin.It was the first time in over two years that Mendes, the 26-year-old Canadian pop star, had performed in front of an audience, after he abruptly pulled the plug on his career at its pinnacle. In 2022, amid what he called a mental health “breaking point,” he canceled a multimillion-dollar, two-year international tour — over 80 scheduled arena dates — acknowledging that, in that moment, he couldn’t handle it. It was a startling admission, especially for a multiplatinum male artist with a hugely devoted young fan base. If their attention was fickle, he would be gone.In the time since, Mendes — a social media phenom with model looks and a penchant for bare-chestedness, who found immediate chart-topping success as a teenager — stepped almost completely away from music, seeking stability and a life away from the road. Then he slowly winched his way back to songwriting, through the wilds of adulthood. Over rootsy guitar and strings, his struggles are laid bare on his fifth album, “Shawn,” due Nov. 15. “I don’t understand who I am right now,” he whispers on the anguished opening track.“I felt super, super lost,” Shawn Mendes said of the moment two years ago when he called off his tour. “Healing takes time.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesHe’s not the type to mask anything. And it took him a long while to feel strong enough to make the record. “I felt super, super lost,” he told me. In Woodstock, he talked of spiraling anxiety, the walls closing in.But in the few months since that gig, Mendes’s stages have been growing exponentially: He blasted through “Nobody Knows,” a new, lovelorn ballad, at the MTV Video Music Awards, ending it in ecstatic guitar peals; and then sang to 100,000 people — in Portuguese — at a festival in Rio de Janeiro. When we met for an interview, at his favorite recording studio in bucolic Rhinebeck, N.Y., where he worked on the new album, he seemed as if he had regained the muscle memory of what it means to be a star. But he wore it lightly.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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    Charles Brandt, Whose Book Inspired ‘The Irishman,’ Dies at 82

    “I Heard You Paint Houses,” his true-crime best seller about the death of Jimmy Hoffa, was brought to the screen by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.Charles Brandt, a former homicide prosecutor whose 2004 true-crime best seller, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” was adapted by Martin Scorsese into “The Irishman,” starring Robert De Niro as the Mafia hit man who killed the ex-Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, died on Oct. 22 in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.The death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by his brother-in-law, Gary Goldsmith, who did not specify a cause.Mr. Brandt’s book purported to solve the mystery of Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance and presumed death in 1975. He identified Hoffa’s killer as Frank Sheeran, a World War II veteran and truck driver who had been recruited into the underworld by the Mafia boss Russell Bufalino.Mr. Sheeran did some enforcement work for Mr. Bufalino, who introduced him to Mr. Hoffa, who said to Mr. Sheeran, “I heard you paint houses.” That was apparently mob slang for killing people — with the word “paint” meaning blood.In a series of interviews over five years, Mr. Sheeran told Mr. Brandt that he had been ordered to kill Mr. Hoffa, who had just been released from prison and was trying to regain power in the underworld.Mr. Sheeran recalled luring him to a house in Detroit for a supposed meeting with organized crime figures.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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    20 Years of Impossible Choices in ‘Saw’

    Two men wake up in an abandoned industrial bathroom, each chained to a pipe. Once they find hacksaws in a toilet tank, they attempt to escape from their thick chains, to no avail. That is when a doctor played by Cary Elwes has a realization about their captor that brings the impossible choice of “Saw” […] More