Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Never Let Go’ Review: Do the Woods Have Eyes?

    Halle Berry plays the ultimate helicopter parent in this new horror movie, where evil lurks in the trees beyond the family cabin.Morbid moments are frequently the bread and butter of horror movies, but “Never Let Go” serves them up in helpings that become repellent. It’s directed by Alexandre Aja, whose past work, including a remake of “The Hills Have Eyes,” is also as crass and pretentious in almost equal measure.Halle Berry, the star of “Never Let Go,” plays the mother of two young boys, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), who all live in a cabin in a forest clearing. The surrounding woods are tangled and dark. She and the kids have to tie thick ropes around themselves when they leave the cabin to forage for food. According to Berry’s matriarch, “the Evil” is in those woods, and one touch will infect a family member, who would then bring it back to the house. So they all hold onto the rope to stay safe.The movie plays peekaboo with its central conceit — is “the Evil” real, or is mom just off her rocker? There are some jump scares at the outset, followed by a series of nonsensical plot turns that may annoy viewers.After one of the boys does something unspeakably stupid (he’s a kid, yes, and an ostensibly brainwashed one, yes, but still), it’s hard to keep caring. Berry is drained of glamour for her role here, and she performs with fierceness; the two boys are also stalwart, but what the movie asks these child performers to do doesn’t add up to effective horror — it’s just opportunistic and gross.Never Let GoRated R for language, grisliness and morbid imagery. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘In the Summers’ Review: Understanding a Father’s Flaws

    The film, by Alessandra Lacorazza, follows two siblings as they visit their father, played by Residente, in New Mexico.“In the Summers” follows two siblings, Violeta and Eva, as they visit their father over four staggered summers from childhood to adulthood. Most of the year, they live in California with their mother, but both she and their lives there go unseen. The film, told in chapters, depicts only the most sweltering months, which they spend in Las Cruces, N.M., with their father, Vicente, played by René Pérez Joglar, also known as the rapper and singer Residente.The movie, written and directed by Alessandra Lacorazza, won the top prize for an American fiction feature at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It increases in power as it proceeds, as Violeta (played in succession by Dreya Castillo, Kimaya Thais Limon and, from last year’s “Mutt,” Lío Mehiel) and Eva (Luciana Elisa Quiñonez, Allison Salinas and Sasha Calle) grow older and gain sharper understandings of their father’s flaws. Each segment begins with their arrival at the airport. Vicente’s temper is apparent in the first section, when he explodes at a stranger in an amusement park after she tries to help a sick Eva.Soon after that, Vicente’s dangerous driving habits emerge as a motif. In one chapter, to impress the children, he swerves recklessly at night, making a game out of not stopping. In another, Violeta has to prevent him from driving drunk. (Emma Ramos as Carmen, the bartender who drives them home and who has known Vicente for years, is in some ways Lacorazza’s secret weapon. Her character becomes a watchful eye and sounding board for the siblings.)Vicente can’t seem to keep track of Violeta and Eva’s ages. But even with his wavering attention, he is capable of flashes of warmth. He works as a tutor and has a knack for explaining things. In a sweet early scene, he pours chili flakes on a pizza to illustrate how scientists can estimate the number of stars in a given area. And even at his most irresponsible — he introduces the teenage Violeta to marijuana, reasoning that it’s better to smoke it in a safe place — he often means well. A late scene in which he haltingly tries to apologize for his shortcomings constitutes the film’s most perfectly underplayed moment.Pérez Joglar becomes the movie’s through line, a constant presence who has to act against a changing roster of co-stars. If the casting shifts aren’t always persuasive, Vicente’s limited ability to perceive Eva and Violeta is part of the point. The structural conceit is the most engaging aspect of “In the Summers,” even if it gives the storytelling some perspective issues. (While Vicente sees Violeta and Eva only during the summer, they in theory see each other much more regularly.) Lacorazza’s deftness with actors, feel for the setting and aesthetic decisions — shooting in the snapshot-like 1.66-to-1 aspect ratio, or leaving the characters’ Spanish without subtitles — help the drama ring true.In the SummersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Featherweight’ Review: Boxing Is Easy. Retirement Is Hard.

    In this biopic, a documentary crew follows the boxer Willie Pep during his 1960s comeback.In “The Featherweight,” James Madio nimbly portrays Willie Pep, the boxing champion from Connecticut whom The Ring magazine once nicknamed the Hartford Tornado.The movie, directed by Robert Kolodny, opens on the acclaimed pugilist in 1964, two decades after he started his career and five years after he first retired. At 42, Pep has been selling autographed photos and other memorabilia, a requirement and curse of a fading fame. He often appears with his nemesis, Sandy Saddler (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), a Black featherweight champ who is along for the downward slide.Pep is angling for a comeback, which is the reason a documentary film crew is trailing him. “The Featherweight” is the fruit of their fly-on-the-wall ubiquity.In Hartford, Pep lives with his much younger wife, Linda (Ruby Wolf), an aspiring actress, and his mother (Imma Aiello), who doesn’t much like Linda. His grown son, Billy Jr. (Keir Gilchrist), is openly antagonistic. Talk about bobbing and weaving.Pep often engages the crew with a sweet and cocky slyness, which befits a boxer who would amass almost 230 wins during his career. That doesn’t mean he’s happy being filmed bullying one of Linda’s fellow actors or being battered at his old gym once he returns to his former trainer, Bill Gore (Stephen Lang).Kolodny handles his movie-as-documentary conceit with subtle flair and finesse. For a subgenre as crowded with movies as boxing has weight classes, “The Featherweight” isn’t a knockout. But it does land more than a glancing blow.The FeatherweightNot rated. In English, with some Italian in subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Eureka’ Review: No More Cowboys and Indians

    This intriguingly languorous Western by the Argentine director Lisandro Alonso explores the existential plight of Indigenous Americans in three separate timelines.In the beginning of “Eureka,” we’re plunged into the Wild West — and it’s pretty much how the movies have always imagined it. A rogue gunman (Viggo Mortensen) hitches a wagon ride into town; unfriendly locals squint at him in a rowdy pub; guns are drawn and brains are blown out.There’s something overly affected — comically macho — about this standard revenge plot. That’s by design. We zoom out from the black-and-white drama, which is playing on a TV set, and enter the modern world: colorful, yes, but with none of the exaggerated emotions and chest-thumping justice-seekers of the earlier sequence.“Eureka,” an intriguingly languorous, visually audacious drama from the Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, is about the existential plight of modern-day Indigenous Americans — people too often trapped in the fictions created by others.In the present, we follow the wonderfully deadpan Alaina (Alaina Clifford), a cop in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, where the problems far outnumber the staff on the sheriff’s payroll. That’s not to say that Alaina fends off gunslingers — there are missing children, people with intense substance abuse problems; grim realities that feel distressingly typical.In another plotline, Sadie (Sadie LaPointe), a young woman with a deceptively chipper manner, shoots hoops by herself; visits her cousin in jail; chats with an actress (Chiara Mastroianni) passing through the reservation. LaPointe’s is a beautiful performance: a slight crack in her voice, the flicker of her eyes, conveys the strength it takes to persist — to keep a straight face — within such bleak circumstances.Ultimately, the film feels a bit misshapen. A third act set in the jungles of Brazil in the 1970s depicts tribe members discussing their livelihoods as gold prospectors encroach on their lands. Here, extra-long shots of wild splendor and oblique talk of dreams makes the film go from patient to listless. At this stage, it’s a challenging sit, but perhaps that’s the point considering where we started.EurekaNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘All Shall Be Well’ Review: Aching With Absence

    The indignity of being someone’s spouse while they are alive and merely a friend after their death is the theme of this extraordinarily moving Hong Kong drama.The delicately crafted drama “All Shall Be Well” opens on the easy intimacy between life partners. Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) and Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin) amble along a wooded path, their elbows softly bumping. Back in their apartment, Angie scoops tea leaves while Pat pours boiling water. Later, the pair sit before their vanity sharing daubs of moisturizer.Set in Hong Kong, this graceful picture of love soon swivels to become one of loss when Pat dies unexpectedly. Nearly catatonic with grief, Angie finds comfort with in-laws, particularly Pat’s luckless brother, Shing (Tai Bo), and his superstitious wife, Mei (Hui So Ying). But the family closeness collapses once an attorney informs them that, without a will or marriage license from abroad, Pat’s estate — including the home the couple lived in for decades — will go to Pat’s next of kin, Shing.The indignity of being someone’s spouse while they are alive and merely a friend after their death is the theme of this moving film, which brims with compassion and uses a silky light touch. The writer-director, Ray Yeung, prefers his camera static or, when observing Angie’s queer chosen family, dollying ever so slightly, as if to telegraph the buoyancy they bring.But the film’s most extraordinary trick is how Pat’s presence hovers over the film. It is a feat of filmmaking and performance that a character only onscreen for a few scenes can feel truly missed by the audience. The home Pat and Angie built together aches with her absence, and so does the film.All Shall Be WellNot rated. In Cantonese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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    The Enduring Simplicity of Galaxie 500

    The pioneering 1980s dream-pop band has now unveiled its entire studio catalog, mistakes and all.Dean Wareham has a Google Alert set for his first full-time band, Galaxie 500, named after a friend’s vintage Ford. With Wareham as its guitarist and lead singer, the band lasted a little over three years — from 1987 to early 1991 — and made just three albums for an indie label that went bankrupt.Galaxie 500’s biggest headlining gigs were appearances for only club-sized audiences. Its music never reached the American album charts. And Wareham and the other two band members, the bassist and singer Naomi Yang and the drummer Damon Krukowski — who are married — haven’t spoken or been in the same room since 1991, when Wareham quit the band on the verge of a tour of Japan. (They deal with Galaxie 500 business via email.)But decades later, Google Alerts for Galaxie 500 keep arriving.“Sometimes it’s a car for sale, but a lot of times it’s a review,” Wareham said in a video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles. “And yeah, every week there’s a review of something that thinks it sounds like Galaxie 500. There’s a lot of that. But they don’t, really.”This Friday, the final remnants of Galaxie 500’s brief but luminous studio recording career will be released as “Uncollected Noise New York, ’88-’90.” The new album adds eight previously unreleased songs to a group of non-album tracks that were included in 1996 as part of a Galaxie 500 boxed set, then reissued separately in 2004 as the album “Uncollected.”“When we made these records, if you had told me that 30 years later, 35 years later, people would still be excited about them, I would be most surprised,” Wareham said.The added tracks reveal how rigorously Galaxie 500 judged its music, even from the beginning. “I think we were good editors. I still think these were the right tracks to reject,” Krukowski said by video from his and Yang’s home in Cambridge, Mass. “I don’t think it’s hidden gems. It’s more like telling the story in a different way. It’s a narrative thing, which I think is why we were all OK with it.”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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    In the Sean Combs Case, Echoes of the Tack Taken Against Other Powerful Men

    Federal authorities are prosecuting Mr. Combs under sex trafficking and racketeering laws, which were used to successfully prosecute R. Kelly and Keith Raniere in earlier abuse cases.Though graphic and startling in its details, the indictment of Sean Combs reflects a familiar playbook for federal prosecutions against high-profile men accused of a long-running history of abuse against women.The Combs indictment, which was unsealed on Tuesday, resembles the prosecution strategy employed in two other major sexual abuse cases brought by federal investigators in recent years against Keith Raniere, the Nxivm sex cult leader, and R. Kelly, the R&B singer.Both of those men were convicted on some of the same sex trafficking and racketeering charges now facing Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty.Racketeering charges are attractive to prosecutors pursuing powerful defendants because they are designed to present an “enterprise,” a complex web of individuals who helped the defendants carry out alleged crimes that can date back many years. In Mr. Combs’s case, for example, prosecutors have assembled their racketeering conspiracy charge by accusing him of crimes dating as far back as 2008, including arson, kidnapping, bribery and narcotics distribution.In some instances, the federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges allow prosecutors to cite crimes for which a state’s statute of limitations has expired.And the federal laws carry stiff punishments: The most severe sex trafficking law that Mr. Combs has been charged under carries a 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentence. The racketeering conspiracy charge, which accuses defendants of carrying out crimes as part of an “enterprise,” carries up to life in prison.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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    ‘Wolfs’ Review: Brad Pitt and George Clooney as Themselves

    They play underworld fixers in this trifle of a movie, though really they’re here to look enviably fabulous.“Wolfs” — a new something or other starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt — would like you to think it’s a thriller with a helping of comedy, though maybe a comedy with guns and guts. Whatever the case, it isn’t remotely tense or mysterious, and its modest thrills derive wholly from the spectacle of two beautifully aged, primped, pampered and expensive film stars going through the motions with winks and a degree of brittle charm. The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, “Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.Clooney and Pitt play underworld fixers, the kind of misterioso professionals whom people with power and money hire to clean up their messes. Much like the character in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” played by Harvey Keitel — named Winston Wolfe but known as the Wolf — the fixers here swoop in and, with some elbow grease and a duffel bag large enough to hold a body, discreetly make the problem go away, or that’s the idea. Tarantino’s influence is conspicuous throughout “Wolfs,” most notably in its reams of self-aware dialogue, theatricality, casual violence and focus on characters talking to and at each other, including in a diner booth.The fixers in “Wolfs” meet cute, as it were, early on when Pitt’s unnamed character interrupts Clooney’s mid-job inside a sprawling penthouse in a New York hotel. Since neither character has a name, it’s easier to refer to the actors playing them, which is very much to the movie’s meta-referential point. Clooney is tidying up a gruesome mess involving a local politician, Pam (a reliably appealing Amy Ryan). Faced with a potentially career-torpedoing situation — there’s blood and shattered glass on the floor, along with what may be the body of a dead male prostitute — Pam has speed-dialed a mysterious number hoping for help. Clooney comes to the rescue, and it’s on.Pitt’s arrival baffles Clooney and adds to what becomes a messier, more dangerous problem. After some teasingly testy back and forth, the two settle into a wary partnership. Pam cleans up and splits as Clooney cleverly deals with her mess in between side-eyeing Pitt. (If you ever wanted to know how to unobtrusively move a body, this movie offers a helpful to-do list.) And then Pitt spies a backpack holding several bricks of drugs, and the cleanup becomes instantly far more complicated. It gets trickier still when the body turns out to be alive, and he flees into the night. Called the Kid (Austin Abrams), he looks a bit like Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” another nocturnal adventure that racks up mileage in downtown New York.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