Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Juliet & Romeo’ Review: Tragedy Executed as Farce

    This movie musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers is no “& Juliet” — that is, it’s no fun.There have been scores (sorry) of musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedy of star-crossed lovers over the centuries. Not just operas — there’s Berlioz’s dramatic symphony; Prokofiev’s ballet; the comedic jukebox musical on Broadway, “& Juliet,” in which the heroine leaves Romeo to die and chooses life for herself. “Juliet and Romeo,” from the writer-director Timothy Scott Bogart and his composer-songwriter brother, Evan Kidd Bogart, is more self-serious.The movie begins, a narrator says, “In the year 1301” when “Italy was only an idea.” In this movie’s idea of 1301, characters jumble up modern and Shakespearean language; “Romeo, where the hell art thou,” someone from the hero’s posse shouts early on. And while “& Juliet” uses pop songs, for this picture the composers Bogart and Justin Gray try to concoct tunes that sound like those of Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff. “There’s a whole lot of wrong here but we get it right, we get it right,” goes one lyric.Veteran actors including Jason Isaacs, Derek Jacobi and Rebel Wilson add spice where they’re able; the costumes are colorful, and as Juliet, Clara Rugaard is fresh-faced and appealing. (As Romeo, on the other hand, Jamie Ward mostly looks like he’s trying to find a boy band to join.)The Bogarts are sons of Neil Bogart, the blockbuster record exec who empowered both Kiss and Donna Summer back in the day. Watching this largely misbegotten movie (which seems to fulfill all of its aspirations with an utterly tacky ending), then, sometimes brought to mind the sardonic Steely Dan tune “Show Biz Kids.”Juliet & RomeoRated PG-13 for salty non-Shakespearean language, one supposes. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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    ‘Clown in a Cornfield’ Review: Stalkers

    In this underbaked slasher film, killer bozos terrorize teens in the American heartland.“Clown in a Cornfield,” a new teen slasher film from the writer-director Eli Craig, is both silly and as sincere as an honor student’s term paper. To its credit, it uses horror to examine the economic woes of the deteriorating Midwest and the emotional shortcomings of the working-class Gen X-ers and baby boomers who never left there.What it could have used is the kind of whip smart satire that made Craig’s superior film “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” (2011) a horror-comedy paragon.The film is set in a small Missouri farming community that was once home to, and defined by, a thriving corn syrup operation with a clown mascot known as Frendo. New in town are Quinn (Katie Douglas, terrific) and her doctor father (Aaron Abrams), who quickly discover how damaged the town became after a mysterious fire crippled the company.Just as Quinn starts to make friends, along come some psychopaths who dress like Frendo and kill select young folk to prevent them from leaving town and achieving their dreams. Or something like that. It’s hard to discern: In adapting Adam Cesare’s novel, Carter Blanchard and Craig have crafted a screenplay that focuses more on grisly (and often gnarly) slaughters than on providing answers to the killer cabal’s motivations. A gay romance provides a sweet if underdeveloped detour.A lackluster horror movie gets points if the leading villain is a real bugaboo. But the Frendos, alas, look like poser versions of Pennywise, Art the Clown and other, scarier horror bozos.Clown in a CornfieldRated R for clown-caused carnage. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Sympathy for the Devil, er Boss: In ‘The Studio,’ the Powerful Are on Defense

    Seth Rogen’s cringe-y Hollywood honcho is well-intentioned but ineffectual. The actor’s awkward laugh has never been put to better use.Matt Remick desperately wants to be considered important. His problem is that he’s recently become a Hollywood mogul, which is like getting a job as a DEI consultant right now. The timing’s not great.This week, in the best episode of the debut season of the fizzy Apple TV+ series “The Studio,” Remick, played with impeccable neediness by Seth Rogen, arrives at the Golden Globes full of anticipation, only to be disappointed to find influencers taking selfies, instead of famous actors wanting to talk to him. Pushed aside by Charli D’Amelio, he strikes a weary tone: “I remember when the red carpet of the Golden Globes actually stood for something.”It’s a wonderfully dry and absurd joke, treating the most superficial part of awards season with preposterous gravity. But it’s also funny because Rogen says the line as if he’s straining to play a part that doesn’t quite fit him, a man of consequence.“The Studio,” which was just renewed for a second season, belongs to the genre of Hollywood satire in which fictional characters interact with real celebrities playing presumably more vain and craven versions of themselves (see also “Hacks”). But what makes the show distinctive is its exploration of a broader, more topical theme: the collapse of the power of bosses in prestige industries.Not long ago, it seemed as if everyone wanted to be the head of a Condé Nast magazine, a major book publishing house or a studio. Now whether the editor of Vanity Fair is a good job is an open question. Tech oligarchs have the most swagger in the culture, and social media has diminished the marketing muscle of publishers and studios. While managing the decline of traditional media is a challenge for the movie business, it’s an opportunity for satirists.Rogen and his longtime partner, Evan Goldberg, who are among the creators of “The Studio,” locate and exploit this cultural shift, giving comedy a new kind of corporate suit. Their insight is that the Hollywood mogul, long seen as an intimidating, cigar-chomping heavy, can now credibly be positioned as a comedic underdog — or even a likable buffoon.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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    ‘Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted’ Review: In the Deep End

    The movie offers full-on immersion, or perhaps submersion, in the singer-songwriter’s musical world.Premises for documentaries don’t come much more casual than in “Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted,” a profile organized around exactly what the title says. As the singer-songwriter Swamp Dogg, born Jerry Williams Jr., awaits the completion of a custom paint job on his pool in Los Angeles, he hangs out on the patio with various friends (including, at one point, Johnny Knoxville of “Jackass”) who drop by to reminisce. The directors — Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson — observe.The movie offers full-on immersion, or perhaps submersion, in Swamp Dogg’s world. His daughter Dr. Jeri Williams, a neurologist (“I’ve got five daughters, but this is the main one,” Swamp Dogg says), likens his home in Northridge to a bachelor pad for “aging musicians.” For years, Swamp Dogg let some of his musical collaborators, like David Kearney, who performed as Guitar Shorty and died in 2022, and Larry Clemon, known as Moogstar, live there too.With Swamp Dogg as MC, the film dutifully checks off biographical highlights: how Little Jerry Williams came up through R&B beginning in the 1950s; how he changed his name to Swamp Dogg in 1970 (“Jerry Williams just seemed too soft”); how the politics of his music (he played in Jane Fonda’s touring anti-war show in 1971) led, he says, to questions from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.In addition, you’ll hear about how Swamp Dogg arranges the TVs in his home, about his recipe book (“If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It”) and about that time he put out an album of pets singing Beatles songs. At one point, the musician’s phone rings. He answers, “I’m in the middle of an interview. Call me later.” Somehow, an editor thought that was worth keeping — which should indicate how much this fans-only documentary gets bogged down with dull asides.Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool PaintedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Lilly’ Review: She Did It Her Way

    Patricia Clarkson plays the equal pay activist Lilly Ledbetter in this misty-eyed drama.The equal pay activist Lilly Ledbetter made headlines in 2007 when she sued her employer, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, for gender discrimination, resulting in a Supreme Court case and, eventually, the passage of the Fair Pay Act.“Lilly,” directed by Rachel Feldman, arrives a year after Ledbetter’s death at 86. With a cringey inspirational tone, the movie weaves in Ledbetter’s advocacy work and court case with moments from her personal life.Beginning in 1979, when Ledbetter (Patricia Clarkson) started working for Goodyear, this hagiographic film shows the working-class mother of two as a steely, principled matriarch from Alabama going toe-to-toe with her condescending colleagues. Before retiring, she discovers that her monthly salary is significantly less than her male co-workers — a glaring discrepancy considering she’s the company’s only female supervisor.Distracting pop-music needle drops and hammy performances give “Lilly” the feel of a Lifetime movie. When the story jumps forward to the 2000s, shifting from black-and-white to color, the film speeds through Ledbetter’s initial court case and positions her as something of a celebrity, taking meetings with representatives in Congress and eventually campaigning for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns.Archival clips (featuring mostly Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the dissenting opinion when the rest of the Supreme Court ruled against Ledbetter’s lawsuit) do the work of explaining Ledbetter’s steady rise in the public consciousness. But the frequency with which the clips are employed feels unintentionally surreal and glitchy, adding more tonal weirdness to an already disjointed and mawkish film.LillyRated PG-13 for workplace abuse and depictions of illness. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Friendship’ Review: Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd Hit Maximum Cringe

    Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd star in the kind of comedy you watch from behind your hands.One of the most unforgivable (and unforgettable) sins you can commit in youth, say around the sixth grade, happens when you’re desperate to join a new friend group. You want to be cool. You want to be part of their circle. So when someone cracks a joke, you laugh with everyone, then add your own hilarious rejoinder — and everyone just stares. Some invisible line has been crossed. You took the joke too far, and now it’s dead and, with it, your social life, your reputation and your chances of ever being happy again.This feeling goes a long way toward explaining why “Friendship,” the new cringe-com starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, is often funny and always distressing. The feature debut of the writer and director Andrew DeYoung definitely shares DNA with “I Think You Should Leave,” Robinson’s hit Netflix comedy series, in which he usually plays a guy who can’t quite make out the social cues everyone else seems to follow without trying. So he’s always doing something bizarre, and it’s funny because it’s uncomfortable.This makes Robinson the perfect, and possibly only, lead for DeYoung’s script. It’s about a man named Craig Waterman who has attained the markers of adulthood — a lovely wife (Tami, played by Kate Mara), a teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer) who still at least talks to him, gainful employment, a nice-enough house — but is functionally still the sixth grader in that friend circle.Except Craig, being a certain variety of grown American man, doesn’t have friends, per se. He has Tami, who is almost unbelievably nice to him given he’s sort of a putz: obsessed with avoiding Marvel spoilers, loyal to only one brand of clothing that he apparently sources from a restaurant called Ocean View Dining. His co-workers joke around with one another on their smoke breaks, which he watches from his office window, nose all but pressed against the glass. Then, one day, he meets the new neighbor, Austin Carmichael (Rudd), who turns out to be the coolest guy Craig could imagine. Austin has a mustache. He’s the local weatherman. He plays in a band. He buys antique weaponry. He knows just which rules to break to have a good time.So Craig develops a kind of obsession with Austin, not exactly the creepy kind but not exactly uncreepy, either. Hanging out with Austin, Craig can see a different future for himself, one in which he is a rad, manly, sought-after leader who jams out on the drums and impresses everyone around him. If Craig hangs out with Austin, people will want to be his friend, too.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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    ‘Fight or Flight’ Review: Conned Air

    Josh Hartnett plays a rugged mercenary in an airborne action movie that struggles to stay on course.In “Fight or Flight,” Josh Hartnett plays Lucas Reyes, an alcoholic bleached-blonde mercenary who is living in exile in Thailand.Desperate to recapture his old life, Lucas accepts a job from a mysterious company led by his ex-girlfriend, Katherine (Katee Sackhoff). He needs to board a flight heading from Bangkok to San Francisco and, while midair, apprehend an assassin named the Ghost.Like “Bullet Train,” the bad guys in “Fight or Flight” are a bevy of assassins who are keen to collect the bounty on the Ghost’s head. Reyes’s only help comes from Isha (Charithra Chandran), a young, virtuous flight attendant. Because the action takes place mostly inside the plane, the staging can be repetitive. The only surprises are the tools used for bloodshed, such as a chain saw or a climbing ax, which an invigorated Hartnett wields in the film’s climactic acid trip freakout sequence.The director, James Madigan, doesn’t fully commit to the single location: He often cuts back to Katherine’s comedic bickering with her sniveling co-worker (Julian Kostov) and even positions the film’s stakes as the cessation of child labor.Hartnett and Chandran’s laid back chemistry steady the film’s turbulent tonal shifts, adding a punch that the shakily choreographed action lacks. Hartnett and Chandran are so good together, Madigan’s last-second setup for a possible sequel doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.Fight or FlightRated R for strong bloody violence and heavy drink service. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Caught by the Tides’ Review: Jia Zhangke Sees Constant Flux

    The Chinese director shot two decades of footage to for his new film, which captures his country in tumult and one woman living through it.In “Caught by the Tides,” the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke tracks a woman, a couple and a country across two tumultuous, transformational decades. As emotionally effective as it is formally brilliant, it draws on a trove of material — both fiction and nonfiction — that Jia began shooting in 2001 while working on another movie. He continued to document a dizzyingly changing China, a heroic project that has finally resulted in “Caught by the Tides,” a tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.Jia has directed more than a dozen feature-length movies since his 1997 drama “Pickpocket,” about a low-level thief, but the impoverished state of foreign-language distribution in the United States means that his work tends to quickly slip in and out of art houses here before heading to living rooms. He’s a rock star on the international festival circuit, however, and a favorite of the Cannes Film Festival, where his movies regularly screen in competition. Jia won the best screenplay award at Cannes for his 2013 masterpiece “A Touch of Sin,” but he tends to be overlooked by juries because while his movies aren’t difficult, they don’t offer obvious pleasures. They’re thoughtful, and they need to be watched thoughtfully in turn.That’s true of “Caught by the Tides,” which follows a character who’s been featured in some of Jia’s earlier features, Qiaoqiao — Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife and longtime star — a willowy stunner with sharply planed cheekbones and a steady, penetrating gaze. That gaze is especially crucial here because while Zhao’s star charisma immediately commands your attention, her character never says a word. Instead, Qiaoqiao texts and she watches, observing the world and the people in it with eyes that, at times, flash with amusement and anger. When she’s with lover, Bin (Li Zhubin), her eyes also pool with tears that he doesn’t deserve.Zhao is a sensitive, subtly expressive screen performer who can convey a world of feeling with a single look. Even so, a heroine who can speak but doesn’t could have been risky for Jia because her silence could drain the character of complexity and, importantly, a sense of female agency. Here, though, everything that needs to be said is said both in bits of conversation that fill in the elliptical story and in the many documentary passages, which makes her a stand-in for Jia. Bin, a small-time hood more interested in money than in Qiaoqiao, does speak, yet his words are invariably less eloquent than her (and Jia’s) quiet.The story, such as it is, opens in the northern city of Datong and emerges gradually without the usual filmmaking preamble and prompts. If Jia has ever read a screenwriting manual, he probably immediately tossed it, laughing. His work fits more readily into art-cinema traditions than those of Hollywood, but is nevertheless insistently nonprogrammatic. “Caught by the Tides” takes place over some 20 years that, contrary to convention, aren’t shaped into neatly defined three (four or five) acts. Instead, time in the movie flows, just as in life. One minute, Qiaoqiao is young and has a bob and bangs; in the next she’s clearly older, and appears more inwardly directed, her now-long hair pulled back in a ponytail.Qiao and Bin’s emotionally fraught romance winds throughout “Caught by the Tides,” but the movie’s heart and its obvious sympathies are more with her than with him. About a half-hour into the movie, she appears one night watching a joyful, raucous crowd flooding the street. It’s 2001, and China has just been named as the host of the 2008 summer Olympics. (“China won!”) The country is on the move, and Qiaoqiao soon will be too. Shortly thereafter, Bin splits to pursue a business venture elsewhere, and she follows. She’ll keep on following him for the remainder of the movie amid national milestones, more crowds, dramatic turns, many songs and a multitude of young and old, unlined and weathered faces.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