Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Dirty Angels’ Review: Women on a Mission

    In this heavy-handed action movie, Eva Green plays a Marine who leads a squad trying to rescue schoolgirls in Afghanistan.The action thriller “Dirty Angels” — a fictional story about a group of soldiers who set out to rescue kidnapped schoolgirls in Afghanistan held hostage by members of the Islamic State, or ISIS — suffers from the discord between the real-life conflicts that make up its setting and the cartoonish characters who propel its plot.It opens by introducing its villain: Amir (George Iskandar), a smirking ISIS member who will soon lead the capture of the schoolgirls. He kills indiscriminately, but in case that isn’t enough to telegraph his terror, an ominous score overlays his every move. Who could stop him but our hero, Jake (Eva Green, grunting her lines)? She’s a steely Marine, who was once held captive by ISIS and joins the women-led recovery mission to avenge her former unit.The director, Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale”), uses his genre pedigree to assemble a series of bloody shootouts that build the women’s squad-goals morale while establishing their toughness. They even elect to ditch names — too girlie, surely — in favor of “functions”: Mechanic (Rona-Lee Shimon), the Bomb (Maria Bakalova), Shooter (Emily Bruni), Geek (Jojo T. Gibbs).But while the movie flouts traditional gender roles, it easily plays into stereotypes about race and religion. The saviors speak English and the terrorists speak Pashto; in one sequence, the commandos slip into enemy territory by donning niqabs as disguises. The title, presumably a gesture at the rescue team being female but ruthless, is at least accurate: For much of her time onscreen, Green is covered in grime.Dirty AngelsRated R for brutal violence. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Young Werther’ Review: Updating an 18th-Century Love Triangle

    This charming film, starring Douglas Booth and Alison Pill, bridges the gap between Goethe’s novel and the adaptation’s modern New York City setting.There is a boisterously nimble quality to the way in which Douglas Booth plays the titular character of “Young Werther.”With hair perpetually coifed, Werther has the look of an uppity trust-fund kid, but Booth plays him more like a dandy mixed with a golden retriever, transported from another era yet born yesterday.His interpretation bridges a kind of spiritual gap between the 18th-century German novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that the film is based on and the modern New York City milieu that this charming adaptation takes place in. The movie, written and directed by José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço, focuses on the trials of Werther, an idealistic young man caught in a love triangle. After meeting and falling in love with Charlotte (Alison Pill), a woman he spends a whirlwind night with at a party, Werther is stunned to hear that she’s already engaged. Charlotte’s fiancé, Albert (Patrick J. Adams), is stable and sweet, but he doesn’t make time for her. Werther, on the other hand, is a romantic adventure.He is all jokes and jolly energy, an irresistible foil to Charlotte’s typically constricted outlook. Booth and Pill make for a pair worth rooting for, but it’s Booth in particular, just barely but believably not of this world, who lends the film its winning sensibility.He’s helped by the film’s warmly pleasing focus, where the edges of the frame blur around the central characters, often Werther and Charlotte laughing and falling for one another. It’s as if we’re looking through a telescope, a representation of both the tunnel vision of love and also of a tragic romance of centuries past.Young WertherRated R for some language and sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘The Man in the White Van’ Review: Sleazy Rider

    In this derivative thriller, set in the early 1970s, young women are stalked by an anonymous killer.“The Man in the White Van,” loosely based on the exploits of the Florida killer Billy Mansfield, Jr., is a flaccid and formulaic thriller more beholden to horror-movie conventions than those of true crime.Unfolding mainly in 1975 in an anonymous suburb, the story (by the director, Warren Skeels, and Sharon Y. Cobb) centers on Annie (Madison Wolfe), a 15-year-old tomboy unnerved by a mysterious white van that appears to be following her. Neither her religious parents (Ali Larter and Sean Astin) nor her prissy older sister (Brec Bassinger) believe her, attributing her fears to an overactive imagination.Or maybe puberty, a not-so-subtle subtext here as Annie develops a crush on the new boy in school (Noah Lomax) and learns to shave her legs. A drop of blood flowers in the bathroom sink; a slithering snake spooks Annie’s horse. In this kind of movie, few places are more hazardous than the cusp of womanhood.Brief glimpses of the killer’s previous victims — via hasty flashbacks to muffled screams and van-door slams — interrupt Annie’s travails. But while Wolfe is an engaging screen presence, the movie is too clumsy and clichéd to conjure tension. Virtually every sighting of the van is accompanied by a clashing-cymbals sound effect and camera angles that distractingly recall much better movies about malevolently motivated vehicles.All of which makes “The Man in the White Van” feel both amateurish and derivative. Keeping the violence — and the villain — mainly in the shadows, the filmmakers build to a climax that’s frustratingly dumb and drawn-out. In the press notes, we learn that the movie is part of a “social impact campaign” to raise money for missing children. Hopefully the cash it raises will be greater than its chills.The Man in the White VanRated PG-13 for a little blood and a lot of smoking. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Nickel Boys’ Review: Childhood’s Brutal End

    This visually inventive adaptation of a Colson Whitehead novel follows two boys at an abusive school in Jim Crow-era Florida.The first time that you clearly and truly see the teenage heartbreaker in “Nickel Boys,” he is walking up to a new friend. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) has just arrived at the fictional reform school referenced in the title when he sits down opposite Turner (Brandon Wilson) at a communal table. They’re in a large dining room crowded with children of varying sizes, shapes and bearings, and while some seem to be on the cusp of manhood, many look too obscenely young to be here. Their chatter and laughter obscures the horrors of this place. You only need to look closer to see that some of these children are already ghosts.Different types of kids populate RaMell Ross’s painful, boldly expressionistic adaptation of the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel, “The Nickel Boys.” The children at the school are by turns determined, defeated and stunned, almost hollowed out. Ross cradles them all in a soft, beautiful light. With great sensitivity to the power of the cinematic image — and to the history of abject representations of Black humanity — he keeps on cradling them. Even when the story turns unbearably cruel, Ross insists on beauty as an imperative; it is, among other things, a rebuke to the annihilating ugliness of Nickel and to those who oblige its horrors.Elwood arrives at the Nickel Academy, as it’s called, after he’s unfairly caught up in an injustice. It’s 1962 when a sympathetic teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails) taps Elwood — a sober, studious 16-year-old high-school student in Tallahassee, Fla. — to take a class at a local college. On his first day to the college, Elwood inadvertently hitches a ride with a car thief. Wrongly implicated in the crime, he is taken from the home he shares with his loving grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who, with his parents long gone, is raising him on her own. He’s subsequently sent to Nickel, where his story begins in earnest.“A prison for children” is how a 1903 report referred to the Jim Crow-era emblem, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which had been founded just three years earlier and would inspire Whitehead’s novel. There, for decade after decade, hundreds of ostensibly troubled boys, most Black, were confined, worked, terrorized and killed. (Among their offenses: “incorrigibility.”) Some disappeared. About 100 children are known to have died at the school from fire, disease, blunt-force trauma and gunshot wounds. After Florida shut down the school in 2011 following several investigations, one by the Justice Department, the state ordered a separate inquiry that led to the excavation of 55 unmarked graves.The movie, written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, adheres to the novel’s narrative arc even as it condenses the story. In vivid, dreamy visual bursts, Ross glides over Elwood’s early childhood and explores his growing interest in the civil rights movement, which he carries to Nickel. There, Elwood settles into the racially segregated quarters, surveys the scene — he notes the Black students’ tattered clothing — and meets Turner. He also experiences Nickel’s culture of violence when, after defending another kid from bullies, some adult employees take him to a building called the White House. Inside this hell, he is so brutally flogged by a white supervisor (Hamish Linklater as Spencer) that he ends up in the school hospital.Ross takes an oblique approach to this scene, using narrative ellipses to avoid making a spectacle out of sadistic white violence on Black bodies. To that end, as he does from the very beginning of the movie, he shows you only what Elwood sees, a strategy that pulls you to the character and which Ross sustains for an unusually long time for a commercial movie. Through Elwood’s darting eyes and keen ears, you see and hear what he does. In the White House, you hear the rhythm of the strap and the thunderous roar of a fan that never fully obscures the children’s cries. You see a light, a Bible, another boy’s hand clutching a frantically jittering leg. You also see blood on Spencer’s shirt but not how it got there.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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    ‘Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ Review: Side Quest

    This anime adaptation, drawn from Tolkien’s appendices, focuses on a shield maiden, but mostly it serves as an excuse to revisit Middle-earth.There’s something so tantalizing about discovering the story within a story — the old tale, the side quest or the bit of lore that is relegated to a brief mention or note. Or, possibly, to a reference in the appendix. That’s the case in “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” a hot-and-cold anime adaptation of a tale mentioned in the appendices of “The Lord of the Rings.”Taking place pre-Peter Jackson trilogy and post-Amazon series, and directed by Kenji Kamiyama (“Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex”), the movie is based on a story from the history of Rohan, a kingdom of men known to be great horse-tamers and riders. Almost 200 years before the War of the Ring, Rohan is facing a mighty rift within its own boundaries, as a Dunlending lord named Wulf seeks a bloody path to the throne held by Helm Hammerhand, voiced by Brian Cox (and, yes, Helm as in Helm’s Deep, the battle site in “The Two Towers,” the second Jackson film). As fighting breaks out, putting both the Helm house and the people of Rohan at risk, Helm’s only daughter, a wild and untamed princess fated for little more than an advantageous marriage, becomes the warrior who defines the battle’s conclusion.Helm’s daughter is unnamed in the appendices, but here she gets both a name — Héra — and a central role in the story, as the eyes through which we see the action unfold. Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), her family’s fastest equestrian, descends from a tradition of Rohan shield maidens, as does her casually badass lady in waiting, Olwyn. The narrator is Éowyn (voiced by Miranda Otto, who played the character in Jackson’s trilogy), another shield maiden who tells the story 200 years after the film’s events. So while “War of the Rohirrim” feels like a noble attempt to expand the number of valiant women characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s canon, Héra doesn’t feel fully realized. Though she’s independent and bonded to nature, the character lacks personality and feels ancillary to the story. Even the film’s bid to add dimension, by, say, including a flashback of Héra’s childhood friendship with Wulf, plays as a forced attempt to weave this character into the larger drama of the movie.Part of the issue here is the built-in constraints to the narrative: The War of the Rohirrim takes up less than three pages in the appendices to Tolkien’s already meticulously detailed and beloved “Lord of the Rings,” so there is, understandably, a bit of reticence to the storytelling in the film. “The War of the Rohirrim” tries to strike the proper balance between remaining loyal to the Middle-earth created by Tolkien and imagined by Jackson while also introducing novel ideas to an adaptation of a lesser-known part of that universe.So although parts of the story feel predictable or familiar — particularly character tropes like the stubborn ruler, the loyal knight exiled from the kingdom and the one-dimensional villain hellbent on revenge — the film does succeed at recreating the fantasy world we know and love, just in a new anime format. It helps that this film shares much of the same creative team that worked on the Jackson films, and the unforgettable music, by Stephen Gallagher (music editor of the “Hobbit” trilogy), immediately sets this world within Jackson’s universe.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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    ‘Endless Summer Syndrome’ Review: Who’s Lying?

    In this sun-dappled French psychological thriller, a lawyer receives a call accusing her husband of having an affair with one of their children.Every year there seems to be a new book or movie on the subject of incest in France — most recently Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer.” Extending from this tradition, in which a sunny French bourgeois family is secretly rotting from the inside, is “Endless Summer Syndrome,” a promising debut feature by the Iranian director Kaveh Daneshmand that frames the crime as a twisty detective story.As Delphine (Sophie Colon), a lawyer, enjoys her final days of vacation in her family’s country villa, she receives an anonymous call from one of her husband’s co-workers telling her that Antoine (Matheo Capelli), a novelist, drunkenly confessed to having an affair with one of his children.Suddenly, Delphine’s blissful vacation turns into a paranoid inferno as she obsesses over her family’s dynamic and each member’s behaviors. Could the child in question be their coquettish 17-year-old daughter, Adia (Frédérika Milano)? Or Aslan (Gem Deger), their brooding college-bound eldest? Both Adia and Aslan were adopted, and Delphine and her husband’s bohemian parenting style (a topless Adia sunbathes in front of them, and Aslan at one point shares a joint with mom) now adds to Delphine’s suspicion that she’s surrounded by strangers.The luxe pastoral setting and slow-burning suspense recall the psychological thrillers of Patricia Highsmith and Claude Chabrol, while the magnetic Colon anchors the plot’s more sensational turns. The focus on Delphine’s mental state is a reminder that this is a story about betrayal, and the human cost of abandoning reason in the name of desire.The script falters when it attempts to pinpoint the dysfunctions of a modern family in the age of fluid sexual identities and multiculturalism. But none of these potentially intriguing avenues play out with much thought, diminishing the emotional effect of a tragedy that winds up seeming like an exercise in style.Endless Summer SyndromeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    YoungBoy Never Broke Again Sentenced to 23 Months in Prison For Gun Possession

    The rapper, whose real name is Kentrell Gaulden, admitted to possessing guns as a felon in Louisiana. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years.YoungBoy Never Broke Again, one of the most-streamed hip-hop artists in the United States, has been sentenced to nearly two years in prison by a federal judge in Utah for possessing weapons as a felon.The rapper, whose real name is Kentrell D. Gaulden, was sentenced on Tuesday to 23 months in prison on gun charges related to a case in Louisiana. Mr. Gaulden, 25, was also sentenced to five years of probation and fined $200,000 for a gun charge in a separate Utah case.Federal law bars gun ownership by felons. In 2017, Mr. Gaulden was convicted of aggravated assault with a firearm, a felony, in a Louisiana court. Details of that case could not be independently confirmed early Wednesday.In a plea agreement filed in the United States District Court in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Mr. Gaulden said that he had been in possession of three guns since his earlier felony conviction.In the first instance, Mr. Gaulden admitted to possessing two guns while filming a music video in Baton Rouge, La., in September 2020. In the second, a semiautomatic pistol was found in the master bedroom of his Utah home during a search, according to the plea agreement.He faced a maximum prison sentence of 10 years in the Louisiana case and 15 years in the Utah case.“This has been a long road that involved extensive litigation and ultimately extensive negotiation,” Mr. Gaulden’s lawyers said in a statement on Wednesday night. “Kentrell’s defense team is very happy for Kentrell and we look forward to his many future successes.”Mr. Gaulden, who is best known as NBA YoungBoy, has legions of dedicated fans. Many of his songs receive hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify and YouTube.But he has a history of legal problems.In 2022, Mr. Gaulden was found not guilty in a similar gun possession case in California. Police in the Los Angeles area had found a pistol and ammunition in the car he was driving. His lawyers argued that he did not know that the weapon was in the car at the time, and that his fingerprints were not found on the gun. More

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    Sundance Film Festival Unveils a Lineup Heavy on Politics

    The annual event also makes room for a remake of the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and the return of Justin Lin.There is a point during every Sundance Film Festival, usually as movie fans are trudging through the cold, slushy snow in Park City, Utah, when they wonder, why do they hold this in January? And yet, so often current events — most often of the political nature — are reflected not only in the films being screened on the mountain but also in the happenings around town.In January 2009, huge crowds gathered to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration. In January 2017, 4,000 festivalgoers, including Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart and Chelsea Handler, marched down Main Street the day after President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. The following year, amid a considerable snowstorm, Jane Fonda, Gloria Allred and Tessa Thompson gathered protesters with fiery speeches to coincide with the one-year anniversary of his presidency.The 2025 edition of Sundance will debut on Jan. 23, three days after Trump is inaugurated a second time, and the Sundance lineup suggests politics are on the mind of this year’s filmmakers.In the five-part documentary series “Bucks County, USA,” Barry Levinson and Robert May take a close look at two 14-year-old girls, best friends despite their opposing political beliefs, living at the epicenter of the nation’s political divide.The documentarian Sam Feder was shooting in Washington as recently as last week for “Heightened Scrutiny,” about the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio and his battle before the Supreme Court for transgender rights.“The Librarians,” from Kim A. Snyder, tracks the efforts of workers in Texas, Florida and other states to protect democracy amid a wave of book bans, while “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” from Mstyslav Chernov (“20 Days in Mariupol”) follows a Ukrainian platoon on a mission to liberate a strategic village.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