Aurelia Butler

This staid biopic of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, is less interested in what she did than what she represented.Shirley Chisholm was an American heroine who challenged simplistic political narratives of victory and defeat. Though her most famous effort — her bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972 — wasn’t successful, it was one chapter in a life’s worth of grit and innumerable wins, only a few of which can be measured by votes or contests.She was the working-class daughter of Caribbean immigrants who achieved academic excellence despite financial struggles; an educator who advocated powerfully the rights of children, particularly those from immigrant backgrounds; a self-made politician who, at the local and state levels, fought successfully for better representation for women and minorities; and, in 1968, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.It is a pity, then, that “Shirley,” John Ridley’s new biopic starring Regina King, focuses rather narrowly on Chisholm’s failed presidential campaign. The film reaches for the urgency of a political thriller, jumping between campaign meetings, backroom negotiations and rousing speeches. But the staid visuals — bright period colors softened by a nostalgic glow — and a script made up of a string of losses convey a dull sense of a fait accompli.Complex, meaningful events from Chisholm’s life and career become reductive paving stones in a despairing story of ill-timed ambition. An early scene, set soon after her election to Congress, shows her railing against her appointment to the Agriculture Committee and convincing the speaker of the House to reassign her. No mention is made of the fact that she served for two years on the committee, and found a way to use her position to expand the food stamp program.The problem is that “Shirley” is interested less in what Chisholm actually did than in what she represented, as a Black woman daring to see herself as the leader of the nation. At home, Chisholm struggles to maintain her relationships with her husband and her sister, who resent the self-absorption her career requires. Her advisers (played suavely by Terrence Howard and Lance Reddick) clash with her over her unwillingness to take partisan stances; younger, more radical supporters dislike her liberalism; and in public, she receives both support and racist, sexist barbs.King is magnetic onscreen, nailing Chisholm’s accent and her steely persona. But there is little for her to do other than trade quips with the other characters, in a drama that is too content with telling rather than showing.ShirleyRated PG-13 for discomfiting depictions of misogynoir. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

An occult-obsessed nation is nimbly captured in this found-footage horror film about a late night show gone horribly wrong.“Late Night With the Devil” is trimly effective horror of a rare sort: I found myself wishing, halfway through my screening, that I was watching it on my TV. Not because it doesn’t work in a theater — horror almost always benefits from being seen in a crowd — but because its writer-director duo, the brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, make shrewd use of some of the uniquely creepy things about television, especially its intimacy. The TV set is in your house, and you’re sitting six feet away from it, and especially in the wee hours of the night, whatever’s staring back at you can feel eerie, or impertinent. Over time, the late night TV host becomes your best friend, or a figure that haunts your fitful dreams.That’s why people watch late night TV, of course: to laugh, to be entertained and to feel some kind of companionship when the rest of the world goes to bed. “Late Night With the Devil” twists that camaraderie around on itself, layering in familiar 1970s horror tropes about demonic possession, Satanism and the occult. The result is a nasty and delicious, unapologetic pastiche with a flair for menace. I had a blast.The host of the movie’s invented late night talk and variety show is Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a younger, snappier Johnny Carson who is desperate to climb to the top of the ratings. Framed as found footage wrapped in a pseudo-documentary, the film briefly fills us in on Delroy’s career trajectory hosting “Night Owls With Jack Delroy,” a show that can’t quite overtake its competitors. As narration informs us that Delroy is risking going down in history as an also-ran — always Emmy nominated, never the winner — we learn that we’re about to watch the night that “shocked a nation.”On Halloween night, 1977, the first in the crucial sweeps week for “Night Owls,” Delroy and his producers come up with a desperate, last ditch idea to spike ratings: they design a show full of spectacle that will tap into the cultural craze for all things occult. The guest list that night includes a medium and a skeptic, plus a parapsychologist and the girl she’s been treating for demonic possession. The master tapes have been found, the narrator informs us, and that’s what we’re about to see. Buckle up.All of these characters seem familiar. Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), the film’s abrasive skeptic, seems based on James Randi, who appeared on “The Tonight Show” to debunk others’ claims to paranormal abilities, most notably the illusionist Uri Geller in 1973. Randi also confronted mediums on live TV (such as this film’s Christou, played by a hammy Fayssal Bazzi) and was an outspoken critic of parapsychology.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

The actress stars as a fresh-faced nun who, by the end of this erotic thriller-horror mash-up, runs amok in her convent.Damsels in distress take different forms and come with diverse temperaments, skill sets and screams. The standard-bearer tends to be a pretty young thing who has enough life in her that you don’t want it or her snuffed out (well, usually). Sometimes she’s babysitting in suburbia; at other times she is tiptoeing around a mansion with dark secrets and groaning floorboards. Every so often, she turns up wearing a nun’s habit, cloistered in a convent where things are never as they seem, as is the case in the slickly diverting, undercooked shocker “Immaculate.”Set in the Italian countryside far from Rome — in more ways than one — “Immaculate” is a scare-fest with a plucky heroine, an irreverent hot-button twist and just enough narrative ambiguity to give viewers something to argue about. The time is the present, give or take a few years, and the place is a grim, gray stone convent with sweeping grounds and formidably high walls. With a remodel and better lighting, the building could pass for one of those castles for princesses and their happily-ever-afters. The creepy opening scene and sepulchral vibe here, though, suggest that whatever happens next will definitely be very unhappy.Working from Andrew Lobel’s script, the director Michael Mohan delivers his damsel — a fresh-faced American, Cecilia, played by Sydney Sweeney — to the convent with unceremonious briskness. As she meets and greets her new sisters in faith, Mohan zips around, providing a sense of its scale and labyrinthine interior (and exits). The overly compressed 89-minute running time doesn’t allow him to linger, so he tends to go fuzzy and generic. Cecilia’s back story is conveniently vague, for one: She’s come to serve God and surrender herself body and soul. Mostly, she is there because it strategically isolates the character, limits her choices and gives the movie a dank whiff of Old World exoticism.Some details and faces quickly stand out, including an ingratiating, uneasily friendly priest (Álvaro Morte) and the no-nonsense mother superior (Dora Romano), who keeps both old and young in line. As Cecilia settles in, she befriends one of the other novices (the appealing Benedetta Porcaroli) and fields puzzling hostility from a young nun (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi). Cecilia also encounters a wizened nun with large cross-shaped scars on the soles of her feet. That’s certainly a grabber, but so too is a communal bathing scene in which Cecilia and some of the other younger women pose prettily in a vaulted room, lounging and grooming in semitransparent bathing gowns that reveal just how fit they are.Much as Mohan did in the 2021 movie “The Voyeurs,” his take on the old-fashioned (a.k.a. 1980s and ’90s) erotic thriller, he is doing his part in “Immaculate” to resurrect another disreputable film favorite. In the earlier thriller, Sweeney plays a Peeping Tom whose habit of spying on her hot, hump-happy neighbors leads to a familiar overheated mix of sex, violence and vengeance. If the milieu and Sweeney’s character are more interesting in “Immaculate,” it’s partly because of the convent’s relative foreignness. What Mohan has largely done here, though, is whip up a genre pastiche that shrewdly combines horror-movie frights, paranoid-woman thrills and the special kinky pleasures of 1970s-style nunsploitation.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

This overstuffed entry in the franchise is an eclectic, enjoyable barrage of nonsense.How many spirits can “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” fit in a firehouse? This overstuffed, erratically funny entry in the 40-year franchise crams in four main characters from the original 1984 blockbuster, six characters from the 2021 Oklahoma-set spinoff, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” and introduces three new occultists along with an assortment of ghosts, poltergeists, horned phantoms and miniature marshmallow men. At one point, a dozen or so heroes amass at the old Ghostbusters headquarters in Manhattan to protect a storage trap of ghouls that has, like the movie itself, gotten perilously sardined. In the scenes where the director, Gil Kenan, who wrote the script with Jason Reitman, ponders what it might feel like to let the dead dematerialize for good, the film seems to be asking its fan base if it’s ready to release Bill Murray’s weary parapsychologist, Peter Venkman, from haunting the series when his soul clearly isn’t in it.“Afterlife” introduced the estranged daughter of Harold Ramis’s Egon Spengler, a single mother named Callie (Carrie Coon), and her teenage children, Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard). After the death of their paterfamilias, the family fended off his killer, the Sumerian deity Gozer, with a helpful boost from a high school physics teacher named Gary (Paul Rudd); two young pals, Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) and Podcast (Logan Kim) — yes, Podcast; and the first generation of Ghostbusters, Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), Dr. Venkman (Murray) and the sassy secretary, Janine (Annie Potts).Now, the Oklahomies (even the unrelated children!) have relocated to Manhattan to speed around town harpooning wild ghosts from the Ectomobile, that beloved vintage hearse. In New York, the posse meets an ancient languages expert (Patton Oswalt), a paranormal engineer (James Acaster, a kooky English comic making his big-screen Hollywood debut) and an in-over-his-head huckster (Kumail Nanjiani) who inherits a nasty little spherical cryptogram with a very bad thing locked inside that’s yearning to unleash a fatal attack of the shivers — a neat idea that, in execution, just looks like a Roland Emmerich disaster movie.My fingers have taken to their death bed simply typing out the basics. Yet, “Frozen Empire” is an eclectic, enjoyable barrage of nonsense — a circus act that kicks off with a Robert Frost poem and climaxes with Ray Parker Jr.’s titular synth banger. Each scene gets laughs. Strung together, they sputter along with the fragmentary logic of a dream: Characters vanish at key moments and then reappear unexpectedly covered in goo. A demon goes to a vape shop. Once, I could swear the fire station’s brass pole was smelted down. A few beats later it was back in place. 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

A new Hulu documentary delves into the legendary Atlanta event and surfaces relics of 1980s and ’90s culture that were essential to partygoers.It’s an accepted spring break axiom that you can retake a class but you can’t relive a party. Until now, that’s been true of Freaknik, the annual bass-rattling spring break street party that drew hundreds of thousands of Black college students to Atlanta throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Traffic crawled. Music blared. Booties were shaken.“It’s a throwback time of nostalgia when we weren’t all on our phone or always trying to take a selfie,” said P. Frank Williams, the director of “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told,” a documentary that aims to immerse viewers in the celebration when it premieres on Thursday on Hulu. “We were just enjoying the moment. It was about these young Black people finding freedom in a world that really didn’t welcome them, in a city that is one of the Blackest places on the planet.”Over time, Freaknik exploded from its roots as a local event organized by students at the Atlanta University Center into a nexus for Black college students from across the country. “They said it was Freaknik, and I just thought that I wanted to bring the freak into the ’nik and then it went from zero to 100 real fast,” said Luther Campbell, the rapper known as Uncle Luke, who is an executive producer of the film.Police and elected officials ended Freaknik after 1999 amid public safety concerns and reports of sexual assault. Other cities in recent years have sought to restrict Black spring breakers through curfews, bag checks and traffic rerouting. Miami Beach rolled out a social media campaign this year to discourage visitors.To tell the story of a party that became legendary before social media, “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told” highlights several of the era’s artifacts that were essential to partygoers’ experience. We spoke with the makers of the film about five of them.CamcordersCamcorders were a fixture at Freaknik and a source of material for the documentary.Rich Mahan/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Associated PressWe 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

His roles in films like “Knives Out” and “Blade Runner” were sometimes big, sometimes small. But he invariably made a strong impression.M. Emmet Walsh, a paunchy and prolific character actor who was called “the poet of sleaze” by the critic Roger Ebert for his naturalistic portrayals of repellent lowlifes and miscreants, died on Tuesday in St. Albans, a small city in northern Vermont. He was 88. His death, in a hospital, was announced by his manager, Sandy Joseph.The most enduring praise Mr. Walsh received also came from Mr. Ebert: He coined the Stanton-Walsh Rule, which asserted that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”In “Straight Time,” a 1978 film featuring both Mr. Stanton and Mr. Walsh, Mr. Walsh played a patronizing parole officer to Dustin Hoffman’s teetering ex-con. Mr. Walsh’s performance caught the eye of two brothers who aspired to be auteurs and were writing their first feature-film script.The unknown Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the pivotal character of a detective in “Blood Simple” for Mr. Walsh. To their surprise, and despite offering little more in compensation than a per diem stipend, he accepted the role.A performance by Mr. Walsh in “Straight Time” led to a role in “Blood Simple” (1984), the first feature film by Joel and Ethan Coen.River Road Productions/Circle — Sunset Boulevard, via Corbis, via Getty ImagesReviewing “Blood Simple” for The New York Times in 1984, Janet Maslin said that Mr. Walsh had captured “a mischievousness that is perfect for the role.” Writing in Salon on the occasion of the release of Janus Films’ digital restoration in 2016, Andrew O’Hehir praised Mr. Walsh’s portrayal of a “sleazy, giggly and profoundly disturbing private detective.”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