Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story’ Review: A Legend and His Kryptonite

    The original Superman actor gets a comprehensive, if narrow-mindedly celebratory, tribute in this traditional talking-heads-style doc.Biographical documentaries too often turn into hagiographies, so you could imagine how that’s even more easily the case when the subject is as beloved as Christopher Reeve. The actor, who is best known for playing Superman in the original 1978 film (and the three sequels that followed in the 1980s), gets a suitably comprehensive tribute in the HBO doc “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.”Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, this traditional talking-heads-style documentary weaves together deep-cut archival footage from Reeve’s heyday and interviews with his three children, other relatives, and friends in the business (like Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close and Whoopi Goldberg). The filmmakers jump back and forth in time, presenting early on a 1995 accident that would forever change Reeve’s life.Reeve was thrown from a horse, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. But the movie’s shaken-up timeline keeps the documentary from becoming a mere before-and-after story. Instead, it considers the breadth of Reeve’s career and personal life — his beginnings in the theater, his feelings about playing Superman, his efforts to break the mold, and his two most important romantic relationships — with his injury looming over his successes like Kryptonite.Reeve’s bond with his fellow actor Robin Williams also makes up one of the documentary’s meatiest threads, adding depth to the character study. In many ways, Reeve actually was a gentle all-American type, but footage of his friendship with Williams brings out his funny, artistic — and dark — side.The documentary argues that without Williams and Reeve’s wife, Dana (who deserves a film of her own), Reeve wouldn’t have pulled out from his post-accident depression.Their love and optimism were key to his rehabilitation and turn to activism. Too little is said about some disabled people’s criticisms of Reeve’s advocacy (specifically, the belief that it was overly fixated on a cure as opposed to promoting destigmatization), which would have productively complicated the portrait. But that’s no surprise considering the narrow-mindedly celebratory scope of this homage.Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve StoryRated PG-13 for language and themes. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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    Review: ‘The Return,’ Starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche

    Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche burn through the screen in this grim take on the homecoming of Odysseus.The last time Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche shared a movie screen, in “The English Patient” (1996), he was a severely singed explorer and she was his sexy nurse. He is in somewhat better shape as Odysseus, the haggard, haunted heart of “The Return,” Uberto Pasolini’s take on the final section of Homer’s “The Odyssey.”An austere, pained drama about postwar trauma and survivor guilt, “The Return” reduces ancient myth to its psychological studs. Twenty years have passed since Odysseus left Ithaca to fight the long-ended Trojan War, his whereabouts since a mystery. (In this telling, the only gods and monsters are in Odysseus’s troubled mind.) Shipwrecked on the shore and taken for the beggar he now resembles, Odysseus finds his kingdom in ruins and his wife, Penelope (Binoche), hounded by a swarm of squabbling suitors. Even his son, Telemachus (Charlie Plummer), is urging his mother to remarry and ensure their safety.Less an epic poem than a showcase for two of cinema’s finest actors, “The Return” is visually bleak and emotionally gripping. Many scenes play out in candlelight and leaping shadows, with Marius Panduru’s camera crawling close to seamed faces and veined forearms. And while Marwan Kenzari deserves special mention for his quietly powerful turn as the most genuine of Penelope’s hopefuls, Fiennes leaves them all in the dust. In his early 60s, his body is a marvel, hard and sinewy and believably battle-scarred.“For some, a war becomes home,” he says at one point, his line readings so pungent you’ll barely miss the excitement of a Cyclops or a Calypso. Binoche has less to say, but her eyes and hands convey more agony and bitterness than an entire page of dialogue. When there’s precious little scenery to chew, the best actors know their words have to be enough.The ReturnRated R for a glimpse of penis and a gush of blood. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Order’ Review: Catch Him if You Can

    The thriller, about a white supremacist (Nicholas Hoult) and the killing of a real-life radio host, among other crimes, hits familiar genre beats.After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in 2021, observers noted the parallels between far-right organizations like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and a group of violent extremists called the Order. The Order, which had splintered from the hate group Aryan Nations and aspired to wage a war against the federal government, was linked to multiple crimes that took place in the western United States throughout 1984, including armored-car robberies, a synagogue bombing and the killing of the Denver talk radio host Alan Berg.“The Order” presents a dramatized version of those events with an ear toward their contemporary echoes. Adapted from a book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, who had been reporters for The Rocky Mountain News, the movie is directed by Justin Kurzel, an Australian whose output has shown a persistent, at times uneasy-making interest in real-life violence. In “The Snowtown Murders” (2012) and “Nitram” (2022), he sought to understand two cases of incomprehensible bloodshed in his home country by exploring them from the killers’ perspective.Some of that interest in psychology is evident in “The Order,” scripted by Zach Baylin, which devotes much of its screen time to Robert Jay Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), the Order’s leader. He is portrayed as a charismatic fanatic who, dangerously, can put on a soothing front when the occasion demands it. (One of the most suspenseful scenes finds him faux-gently grilling a newcomer who has squealed.) He is depicted as too extreme for the Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), from whom he poaches followers, and has apparently charmed his way into playing family man to two women, his wife, Debbie (Alison Oliver) and Zillah, his pregnant mistress (Odessa Young).But perhaps knowing that a concentrated wallow in Mathews’s world and white-supremacist views would be utterly repellent, “The Order” mostly splits its perspective between him and a fictitious F.B.I. agent, Terry Husk (a pleasingly gruff Jude Law), whose presence brings the movie closer to a conventional police procedural. There is even the usual subplot about how Husk is running from a botched mob case back east and misses his family.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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    ‘Lake George’ Review: An Odd Couple Crime Comedy

    A stoic former convict reluctantly teams up with his would-be victim in this off-kilter film by Jeffrey Reiner.In “Lake George,” what initially carries the air of a gritty crime drama makes way for an off-kilter neo-noir comedy that, at its best, reaches for the blood-splattered sardonicism of a Coen brothers film.While looking out at the Glendale, Calif., skyline, a cartoonish goon named Armen (Glenn Fleshler) wistfully recalls his on-and-off-again girlfriend, Phyllis (Carrie Coon), whom he wants Don (Shea Whigham), a down-and-out ex-convict, to kill. But it’s a job that Don doesn’t have the stomach for, and soon enough, Phyllis convinces Don to team up with her to hit Armen’s safe houses and abscond with the loot.It’s Coon’s charming performance of the eccentric victim-to-be that brings the film, written and directed by Jeffrey Reiner, into fuller focus as a crime comedy. She and Whigham, a welcome lead role for the consistently remarkable character actor, work together nicely, forming an odd couple of a trigger-happy yapper and her stoic, softhearted counterweight.Yet, scoring and shooting through the downcast eyes of Don, the film often can’t quite decide what, tonally, it wants to be as a film — either a serious crime noir or a sarcastic one. But, then again, a good film can still manage to balance both, even imperfectly, and across Don and Phyllis’s string of botched jobs, “Lake George” is more than enough fun in its attempt.Lake GeorgeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Girl With the Needle’ Review: A Series of Unfortunate Events

    This grim and exceptionally stylish film centers on a Danish woman who becomes tied up in the black-market baby trade.A couple of times in “The Girl With the Needle,” a grim story of a woman out of options, the director Magnus von Horn positions his camera in front of a mass of textile workers streaming out of the mill after their shifts. The moments pay homage to one of history’s first motion pictures, a Lumière film of employees leaving a factory.If that early cinematic curiosity captured reality, von Horn’s piercing black-and-white film elevates it, filling its world with figures and places out of a Gothic fairy tale. Set in post-World War I Copenhagen, the story, inspired by true events, follows Karoline (a remarkable, often wordless Vic Carmen Sonne) as she finds herself in a series of spaces — grubby tenements, factory floors, a utilitarian bathhouse, a circus sideshow — connected only by a menacing mood and a winding maze of steep cobblestone streets.The plot is a series of unfortunate events, with Karoline becoming pregnant by her boss only to be frozen out by his mother and fired from her job. At the same time, her husband, assumed to be dead, returns home from the war with his face disfigured. It’s a strong start for a story about how, amid hardship and desperation, compassion can wear thin.But once the story veers into a local woman’s black-market adoption scheme, Karoline’s personal troubles are eclipsed by a greater evil — the details of which inspired the screenplay. These events scandalize, yet “The Girl With the Needle” is most intriguing when it lingers in its disturbing fictions, which come to life with exceptional style.The Girl With the NeedleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Day of the Fight’ Review: Innovating an Old Cliché

    Revisiting a boxing classic, and honoring a filmmaking legend.A professional fighter, or at least a professional fighter with any sense, does one thing in between bouts: They train. They train and train and train. In 1951, Stanley Kubrick made a short documentary called “Day of the Fight,” which virtuosically distilled the process leading to the middleweight boxer Walter Cartier’s victory in a Newark bout.Jack Huston, an actor here making his debut at a writer-director, takes Kubrick’s picture as inspiration for a dazzling debut feature using the same title. “Day of the Fight” is an unabashed genre picture that manages to be both the kind of movie they supposedly don’t make like they used to, and also something bracingly fresh. It’s anchored by the lead actor, Michael C. Pitt, here ferocious and heart-stabbingly vulnerable in equal proportion.Huston and Pitt worked together as actors on the series “Boardwalk Empire,” and their affinity here is crystal clear, although Huston never appears onscreen. The director and actor invoke clichés — such as the story of a broken-down fighter looking for a “shot” at redemption — for the purpose of exploding them with raw emotion.Pitt plays Mike Flannigan, who’s making a comeback after 10 years out of the ring. The comeback corresponds with Flannigan’s efforts to piece together his broken life and family. The movie’s unforgiving New York City is grittily conjured with black-and-white cinematography (by Peter Simonite) into which some color occasionally bleeds. Stalwart support from Steve Buscemi and Joe Pesci enhance the authenticity.Huston is a legacy filmmaker — his grandfather, the director and actor John Huston, made a pretty distinctive boxing picture himself, “Fat City,” from 1972. “Day of the Fight” honors the elder Huston with unwinking reverence, but a voice that’s wholly its own.Day of the FightRated R for language, themes, violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Bona’: A Filipina Superstar Wreaks Vengeance in a Two-Fisted Melodrama

    Recently rediscovered and now digitally restored, Lino Brocka’s 1980 movie, starring Nora Aunor, opens for a week at Metrograph.The title character in “Bona,” a stark tale of selfless devotion by the Filipino director and prominent political activist Lino Brocka (1939-1991), is a middle-class Manila schoolgirl who develops a fierce, morbid attachment to a narcissistic movie extra — a fantasy all the more desperate for being set and shot on location in the miserable slum where her idol lives.Made in 1980, thought lost, recently rediscovered and now digitally restored, “Bona” was featured in the most recent New York Film Festival and begins a weeklong run at Metrograph on Friday.As mordant in its way as the slyly subversive movies Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, Brocka’s two-fisted melodrama is a hellish, compelling work by a director whom the French critic Serge Daney, then editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, called “the great filmmaker of the ’70s.”“Bona” opens with a high-angle shot of a screen-filling crowd, participants in a Philippine religious spectacle, the Feast of the Black Nazarene. Glimpsed among the masses, Bona (Nora Aunor) is next seen as a star-struck spectator to a movie shoot whose extras include the handsome Gardo (Phillip Salvador, an axiom of Brocka’s cinema). Diminutive and determined, Bona cuts school to continue watching the production and, after a beating from her father, runs away to become Gardo’s devotee — an unpaid live-in maid.Bona had plastered her room with pictures of Gardo. His image is similarly ubiquitous chez Gardo, a shack without plumbing in Manila’s largest slum, Tondo. Reporting on the 1982 Manila Film Festival, the journalist Elliott Stein noted that as the area was officially off-limits for film production, “Bona” was not simply a movie but “an admirable act of civil disobedience” — fitting for a movie in which “obedience” is key.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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    ‘Y2K’ Review: Dying Like It’s 1999

    A computer glitch makes electronics go haywire in this zany and nostalgic horror-comedy from the comedian Kyle Mooney.The first 20 minutes of the director Kyle Mooney’s “Y2K” are so densely packed with references to turn-of-the-millennium pop cultural ephemera — AND1 apparel, “That 70s Show,” devil sticks, Tae Bo and the Dancing Baby, to name a handful — that I was exhausted by nostalgia before the end of the first act.Mooney’s ordinarily eccentric, heavily ironic sense of humor, honed over many years on his cult-favorite YouTube channel and later on Saturday Night Live, seemed to have been replaced by something more cloying and conventional, where simply reminiscing about 1999 was a substitute for actually writing jokes about it. (Mooney and Evan Winter penned the screenplay.) Where was the genius behind such classic sketches as “ball champions,” an early forerunner of “How To With John Wilson” and “I Think You Should Leave”?But then the movie takes a sudden, jarring pivot, and Mooney’s unique sensibility aggressively (and thankfully) reasserts itself: A familiar story of teenage slackers at a New Year’s Eve party transforms into an anarchic, over-the-top Armageddon picture, as the “Y2K problem,” the computer coding crisis that incited much fear on the eve of the year 2000, turns all electronics evil and bloodthirsty at the stroke of midnight. A beard trimmer leaps into jugulars, a VCR shoots tapes like a cannon, and the carnage of consumer goods is nasty, gory and cruel, with a darkly comic mean streak that recalls Joe Dante’s “Gremlins.”Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison and Rachel Zegler, as the teens tasked with thwarting the apocalypse, make charming heroes — but it’s Mooney himself, as the loquacious stoner Garret, who is the film’s dopey MVP.Y2KRated R for strong language, frequent drug use and intense graphic violence. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More