Aurelia Butler

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    ’The Surfer’ Review: Nicolas Cage Catches Hell at the Beach

    Nicolas Cage plays the title role in this punishing beach drama, where an aggressive group of surfers advise him the spot is for “locals only.”Some successful actors start to downshift when they hit their 60s, but Nicolas Cage, 61, still works with the frequency of a man who has a hellhound or a collections agency on his trail. Cage is the best reason to watch “The Surfer,” a deliberately punishing drama in which he plays the title role. His character is an apparently successful wheeler-dealer who’s taking a day off to catch some waves at a beach close to a house he hopes to buy. His plan runs afoul of an aggressive group of surfers who advise him the spot is for “locals only.” But he is a local, he protests.That may or may not be true. And the surf gang, who want him gone, don’t care either way, as they demonstrate with mounting violence. Cage has a penchant for characters who take a lot of punishment, like in the “Wicker Man” remake (2006) or the first half or so of “Mandy” (2018), and here his character just keeps coming back for more.Is he crazy? Maybe. But something else is going on. There’s an older man hanging out at the beach handing out fliers about his lost son — and didn’t Cage’s character first come to the beach with his own teenage son? The surfer is increasingly addled by visions that come to him in harrowing split-second blackouts. The director Lorcan Finnegan drops other intimations of a time loop, reminiscent of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée.” But if this movie leaves Cage adrift, he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable about it.The SurferRated R for language and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Lavender Men’ Review: Daring to Reimagine ‘America’s Daddy’

    A writer rethinks queer history through Abraham Lincoln’s political ambitions, but needs a few present-day edits.What if Abraham Lincoln’s presidential pursuit was sparked amid some playful, shirtless roughhousing with his legal clerk Elmer Ellsworth? Now imagine another twist — a tree in full drag regalia is a witness.That’s some of the reinterpreted history in the unconvincingly staged new film “Lavender Men.”The film begins with Taffeta (Roger Q. Mason), the mistreated stage manager of a community theater production about Lincoln, who is fed up with the current state of the play. Taffeta, who is nonbinary, seizes control of the narrative, granting “America’s daddy” romantic agency and his own gay love story.Through this queer lens, Taffeta critiques Lincoln for his role in upholding white supremacy while also connecting with him as another “lonely queen,” using the encounter to reframe Taffeta’s own story. In this act of reclamation, Taffeta inhabits a kaleidoscope of roles — from army cadet to Mary Todd Lincoln to that all-knowing, unseen tree. “This is my fantasia, honey,” they proclaim to the camera. (The queering of Lincoln is also present in “Oh Mary,” Cole Escola’s Broadway hit.)Drawing a line from modern repression to the 16th president’s sexuality is a bold premise, and “Lavender Men,” which was originally a play written by Mason, struggles to fully realize its world onscreen. The director Lovell Holder, who wrote the screenplay with Mason for this adaptation, tackles the idea of inherited trauma by breaking the fourth wall, yet the film remains narratively inert, reaching for profundity with the earnestness of poetic fan fiction.Tonal whiplash — farcical comedy, heavy drama, even a musical number — undermines the film’s emotional stakes. You want a better story for Taffeta, and for Lincoln and Ellsworth, too. “Lavender Men” rewrites the past, but it could use edits in the present.Lavender MenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘A Desert’ Review: Motel Hell

    A washed-up photographer finds himself embroiled in an eerie mystery in Joshua Erkman’s strange, singular thriller.Alex (Kai Lennox), the hero of Joshua Erkman’s languid, atmospheric neo-noir “A Desert,” is a photographer past his prime. His first book, a collection of landscapes channeling the desuetude of small-town America, put him on the map 20 years ago, and now he’s cruising the highways and byways of the Yucca Valley in California, chasing his former glory.It’s in the nature of stories like this to offer its hero the reprieve of a disruption, and it arrives, violently, in the form of Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman), a lanky, keyed-up stranger Alex befriends at a roadside motel. Renny is clearly bad news, and for about 40 minutes, it seems obvious where “A Desert” is going. But Ekrman’s screenplay is slyly intelligent, and in the second act the film takes a sharp turn that is genuinely shocking.Erkman’s use of stark lighting — high beams cutting through the desert night — evokes “Lost Highway,” and there’s some “Mulholland Drive” in the underworld theatrics detailed on the story’s periphery. Lynch is a difficult influence to wield responsibly, yet Erkman keeps it largely under control: “A Desert,” if at times too ambitious, certainly feels distinct.It’s a strange film, but it works, and feels grounded, because of its ensemble cast. Both Lennox and Sarah Lind, as Alex’s wife, Sam, are serious and convincing, and the musician David Yow, as an oddball private detective following in Alex’s wake, gives the movie some idiosyncratic flair. But the highlight is Sherman, whose menacing Renny is truly creepy and, when he really goes berserk, electrifying.A DesertNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ Review: Goodbye Girlhood

    Durga Chew-Bose boldly reimagines a work once adapted by Otto Preminger in her beguiling first film set on the French Riviera.“She is imagining what she looks like to us as practice for when she wants to be seen,” a woman remarks early in “Bonjour Tristesse” of the teenage Cécile (Lily McInerny), whose mischievous experiment in womanhood is the subject of Durga Chew-Bose’s beguiling first film.Adapted from Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel, “Bonjour Tristesse” dips into a well once tapped by the prolific director Otto Preminger — a bold choice for a first-time filmmaker. But Chew-Bose makes a convincing case for the remake by showing, like Cécile, a keen awareness of how to direct a gaze.The film follows Cécile, a teenager from the United States, over a summer on the French Riviera with her roguish father, Raymond (Claes Bang), and Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune), his summer fling. Lazing seaside, Cécile enjoys the couple’s company, but the serene scene frays upon the arrival of Anne (Chloë Sevigny), a refined family friend who undermines our protagonist’s status as the apple of daddy’s eye.While Jean Seberg once imbued Cécile with girlish petulance, McInerny gives the role an electric charge of ambivalence. We see our protagonist study Elsa and Anne’s womanly powers with a blend of longing and trepidation. Here, more so than in Preminger’s adaptation, the absence of Cécile’s mother is made to feel tangible.Chew-Bose directs her camera to elegantly glance off bodies, fabrics and seawater. She individualizes her characters through habits and gestures, like the different ways each woman eats her morning apple. A work of image and mood, “Bonjour Tristesse” captures the mythopoetic wonder of an adolescent summer, and the effect is trancelike.Bonjour TristesseRated R for budding female sexuality. In French and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Another Simple Favor’ Review: Big Hats and Big Intrigue

    The sequel to the deranged 2018 comedy finds Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick feuding in the Italian sun.When “A Simple Favor” came out in 2018, I fell headlong in love. It was just so unhinged, and so self-aware — not the sort of comedy you’d expect from two Hollywood actresses as bankable as Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick, or a filmmaker as mainstream as Paul Feig, who directed the genre-upending “Bridesmaids” in 2011. “A Simple Favor” felt like a melodramatic French psychosexual confection that had suddenly become sentient and started making fun of itself.You’ll have to go back and remind yourself of the plot before you see the sequel, “Another Simple Favor,” for which Lively, Kendrick and Feig have all returned. It won’t make any sense if you don’t, though it barely makes sense even if you do. Here’s the basic cheat sheet, spoilers obviously included: In the first film, Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick), a widow and a mommy vlogger, becomes embroiled in the life of her young son’s friend’s mother, the glamorous Emily Nelson (Lively). Emily is married to an English professor named Sean (Henry Golding). In the course of the film, sordid secrets are revealed and murders happen, and Stephanie and Sean hook up when they think Emily is dead, and it’s all very bonkers, though the most bonkers part is probably Emily’s amazing pantsuits. (If you know, you know.)The most pertinent detail to recall going into this new film (besides that other kinda-sorta incestuous liaison from Stephanie’s past) is that Emily is the assumed identity of a woman named Hope. Furthermore, Hope is a triplet; her sisters were named Faith (who’s dead now) and Charity (who died shortly after they were born). Don’t forget that. OK. Deep breath.“Another Simple Favor” escapes the pedestrian upscale suburban setting of its predecessor, flying (via private plane, naturally) to Capri, Italy, though not until after we learn that Stephanie has pivoted to true crime vlogging and writing, and Emily has figured out how to get out of her prison sentence, and is marrying a glamorous and rich Italian. Naturally she wants Stephanie, her bosom frenemy, to be her maid of honor. So off to the island they go, where things go extremely sideways.No one is more regretful than me to announce that “Another Simple Favor” is not as bananas as the first film. It was inevitable. The element of surprise is gone, for one thing: “A Simple Favor” was just so plain weird, so far afield of the vibe most people were expecting — what is this psychotic and vaguely erotic movie, and does it know how demented it is? — that the whole thing wound up feeling fresh. You had to lock into its vibe to appreciate it, but in the right frame of mind, it was a pleasure.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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    ‘Electra’ Review: Not Exactly a Unicorn

    In Hala Matar’s stylish if somewhat vacant drama, flair trumps grief.One doesn’t have to delve too deeply into the name Electra to imagine tragedy’s-a-comin’ in the director Hala Matar’s stylish if somewhat vacant drama of the same name. Electra, after all, had roles in the works of the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides, among others. Here, the so-named beauty appears in flashback and her significance in the shifting relationships between two couples who meet in Rome and repair to a country house is fitfully revealed.When the magazine writer Dylan (Daryl Wein) and his girlfriend and photographer, Lucy (Abigail Cowen), descend upon the rocker Milo (Jack Farthing), there’s subterfuge afoot. As Milo is accosted by an amorous fan at a restaurant, the pair look stunned. But are they really?It turns out the fangirl is Francesca, Milo’s lover (Maria Bakalova giving a surprisingly sympathetic turn). In fleet order, the couples hit it off and Milo invites his chroniclers to Francesca’s family palazzo. But what’s the aim of Dylan and Lucy’s con exactly? Without spoiling things, it has something (but not everything) to do with stealing a painting of a unicorn. Its creator: Electra.From its title sequence — one toggling between typefaces crowding the frame and the hushed scene of a person mopping a vast room — to its languid eying of the palazzo’s suggestive artworks, “Electra” declares its affinity for visual (and sonic) swagger. (Matar makes music videos, as well as films for fashion houses.) The flair is palpable. What’s not convincingly nailed by the film’s moody bravado is the grief propelling its flirtatious and fraught quartet toward presumptive tragedy.ElectraNot rated. In English and Italian with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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    What the Cult Singer Daniel Johnston Left Behind

    Electric Lady Studios, in Greenwich Village, is a working music museum. The Fender Twin amplifier that the studio’s onetime owner Jimi Hendrix brought to work before his 1970 death remains, as does an electric piano Stevie Wonder used on an astounding run of records. There’s a keyboard Bob Dylan played in Muscle Shoals and several lurid murals by the painter Lance Jost, originals depicting interstellar travel and Aquarian-age sexual exploration.But Lee Foster — the former intern who became the space’s co-owner in 2010, after helping rescue it from financial ruin — keeps his drawings by the singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston in a small safe in the corner of his office, each page bound in plastic in a lime-green three-ring binder.Daniel Johnston’s drawing desk in his Texas home.Several 3D-printed versions of Johnston’s frog character, Jeremiah.The shelves in Daniel Johnston’s kitchen are completely filled with figurines and keepsakes. The house remains largely as he left it before his 2019 death.“It has nothing to do with financial value,” Foster said in his art-lined room last month, as afternoon slipped into evening. “It is so meaningful that, even if it was for that hour or three when he was sitting down to draw, it was all he was thinking about. There’s a little bit of his soul in there.”Soon after Johnston’s death in 2019, at 58, Foster became the unexpected custodian of Johnston’s unexpectedly enormous art archive. His career hamstrung by bipolar disorder and stints in psychiatric hospitals, Johnston first found acclaim as an unguarded and guileless songwriter in the late ’80s with tunes that cut instantly to the emotional quick.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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    ‘Thunderbolts*’ Review: Florence Pugh and Pals Kick Some Asterisk

    The actress is the main attraction in Marvel’s latest, about a group of ragtag super-types who join forces to (spoiler alert!) save the world.For “Thunderbolts*,” Marvel has thrown so much stuff into its new branding event — an enigmatic asterisk, a guinea pig, a comic villain, a depressed superhero, nepo babies, veterans of David Simon’s “The Wire” — that some of it was bound to stick. The results are fitfully amusing, sometimes touching and resolutely formulaic. The story zigs and zags between firing guns and dropping bodies, and its tone zips all over the place. What holds it more or less together is a cast that includes Florence Pugh getting her Tom Cruise on, David Harbour playing a boisterous Russian clown and Sebastian Stan winking at Donald J. Trump.Stan, whose last splashy turn was as the young Trump in the biopic “The Apprentice,” is back as Bucky Barnes, who you may know as the Winter Soldier. This movie’s resident cool dude, Bucky is a soulful warrior with a prosthetic metal arm who looks good on a motorcycle and is mostly here to provide franchise continuity. Now in Congress, Bucky is working with Wendell Pierce’s Congressman Gary, to bring down the head of the C.I.A., Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Drefyus, another Marvel returnee). She’s been overseeing a secret program out of a mountain lair worthy of a Bond villain, so, yep, she’s bad news.If you’re not a comic-book devotee and have never heard of the Thunderbolts before they were exhumed for screen service, you aren’t alone. First introduced on the page in 1997, the group has been re-suited up here to be testy, quarrelsome and finally likable antiheroes, redeemable rogues with hard-luck stories and blood-slicked hands. (The body count is high; the gore sanitized.) The most reliably entertaining are the dryly sardonic Yelena Belova (Pugh) and the excitable, histrionic Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (a showily outsized Harbour). The sister and father of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, they are Soviet-trained toughs so powerful they upstaged that superhero in her titular 2021 flick.There’s always a lot going on in Marvel movies, and the filmmakers here — the screenwriters are Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, the director is Jack Schreier — pile on twisty plot turns, blowouts, intimate chats and yet more characters. Chris Bauer, a familiar face from “The Wire,” plays a security type, Holt, while Lewis Pullman plays a mysterious newbie, Bob, an addition who isn’t interesting enough for all the screen time he’s given. (His father is the actor Bill Pullman.) Other returning faces include Wyatt Russell (his folks are Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell), who has some notably bleak moments as John Walker. Like Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr/Ghost and the rest, he mostly plays backup for Pugh.This is Pugh’s movie from the start, and that’s a good thing. She’s a vibrantly alive presence, which is useful given that death is so pervasive in Marvel movieland, where heroes, villains and a seemingly infinite number of nameless civilians die — though some irrepressibly, near-miraculously rise again — amid the high jinks and wisecracks. Here, death enters early with Yelena having what seems like a to-be-or-not crisis atop a skyscraper. Speaking in weary, Russian-accented English, her face slightly pinched and the corners of her lips turned down, Yelena is in rough shape. “There’s something wrong with me, an emptiness,” she says as she steps off the ledge and plunges into the void, adding: “Or maybe I’m just bored.”Pugh’s deadpan delivery is disarming, as is the revelation that she did the stunt herself, which involved stepping off the top of the second-tallest building in the world before her character deploys a parachute. There’s no way to tell it’s Pugh from the way the filmmakers handle the scene because, after Yelena steps off, there’s a cut to a long shot of a tiny figure falling next to the tower. I assumed the whole thing was done with CGI and a stunt double. When Tom Cruise scrambled atop the world’s tallest building in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” (2011), you knew it was him from the attentive way the scene was staged and shot, which created a visceral sense of peril and further burnished his stardom. If actors risk their lives in a movie as Pugh did, viewers should know it; I only do because of a behind-the-scenes video.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