Movies

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares24 Views

    ‘Pedro Páramo,’ ‘Let’s Start a Cult’ and More Streaming Gems

    by

    Two releases from last year — one an inventive literary adaptation, the other a wild, gross-out comedy — are among this month’s streaming recommendations.‘Pedro Páramo’ (2024)Stream it on Netflix.This adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel is the feature directorial debut of Rodrigo Prieto, who, via his collaborations with Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Greta Gerwig and (frequently) Martin Scorsese, has become one of the best cinematographers of our time. It is, unsurprisingly, a beautifully photographed movie (Prieto and Nico Aguilar share cinematography credit), filled with astonishing compositions and a surplus of mood. The narrative is haunted by ghosts, dreams and memories. The dialogue is alternately wry and poetic, trafficking in a deadpan magical realism, involving its bustling cast of colorful characters in a circular story, with events revisited via shifting perspectives and time frames. It doesn’t all land, as the picture’s loose ends and shaggy running time occasionally get away from the filmmaker. But if it’s messy, it’s also mesmerizing, and marks Prieto as a talent to keep watching, wherever he may go.‘Fall’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.So many of today’s thrillers are convoluted, franchise-servicing affairs that this one is worth praising for its simplicity and efficiency: There is a narrative, yes, but it boils down to tracking two young women as they climb to the top of a 2,000-foot TV tower, and are then stranded there, with no obvious way down. The screenplay (by the director, Scott Mann, and Jonathan Frank) works through every possible situation and variation, mining the loaded scenario for maximum scares, thrills and pathos. But the performances ultimately have to carry the show, and the newcomers Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner are charismatic and sympathetic — even when doing the dumbest things — while Jeffrey Dean Morgan lends gravitas as Currey’s concerned dad.‘Joe’ (2014)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.David Gordon Green narrates a sequence from his film featuring Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan.Roadside AttractionsWe 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

    More stories

    • 150 Shares18 Views

      in Movies

      “No Other Land” Is the Oscar-Nominated Film That No Studio Will Touch

      by

      “No Other Land,” about the destruction of a village in the occupied West Bank, is one of the year’s most acclaimed films. Still, U.S. studios are unwilling to distribute it.No documentary this season has been more talked about or acclaimed than “No Other Land,” which chronicles the besieged community of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank as Israeli forces demolish residents’ homes and expel families from the land they have lived in for generations, claiming the area is needed for a military training ground.Directed by the Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal alongside the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, “No Other Land” has received critical acclaim and collected many honors on the festival circuit. After winning the best documentary award at its Berlin International Film Festival premiere last February, the film also earned the same prize at the Gotham Awards and from major critics’ groups in New York and Los Angeles. Just weeks ago, it received an Oscar nomination.Still, no American studio has been willing to pick up this hot-button film, even though distributors typically spend this time of year eagerly boasting about their Oscar-nomination tallies.“I still think it’s possible, but we’ll have to see,” Abraham told me last week. “It’s clear that there are political reasons at play here that are affecting it. I’m hoping that at a certain point the demand for the film will become so clear and indisputable that there will be a distributor with the kind of courage to take it on and show it to the audience.”In the meantime, the directors have embarked on a self-distribution plan that has put “No Other Land” into 23 U.S. theaters; on the back of strong box office, it will continue to roll out into additional cities over the coming weeks.Adra and Abraham are not just part of the film’s directing team, but its two primary subjects. The 28-year-old Adra was raised in Masafer Yatta and has been documenting the forced expulsion since he was a teenager. Over the course of the film, he builds a strong but tense bond with Abraham, who lives in Jerusalem but travels frequently to Masafer Yatta to write about the situation there for an Israeli audience.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

    • 113 Shares28 Views

      in Movies

      With ‘Companion’ and ‘Novocaine,’ Jack Quaid Makes Comedy Painless

      by

      Jack Quaid can guess what people must think of him: Entitled. Overconfident. A jerk, no doubt about it.“Who I am comes with a certain expectation,” he said over breakfast — black coffee, fruit plates — on a Thursday in late January.Quaid, 32, is the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. (That DNA is strong. You can see his father when he smiles, his mother when he squints.) He grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., grabbing snacks from the craft services table on his parents’ sets and attending a private school with a common room where he could screen his camcorder movies. (An early magnum opus: “Bicycle Cops.”) Which is all to say that Quaid grew up with privilege, and he knows what privilege, unexamined and unacknowledged, can do to a person. He can turn that arrogance on for auditions, which explains why his first role was as a villain in “The Hunger Games” and why he can now be seen as a very bad boyfriend in the thriller “Companion” (in theaters).But the real Quaid is earnestly, acutely, even painfully aware of his privilege. In rooms where people don’t know him, he finds himself, he said, “apologizing for existing.” He isn’t jealous of his parents. (Please, he has been to therapy.) He loves his parents. He loves the life they have given him. “But there’s definitely a need to prove myself,” he said. “There is a little bit of something with identity and thinking, do I have any value outside of them?” As he said this, the divot in his forehead, which deepens when he’s stressed or concerned, had become a crevasse. “Not to say I’m complaining,” he added.Jack Quaid, the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, is earnestly aware of his privilege.Hannah Edelman for The New York TimesOver the last several years, Quaid has proved himself. And as the star of two movies out this winter, his value as a leading man is confirmed. He is beautifully smarmy in “Companion,” a romantic thriller with a sci-fi twist. (Avoid the trailer if you don’t want that twist unfurled.) And he is a sweetheart of an accidental action hero in the punchy thriller “Novocaine,” due March 14, in which he plays a timid assistant bank manager with a congenital inability to feel pain. (Quaid’s own pain threshold: “Not high!”) He is also currently wrapping the fifth and final season of “The Boys,” Amazon’s body fluid-soaked antisuperhero show. He leads the cast as Hughie, a normal-ish guy in an enthusiastically abnormal world. And he has two other movies in postproduction, the thriller “Neighborhood Watch” and the action comedy “Heads of State.”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

    • 138 Shares14 Views

      in Movies

      A New Documentary Uncovers One of Pop’s Tragic Mysteries: Q Lazzarus

      by

      Her haunting song “Goodbye Horses” had a star turn in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but the enigmatic artist behind it seemingly vanished for decades after.For years, it was one of pop music’s most persistent mysteries: Whatever happened to Q Lazzarus? And furthermore: Who was she in the first place?Most listeners who had heard of the genre-bending artist — if they’d heard of her at all — encountered her song “Goodbye Horses” in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 blockbuster “The Silence of the Lambs” as the backdrop to the scene where the serial killer Buffalo Bill applies makeup and poses strikingly nude. The creepy new wave track, with its minor-key, sci-fi synths and androgynous vocals, harmonized impeccably with the scene’s ominous visuals.“Goodbye Horses” was the only single Q Lazzarus officially released on a physical format while she was alive, but it came with an incredible story: Demme had encountered the musician at her day job — as a taxi driver — and fell in love with the music she played during the ride. But after her song’s star turn in his film, Q Lazzarus’s career stalled, and by the mid-90s, she had seemingly vanished entirely.Some fans and journalists made efforts to track down this enigmatic voice over the years, but the filmmaker who ended up telling her story in the new documentary “Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus” met the artist born Diane Luckey the same way Demme did: in her cab.“Getting into her car was a completely coincidental or fated, as Q and I both felt, meeting,” Eva Aridjis Fuentes, the movie’s director, said in an interview. The two sang along to Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”; Aridjis Fuentes thought the woman behind the wheel looked familiar, and asked if she’d ever seen Q Lazzarus. They formed a friendship that resulted in Aridjis Fuentes’s film, which opens in a handful of cities including London, Los Angeles and New York next month, with a streaming release expected to follow. On Friday, the Brooklyn record label Sacred Bones will release its soundtrack — effectively the first full-length Q Lazzarus release.“We’re doing this documentary to let you know what went wrong and what happened,” Luckey says in the film. “The truth” about why she disappeared: “Because I had to.”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

    • 150 Shares28 Views

      in Movies

      Grant Hill Can Finally Gloat in HBO’s ‘We Beat the Dream Team’

      by

      Hill and the film’s director talked about the time a team of college basketball players beat Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson — and the effort to bury it.Grant Hill is a seven-time N.B.A. All-Star, Chris Webber a five-timer and Penny Hardaway a four-timer. Allan Houston was selected twice, Jamal Mashburn once.But back in 1992, they were just a bunch of college students playing a scrimmage against the U.S. men’s national basketball team, otherwise known as the Dream Team, which included Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing and six other future Hall of Famers. The odds that Hill and company could topple a squad that went on to destroy every opponent at the Olympics by an average of 44 points seemed vanishingly thin.The HBO documentary “We Beat the Dream Team,” which premiered on Monday and is streaming on Max, recounts the day in June 1992 when that shocker actually happened — when the Select Team, as this collection of youthful sparring partners was called, stunned the game’s biggest players.Bobby Hurley, the Select Team’s point guard, pushed the pace and shredded the Dream Team defense with pinpoint passes. Houston buried threes. Webber was a force inside. Their elders looked complacent and sloppy, turning over the ball and even missing dunks as the game slipped away. The scrimmage lasted about 20 minutes, but the Select Team finished with a solid 62-54 triumph.Because of a rule change made by the International Basketball Federation, the 1992 Barcelona Games were the first Olympics in which N.B.A. players were permitted to play. For the college players, who were a bit resentful because they had hoped to represent the U.S. at the Games, the scrimmage victory was the ultimate vindication. (A few celebrated with perhaps a bit too much trash talk.)But as the documentary makes clear, their victory was essentially buried. The coach of the Olympic team, Chuck Daly, made sure the scoreboard was shut off before reporters came into the gym. No one really talked about it in the media that day. (Daly had allowed only one camera to record the game.)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

    • 38 Shares38 Views

      in Movies

      Jane Fonda, Sneakerhead

      by

      The actor and activist on aging into her latest role: sneaker model.The activity that Jane Fonda, the 87-year-old Oscar winner, activist and aerobics queen, is most associated with these days is probably environmental protest (well, that, the “Grace and Frankie” series and the “Book Club” film franchise). She did, after all, move to Washington, D.C., in 2019 specifically to draw attention to the climate crisis, getting arrested pretty much every Friday while staging sit-ins at the Capitol. Then she swore off buying new clothes, even for the red carpet.All of which makes her an unlikely choice to front a new luxury sneaker campaign. But for Silvio Campara, the chief executive of Golden Goose, the brand known for its prescuffed sneakers with the sparkly star on the side, she was his only choice. As to why she agreed to do it … well, that’s a whole other story.This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.Were you surprised when Golden Goose got in touch?I don’t do a lot of campaigns because I’m not friendly with a lot of brands. But my manager said: “This is a cool company. They have responsible practices.” And I said, “Well, you know, I like their sneakers.”So you were already wearing the sneakers?Two and a half years ago, I was making “Book Club: The Next Chapter” in Rome, and I would walk every day and look into stores, and there were so many cute sneakers with sequins and sparkles. That’s when I found them. I like the combo of sneakers with glitter and a very structured suit. I think that’s cool.How many sneakers do you have?Quite a lot because I don’t throw them away. I don’t want them to end up in the ocean. I have many, many dozens of all kinds of sneakers, starting with the old colored Reebok high-tops.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

    • 100 Shares22 Views

      in Movies

      Watching ‘Shoah’ in Berlin, 80 Years After Auschwitz

      by

      A commemorative screening of the monumental documentary came as some artists are questioning whether Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture stifles free speech.On the first Sunday of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985) — a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust — screened to a nearly full house in the auditorium of the city’s Academy of Arts.Tricia Tuttle, the festival’s new director, spoke before the film, along with a curator from Berlin’s Jewish Museum and Dominique Petithory-Lanzmann, the director’s widow. Tuttle called the screening a “triple remembrance”: This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the 40th anniversary of “Shoah,” and the centenary birthday of Lanzmann himself, who died in 2018.The mood was reverential. “Shoah” — which consists of interviews with Holocaust survivors, bystanders and perpetrators, as well as footage of the sites referenced by the speakers, such as the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps — is widely considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time. Its monumental length is key to its power; it suspends viewers in the act of witnessing humanity’s capacity for evil and its astonishing resilience, which we see washed across the subjects’ faces as they tell their stories.There’s no denying Lanzmann’s achievements or the significance of “Shoah,” yet the festival’s commemorative programming — which also includes the world premiere of “All I Had Was Nothingness,” a documentary by Guillaume Ribot that pays homage to “Shoah” — also plays out amid growing concerns that Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance is stifling the free speech of other artists.Lanzmann, the director of “Shoah,” joined the French resistance against Nazi Germany as a teenager. He appears in “Shoah” as a passionate, at times even aggressive, interlocutor.Les Films AlephLast year, the film festival, known here as the Berlinale, came under fire after filmmakers participating in the event (including the directors of “No Other Land,” a documentary currently nominated for an Oscar) were denounced by German officials and festival executives for making statements in solidarity with Palestinians.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

    • 100 Shares23 Views

      in Movies

      Why Everyone Is Still Talking About ‘Paddington 2’

      by

      With the third movie now in theaters, let’s look at how the 2018 film became a sleeper hit, thanks to Hugh Grant’s villain and its showstopping end credits.“Paddington 2 is the greatest film ever made,” one user posted on X in 2022.This tweet was not ironic.In the seven years since its release in January 2018, the film about a marmalade-loving bear’s quest to find the perfect gift for his beloved aunt has become an internet phenomenon, spawning memes, think pieces and an endorsement from Nicolas Cage. For a time, it was the best-reviewed film ever on the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.“A very eclectic group of people respond to it in the way that they do,” David Heyman, a producer on “Paddington 2” and its 2015 predecessor, “Paddington,” said in a recent phone conversation from his home in London. The Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, for example, confessed to Heyman he was a fan.Now with the third feature-length installment in the franchise, “Paddington in Peru,” in theaters — and already having passed the $100 million milestone at the international box office — it is hard to imagine that when “Paddington 2” first arrived in theaters stateside, it was only a modest box office success. Since its DVD and streaming releases, a devoted community of online fans has sprung up around it, evangelizing about the outsider bear who brought joy to their lives.“There’s humor in it for adults; there’s humor for children,” said Heyman, who grew up reading the Paddington books, written by the British author Michael Bond. “It never feels patronizing or like it’s talking down to its audience. It has a big, beating heart.”All three films are based on the children’s books about the duffle-coated, hard-staring bear, first published in 1958. In the first movie, Paddington emigrates from Peru to London in a story inspired by the World War II rescue operation that brought nearly 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied Europe to England. The second film, directed by Paul King, who wrote the script with Simon Farnaby, is an action adventure with stunning set sequences, following Paddington through a court trial, a prison escape and a daring pursuit by train.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

    • 100 Shares42 Views

      in Movies

      South Korean Actress Kim Sae-ron Is Found Dead

      by

      The 24-year-old star, once a prolific child actor, appeared at the Cannes Film Festival and on Netflix, until a drunk-driving incident in 2022 derailed her career.South Korean actress Kim Sae-ron, a former child star whose promising career suffered a setback in recent years after a drunk-driving incident, was found dead in her home on Sunday afternoon, police said.Ms. Kim, who was 24, was discovered by a friend who had visited her house, according to the Seongdong Police Station in Seoul. The police on Monday said Ms. Kim’s death was a suicide. One of South Korea’s most lauded young actors, Ms. Kim had not appeared in any shows since she faced public criticism after being convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol in 2022.Her death marks the latest tragedy to strike South Korea’s booming but high-pressure entertainment industry, which has faced criticism for the toll it places on the mental health of its burgeoning stars. A celebrity’s popularity is often contingent on a spotless reputation, experts say.Over the past few years, several young stars were ruled to have died by suicide, one after receiving hate messages for being outspoken and opinionated, and another after a legal battle put her romantic and sex life in the public domain.Ms. Kim started her acting career by starring in “A Brand New Life,” a film about a girl abandoned in an orphanage, in 2009. She was 9 years old when the movie premiered and was invited to the Cannes Film Festival.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