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      ‘Y2K’ Review: Dying Like It’s 1999

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      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of humor, honed over many years on his cult-favorite YouTube channel and later on Saturday Night Live, seemed to have been replaced by something more cloying and conventional, where simply reminiscing about 1999 was a substitute for actually writing jokes about it.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

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      ‘Unstoppable’ Review: A Fearless Athlete, at Home and Away

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      In “Unstoppable” a focused Jharrel Jerome stars as Anthony Robles, who won a 2011 NCAA wrestling title and was born with one leg.“Unstoppable” tells the story of Anthony Robles, who won a 2011 NCAA wrestling title and was born with one leg. But despite the training montages and the hustling to qualify for teams and competitions, William Goldenberg’s feature directing debut comes to life more often as a conventional family drama than as a conventional sports movie.That’s probably a good thing at a time when the sports drama is starting to feel like a dying genre. “Unstoppable” takes time to flesh out the cyclical family dynamics that preoccupy Anthony (Jharrel Jerome), a disciplined athlete who can falter when his mind is elsewhere. His father, Rick (Bobby Cannavale), lords over the household, where Anthony is the eldest of five children. His mother, Judy, patches up the damage, in a typically sure-handed performance by Jennifer Lopez, negotiating mixed emotions.The action joins Anthony in high school in Arizona, working out to motivational videos, eyes on the prize. He gets a scholarship offer from Drexel University in Philadelphia, but is gunning for a better wrestling program. Jerome gives Anthony a daunting focus and self-possession, which befits the incessant tests that competitive wrestling throws at him (on top of a part-time job at an airport). He gets some requisite tough love from his blustering high school coach (Michael Peña).Anthony opts to stay local and go to Arizona State University when his dad upends the family with a sudden absence. At this school, making the team is an uphill battle, and his coach (a nicely underplaying Don Cheadle) needs to be convinced. Yet soon Anthony is on the mat winning matches, with a swaggering final-boss rival looming at another university.But the most gripping scenes can be the confrontations at home (especially given a sometimes creaky script). Cannavale effectively puts across a machismo that turns from dad swagger to insidious undermining to much worse (though the violence is largely shown through its aftermath). Jerome stays contained, even quiet, in showing Anthony’s resistance, which only raises the tension. Lopez deftly scales her energy up or down in the scenes of regrouping after the storm.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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      ‘Oh, Canada’ Review: Jacob Elordi as a Young Richard Gere

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      Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi star in Paul Schrader’s meditative drama about guilt and seeking forgiveness.Near the beginning of “Oh, Canada,” Paul Schrader’s adaptation of his friend Russell Banks’s novel “Foregone,” a small camera crew is preparing a room for a documentary interview. It’s a beautiful room, with dark wood-paneled walls, antique furnishings, a case containing awards and trophies. It looks like the home of someone who has led an interesting and successful life.The space belongs to Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), a documentarian and something of a left-wing celebrity living in Montreal with his wife and creative partner of many years, Emma (Uma Thurman). Fife is dying. But he’s agreed to allow two former students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), themselves documentary filmmakers, to interview him on camera. They are champing at the bit to memorialize him, but Fife’s motives in agreeing are not purely about the film.The themes running through much of Schrader’s work, especially lately, revolve around redemption — the messiness of it, the possibility of it, the impossibility of it. The man who wrote “Taxi Driver” has, in his 70s, given us “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter” and “Master Gardener,” movies about solitary men wrestling with the task of living in a world that humanity has wrecked, and the dread of discovering oneself personally unforgivable for one’s place in it. A recurring line from “First Reformed” feels like a precis for all of these: Will God forgive us?“Oh, Canada” circles around this theme, too. But while the men of the recent trilogy have preferred to pour their thoughts into journals, Fife is the kind of person who bottles everything up, able to move forward only by ditching the past. His life — at least before he crossed the border into Canada as a much younger man, leaving everything behind — is a series of secrets that not even his wife was fully aware of. His admirers, and history, see his crossing to Canada as bold protest against the Vietnam draft. But the story is more complicated, and now he feels he must get it off his chest before he crosses another border.In other words, he must confess. This religious practice, confession, is the beating soul of “Oh, Canada.” It’s signaled early: When the documentary crew is preparing the room for Fife, they awkwardly move a decorated Christmas tree out of the shot, revealing a portrait of some clergyman on the wall. Then, as the filmmakers get started with the shoot, they tell Fife that they’re going to be using the technology he developed, which seems to be the Interrotron we associate with the work of Errol Morris. It creates a way for an interview subject to feel as if they’re maintaining eye contact with the interviewer while actually looking directly into the camera lens. Morris (and, presumably, the fictional Fife) has said that this leads to more revelation. He’s also compared the tool’s results, its ability to rip away self-consciousness, to Freud’s psychoanalysis couch.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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      ‘Nightbitch’ Review: Motherhood? Woof! Grr!

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      Amy Adams plays a stay-at-home mom who comes to believe that she’s a dog in Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel.The sly, teasing conceit in “Nightbitch,” a fantasy starring Amy Adams, is that one day her character — a beleaguered, bone-weary mother — turns into a dog. That isn’t a metaphor, though maybe it is. The movie is wily on that point, even as you see her turning into a glossy-coated, tail-wagging, fang-baring canine. It looks kind of fun. Unlike poor Gregor Samsa, whose transformation into a giant insect in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” ends tragically, the mother’s change proves exhilarating. Among other things, she no longer needs to behave like a good girl. Hers is a galvanizing rebirth, one that’s red in tooth and claw.Written and directed by Marielle Heller, and based on Rachel Yoder’s novel of the same title, the mother — she doesn’t have a proper name until she starts calling herself Nightbitch — enters shortly before her great transformation. She, along with her unnamed husband, 2-year old son and criminally neglected cat, lives in one of those nice movie houses in a leafy, generic suburban neighborhood in Anytown, U.S. Unhappy with day care, the parents have decided that the mother, an artist who’s had critical success, will stay home. It isn’t going well. Their toddler is, ta-da, a toddler, and a babbling bundle of joy, energy and raw need.The mother’s awakening begins, appropriately, with her canine teeth, which seem to be getting sharper. Her body also seems hairier. She’s puzzled but also intrigued. For his part, her husband (Scoot McNairy, in a largely thankless role) seems oblivious, his usual state. Before long, she is scrutinizing a bump near her coccyx that’s big enough to send most of us to urgent care. The mother, though, isn’t like most people; she’s a clever, at times comic, engagingly offbeat fictional vehicle for some familiar and dubious ideas about female identity as well as maternity, domesticity and femininity. All of which is to say, this is also about power.Heller’s previous explorations of the lives of women include “Can You Ever Forgive Me” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” her feature directing debut. For her adaptation of “Nightbitch,” Heller has retained the novel’s claustrophobic intimacy; the mother leaves the house, though it never feels like she gets out enough, in part because she’s usually with just the kid. That her interior life proves far more interesting than her material reality isn’t a surprise. Heller makes that clear early with the use of visual repetition, underscoring the monotony of the mother’s dawn-to-dusk life with shot after shot of her frying up breakfast and reading a bedtime book. The point is made quickly, but Heller keeps making it.More successful are the scenes in which you hear both what the mother says and what she thinks. To allow you to get into the character’s head, Heller has translated passages from the book’s stream-of-consciousness narration into chunks of voice-over. This makes for some nice comedy, especially when the mother’s spoken utterances are in sharp contrast to her unvarnished, panicky, annoyed voice-over. “Do you just love getting to be home with him all the time?” an acquaintance asks. Er, yes and no. Most people, though, her husband very much included, don’t seem really interested in what she says, never mind what she thinks. It’s no wonder that even when she’s nodding along with others, her thoughts run wild.The story takes a surreal turn when the mother pierces the cyst on her back with a needle, a visceral, entertaining gross-out moment that, as milky liquid oozes out, briefly shifts the movie into body-horror terrain. When she pulls a wispy tail out of the cyst, the movie slips into magical realism and starts getting down to its weird business. The mother gives the cat the side eye and chases a squirrel, her toddler giddily in tow. Then one evening, while the husband is away and the boy is (at last) asleep, she changes into a floofy dog with a luxuriant tail. Enter Nightbitch. She finds a pack, pads around the streets, runs wild.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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      ‘The End’ Review: It’s All Come to This

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      Joshua Oppenheimer’s postapocalyptic musical about a wealthy family in an underground bunker is placidly disturbing.Joshua Oppenheimer is our age’s great bard of cognitive dissonance. His previous two films, “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” are technically documentaries about the horrific Indonesian mass killings in 1965-66. But they’re more fundamentally about the extraordinary lengths to which the human mind — or, really, the human soul — is prepared to go in justifying its own coldblooded atrocity. I don’t have to tell you that this goes far beyond one historical event, and so do these two documentaries. The subjects are men who perpetrated the massacre and seemingly feel no remorse at all. Something inside them has rotted away.They’re disturbing films, chilling the viewer to the bone. So, too, is “The End,” which when I first heard about it sounded like a particularly unlikely Oppenheimer project. The film, which he wrote with Rasmus Heisterberg, is not a documentary at all: It’s a musical, set in the nearish future, about a family living in a vast and luxurious underground bunker while the world literally burns above them. And they, it turns out, caused that apocalypse.The man of the house was an oil mogul when the world was alive, a great defender of fossil fuels and an affectionate guardian to his family. He is named only “Father” in the press notes, and played by Michael Shannon, who sings and dances very well. His wife (Tilda Swinton, with an appropriately reedier voice) is a nervy former ballet dancer, spending her days rearranging the well-appointed rooms of their dwelling, the walls of which are decked out with the world’s greatest masterpieces. They brought them when they fled the surface, apparently.Mother and Father have a son (George MacKay, suitably strange) who was born underground and now is in his 20s. He’s been well-educated in this bunker, even doted upon by all of these adults — his parents and the few others they allowed to come with them. His best friend is also his mother’s best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), who in the past was a great chef. They also have an affable butler (Tim McInnerny) and a grumpy doctor (Lennie James). And for decades, that’s been everyone. There’s next to no one left above.Musicals mostly deploy songs when characters are experiencing great emotion: desire, or fear, or exhilaration. But “The End” plays with these expectations, because emotion is a tricky subject for these bunker-dwellers. Yes, they sing lyrical songs with great swelling orchestral harmonies, and sometimes they dance. (Oppenheimer wrote the lyrics, with music by Joshua Schmidt and score by Schmidt and Marius de Vries.) But in between smiles, their faces slip into mask-like panic, with eyes that are dead. Oppenheimer modulates the lighting during the scenes from cool to warm and back again, underlining the vacillating feelings they can’t acknowledge outright.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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      When a Baby Killer Isn’t a Straightforward Villain

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      The real-life murderer who inspired “The Girl With the Needle” was “a monster,” said the actress who plays her, “but the movie is also about showing you her struggles.”In 1920s Copenhagen, a woman named Dagmar Overbye was convicted of murdering multiple infants whose mothers had paid her to find adoptive families for them. She confessed to killing 16 babies, though the true number of victims was likely higher.One of Denmark’s most notorious serial killers, Overbye is a character in the movie “The Girl with the Needle,” which arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday and is Denmark’s entry for the best international feature Oscar.Yet the film isn’t a true-crime thriller, and Overbye isn’t portrayed as a straightforward villain. Instead the story is about “finding the humanity in these horrible deeds,” the film’s director, Magnus von Horn, said in a video interview — a tall task considering the deeds involve burning, drowning and strangling babies.How to perform the high-wire act of humanizing a killer?“You focus on the characters,” von Horn said.And you have to cast actors fearless enough to pull it off.Enter Trine Dyrholm and Vic Carmen Sonne, the two leads in “The Girl with the Needle,” and two of Denmark’s most boundary-pushing actors.The movie is based on the story of Dagmar Overbye, one of Denmark’s most notorious serial killers.MubiWe 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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      New Movies and Shows Coming to Netflix in December: ‘Squid Game’ and More

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      This month has a ton of new titles arriving for U.S. subscribers, including a Nate Bargatze special and the return of “Squid Game.”Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of December’s most promising new titles for U.S. subscribers. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘Black Doves’ Season 1Starts streaming: Dec. 5Created by Joe Barton (known for the stylish series “Giri/Haji” and “The Lazarus Project”), this twisty thriller has Keira Knightley playing Helen, a secret agent so deeply undercover that she is married to the British politician she is spying on — and is the mother to his children. When Jason (Andrew Koji), a man Helen was having an affair with, is very publicly assassinated by London mobsters, Helen’s boss, Reed (Sarah Lancashire), and her close colleague Sam (Ben Whishaw) try to keep the investigation into the murder from reaching back to her and blowing her cover. “Black Doves” is set in a pulp fiction version of England where everyone is hiding something and no one fully trusts anybody — a place where information is currency and people survive on guile.‘Maria’Starts streaming: Dec. 11The third film in the director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy of biopics (after “Jackie” and “Spencer”), “Maria” is a showcase for Angelina Jolie, who plays the opera diva Maria Callas. Set during the final week of the singer’s life, the movie has Callas in a druggie stupor, imagining that she is sitting for an interview in which she reflects on her tumultuous life. Jolie reportedly spent months in opera training, not to learn how to copy Callas’s voice but rather to make sure she could stand, move and breathe like a master.‘No Good Deed’ Season 1Starts streaming: Dec. 12At the start of this dark dramedy, a Los Angeles couple, Paul (Ray Romano) and Lydia (Lisa Kudrow), are anxious to sell their house: a beautiful, century-old home in an upscale neighborhood. A handful of motivated buyers, played by Luke Wilson, Linda Cardellini, Teyonah Parris, O-T Fagbenle, Abbi Jacobson and Poppy Liu, circle the property while Paul and Lydia try to hide their secret reasons for the sale — and their relationship with a dangerous ex-con played by Denis Leary. Similar to the creator Liz Feldman’s previous Netflix series, “Dead to Me,” “No Good Deed” is about people who seem outwardly to be enjoying some material success but whose personal lives are in shambles; privately, they all feel they’re on the brink of disaster.‘Your Friend, Nate Bargatze’Starts streaming: Dec. 24The stand-up comedian Nate Bargatze was popular before he hosted “Saturday Night Live” for the first time in 2023, but that episode — and a second hosting gig in October — helped boost him into comedy’s A-list. This month, Bargatze will be hosting a Christmas-themed variety show for CBS (airing on Dec. 19 and also available on Paramount+); and then on Christmas Eve, he will debut this third Netflix stand-up special. It makes sense for Bargatze to be delivering new material at a time when families are gathering and looking for something to do. He is one of the rare modern comics whose profanity-free jokes are suitable for pretty much all ages, touching on such universal topics as marriage, parenting and how to navigate the modern world’s sometimes confusing etiquette.‘Squid Game’ Season 2Starts streaming: Dec. 26The first season of the Korean mystery-thriller “Squid Game” became an unexpected international phenomenon, captivating audiences with its depiction of an elaborate tournament in a remote location in which desperate people risk their lives for a huge cash prize. As Season 2 begins, rumors about the game have begun to leak out, and several people are looking to find it — including the former players Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) and Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun). The series’s Emmy-winning writer-director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, returns for the second of a planned three-season run, bringing back the visually spectacular and nerve-racking contests of Season 1. He also adds more social commentary, examining the brokenness of a world, very much like our own, where such a deadly underground competition could exist.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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      ‘Our Little Secret’ and More New Holiday Movies to Stream

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      From “Our Little Secret” to “The Merry Gentlemen,” a roundup of several holiday movies to stream this season.“It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” the song goes. “There’ll be parties for hosting/Billions of movies for bingeing.”If the Andy Williams chestnut doesn’t actually mention streaming, that’s only because it came out long before Hallmark, UPtv, Great American Family and Lifetime decided to flood the holidays with movies. But because time is a finite resource, the following selection of new seasonal offerings focuses on releases from the major platforms. And remember: If you see someone stranded in a blizzard once, it’s a plot development. If you see it 10 times, it’s a cliché. If you see it 50 times, it’s a holiday-movie convention — and this time of year, we love conventions.‘Dear Santa’Stream it on Paramount+.This year’s entry in the bad Santa subgenre goes all out. And that’s because the bearded, stocky guy in a red outfit is actually Satan (Jack Black). He has been summoned by young Liam (Robert Timothy Smith), who mistakenly switched two letters in his note to Santa. And now the devil won’t leave until Liam has requested three wishes, which sounds more straightforward than it turns out to be. “Dear Satan” does not fully deliver on this mouthwatering premise, which is surprising considering the movie is directed by a Farrelly brother (Bobby) and the casting is on point — you feel Black has waited all his life to play this part. Still, there are enough nuts for this fruitcake to go down easy.Watch for: gastrointestinal distress.‘Hot Frosty’Stream it on Netflix.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