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      ‘Terrestrial Verses’ Review: Crossing Lines in Iran

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      Ordinary Iranians face a maze of byzantine rules and small indignities in this series of gripping vignettes.Half the cast of “Terrestrial Verses” never appears onscreen. Instead we hear their voices as they speak to a variety of ordinary Tehranians: a young woman applying for a job, a man seeking to register his newborn son’s name, a filmmaker, a little girl, a driver’s license applicant. Out in the audience, we’re watching the hopeful faces of those people, who become crestfallen as it becomes clear that whatever they want, no matter how small, is impossible, for no real reason at all. An authoritarian regime, and a bureaucratic establishment that props up byzantine rules, has seen to that.“Terrestrial Verses,” written and directed by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami, unfolds as a series of vignettes, almost like tiny one-act plays. Selena (Arghavan Shabani), the little girl, is wearing headphones and dancing when we meet her, while, off-camera, her mother and a shopkeeper discuss a uniform she needs for a school ceremony. Selena keeps getting called over by her mother, returning to our field of vision wearing yet another layer of clothing in the drab neutrals mandated by the school’s rules. In another vignette, a new father (Bahram Ark) wants to name his baby David, but is informed that it’s simply impossible, since the name is Western and doesn’t have the state-required religious connotation. In another, the filmmaker, named Ali (Farzin Mohades), exasperatedly converses with a culture ministry official, who wants him to remove nearly everything from his screenplay in order to make it acceptable to the regime.The most maddening segments show how boxed-in women are, attempting to simply live their lives without accidentally crossing some line. Or not even crossing it: Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari), a young ride-share driver with and a punk affect and short hair beneath her head scarf, argues with an official. Traffic cameras caught what the official insists is a woman driving Sadaf’s car, head scarf removed. Isn’t a car a private space?, Sadaf asks. The official disagrees, and Sadaf is deemed a criminal.Because each vignette is no more than a few minutes long and consists of Kafkaesque conversations that border on the absurd, “Terrestrial Verses” operates with a cumulative effect. It’s death by a thousand pinpricks, a succession of small indignities. Each seemingly simple task is not just saddled with procedural irritations — forms to fill out, appointments to attend, banal questions to answer — but with fear. Suppose your answer to a routine query could incriminate you or there’s no way to prove to an official that you aren’t lying. How would you live your life?Those questions run through “Terrestrial Verses,” which consists entirely of stark, locked-off shots that place each segment’s protagonist in the box of the frame. It becomes clear that the shots themselves are full of meaning. Each actor in the uniformly excellent cast is centered on the screen, and as they are heaped with indignities, the frame becomes something like a mug shot, or a prison — a place where they’re confined for us to look at them, watch their reactions, judge their facial cues.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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      ‘Humane’ Review: An Ethical Crisis and a Dinner Party

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      Caitlin Cronenberg’s debut feature is set in a dystopian world that’s alarmingly believable.“Humane” is a thought experiment sprung to bloody life, a cross between the trolley problem and dystopian extinction nightmares. Set in the very near future, it tries to tackle a cascade of ethical questions. Who counts as valuable? What does it mean to be good? If humans wreck the earth, what will we do to survive? Do we even deserve it?Those are gargantuan questions, enough to power several graduate-level philosophy courses. But “Humane” wraps them in admirably small-scale trappings: a family drama with immensely high stakes. Just after widespread ecological collapse, every country on earth has shut its borders and has committed to reducing its population within one year. In Canada, the target reduction is 20 percent, and to coax people into joining the effort, the government’s Department of Citizen Strategy has come up with language as euphemistic as its name. People who agree to be euthanized are “enlisting” in the “war.” Posters declare that “Enlistment = Opportunity,” because the families of those who enlist receive a substantial payout, enabling higher education or homeownership.The volunteers tend to be older people, but they’re not the only ones being euthanized. It doesn’t take much to realize who else might be willing: prison inmates facing long sentences, terminally ill people, financially disadvantaged parents, undocumented immigrants whose families are promised a fast track to citizenship. But people haven’t been enlisting fast enough to reach the threshold. On TV news, some are beginning to discuss “conscription.”“Humane,” directed by Caitlin Cronenberg (a daughter of the celebrated horror auteur David Cronenberg) in her feature debut, builds this world at a satisfyingly rapid speed, raising stakes so quickly that you’re left breathless as the implications sink in. (That also means some of the logical leaps — like how you’d get the whole world to agree to these measures — fade into the background, and that’s fine.) 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 Feeling’ Review: Fifty Shades of Apathy

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      In the sex comedy “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” Joanna Arnow keeps her scenes short and her expressions flat.Joanna Arnow’s attention-grabbing debut “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” has been described as a sadomasochistic sex comedy, but it’s hard to laugh.Arnow, who wrote, directed and stars in this sometimes-riveting, sometimes-dull study of demoralization, plays a dour 30-something New Yorker who spends her days getting pushed around by her boss (Armand Reiser). At night, she submits to the sexual commands of her various male masters, whom she meets online. The joke is that her days and nights aren’t that different.And then the joke is on the audience when Arnow introduces us to six men in 30 minutes before we realize that we don’t yet know her character’s name. (It’s Ann.)The film is structured by Ann’s partners, whose names appear in tidy white font on a black screen. They’re nearly always dressed; she’s almost always naked (though one partner, played by Parish Bradley, commands her to wear bunny ears and a pig nose). It’d be one thing if Ann enjoyed the sex. But from the snapshots we see, these encounters seem mostly humiliating and joyless. When obeying an order to touch herself in view of drivers on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, she just looks bored.Arnow keeps her scenes short and her expressions flat. These glimpses of her character’s life could be stand-alone comic book panels. Together, they’re a mosaic of stagnation.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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      ‘Boy Kills World’ Review: A Wide-Eyed Assassin

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      Beefed up and bloodied, Bill Skarsgard goes mano a mano against disposable hordes in this dystopian action flick.At least give it up for the stunt crew on “Boy Kills World,” a boneheaded action movie that gives some exceedingly fit performers — its hard-body star Bill Skarsgard very much included — a chance to flaunt their physical skills. To judge from all the grunting, the straining muscles and cascading sweat, Skarsgard, along with a few of his nimble co-stars and an army of stunt performers, puts in serious work to try to make the relentless bashing and smashing, flailing and dying look good. Too bad the filmmakers were incapable of doing the same.Set in a discount dystopian hellscape, the story centers on, ta-da, Boy (Skarsgard), a saucer-eyed dynamo with an uninteresting back story who can neither hear nor talk. Once upon a time, for reasons that are laboriously teased out, he landed in the jungle, where he was taken under wing by a punishing caretaker, the Shaman. This cat is played with a lot of grimacing by the Indonesian martial-arts phenom Yayan Ruhian, of the “Raid” movies. Ruhian also shows up in “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum,” which isn’t good, yet is still better than “Boy Kills World” because it was made by people who know how to showcase stunt fighting.“Boy Kills World,” by contrast, consistently undermines its stunts with frustratingly clumsy filmmaking. Again and again, the frantic camera goes overly close when it should go wide — turning bodies into a chaotic jumble of parts — and the choppy over-editing makes matters worse. I’m not sure what the director Moritz Mohr thought he was doing here. (Sam Raimi is one of the producers.) It’s also unclear why anyone even bothered to concoct a story for Boy, because the only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.The story involves, yup, a revenge mission that the filmmakers fuss with by toggling between the past and present but that mostly finds Boy hunting a cartoon despot (Famke Janssen) and her minions (Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Brett Gelman). Andrew Koji also shows up as a sidekick for Boy, whom Skarsgard plays as a guileless killing machine. As he did in “It,” the actor makes shrewd use of the whites of his eyes, turning them into attention-grabbing beacons. That’s understandable given that another actor (H. Jon Benjamin, of “Bob’s Burgers”) provides Boy’s internal voice using a putatively humorous tough-guy drone. This gimmick gets old fast, as does the movie, even as its hero and ideas remain underbaked.Boy Kills WorldRated R for action movie fighting and killing. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Zendaya, Luca Guadagnino, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist on ‘Challengers’

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      Can trash talk be a love language?It is in the world of Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Challengers,” which pits two best-friend tennis players, Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), against each other in a bid to win the heart of the superstar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). What begins as innocent teasing becomes more charged once an injury cuts short Tashi’s career: Forced to pivot to coaching, she weds Art and goads him to demolish her former lover Patrick on the court, though both men continue to nurse their own hidden agendas.“I find them all really likable and charming — and terrible also,” Zendaya said with a grin. The complicated adult stakes of “Challengers” offer a new pursuit for this 27-year-old actress, who shot to fame as a teenager on the Disney Channel and is now best known for her Emmy-winning role on HBO’s “Euphoria” and the big-budget movie franchises “Spider-Man” and “Dune.” Though she is aware that “Challengers” will test her box-office draw as a solo star, she didn’t overthink her decision to make the movie, which comes out in theaters on Friday.“I wanted to do it because it’s brilliant,” she said. “It’s not like I sat in my room and had this master board: ‘OK, this is how I’m going to make my big transition for my first lead theatrical role.’”Last week at a Beverly Hills hotel, I met Zendaya, her co-stars O’Connor (“The Crown”) and Faist (“West Side Story”), and Guadagnino for an hour of freewheeling conversation about “Challengers” and the pressure of forging a life and career in the public eye. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“The triangle is not just two people after one,” Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Challengers,” said, “but the corners touch together all the time.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThis movie poses a lot of questions about ambition and drive. Zendaya, has your relationship to your own ambition changed over time?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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      Video Shows Crash That Injured Crew Members of ‘The Pickup’

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      The collision on the set of “The Pickup” is under investigation. Video shows an armored truck and an S.U.V. veering off a road before the truck flips onto the smaller vehicle.A two-vehicle crash that injured several crew members on the set of the movie “The Pickup” is being investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency said on Wednesday.Amazon MGM Studios said the crash occurred on Saturday but did not provide any details about the injuries. According to two people with direct knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to speak publicly about it, at least a half-dozen people who were inside the vehicles sustained injuries and were transported to a hospital. One person remained hospitalized on Wednesday with a back injury, those people said.They said that none of the actors in the film, which features Eddie Murphy, Keke Palmer and Pete Davidson, were involved in the crash. An OSHA inspection report said it occurred at a small airport outside Atlanta.Video of the crash that was obtained by The New York Times shows an armored truck pulling up alongside an S.U.V. before swerving into it. After the collision, both vehicles veer off the road in tandem and drive onto grass, where the armored truck flips on top of the S.U.V.Both vehicles completely roll over and end up upright but mangled. As a back door of the armored truck swings open, one person inside can be seen lying limp.The video is a cellphone recording of a monitor playing back the footage of the crash.Several crew members of the movie “The Pickup” were injured when two vehicles collided during filming. The crash is under investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.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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      What Directors Love About Nicole Kidman

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      As the actress receives a life achievement award from the American Film Institute this week, five filmmakers discuss what makes her work so singular.“We come to this place for magic,” Nicole Kidman says in the well-known AMC Theaters preshow advertisement. And who could better welcome back audiences to experience movies on the big screen than an acclaimed artist who’s illuminated stories across all genres?Kidman has starred in daring art house projects (“Dogville,” “Birth”), awards-friendly dramas (“Cold Mountain,” “Rabbit Hole”), big-budget crowd-pleasers (“Aquaman,” “Paddington”) and everything in between.On Saturday, the Australian American Oscar-winning actress will receive the life achievement award from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. At 56, Kidman is among the youngest honorees.But what qualities have kept Kidman consistently in demand for the past three decades?The Australian director Jane Campion said via email that “her fierce curiosity has helped her take an audience inside some gnarly women.” The American filmmaker Karyn Kusama described her as a “channeler of inchoate energy,” and explained that when this “coalesces into something visceral for her character, you almost feel the molecules in the air shift around her.”Five directors who have worked with Kidman, including Campion and Kusama, discussed what makes the performer an irreplaceable, shape-shifting talent.Baz Luhrmann‘Moulin Rouge!’ (2001), ‘Australia’ (2008)As Satine in “Moulin Rouge!”20th Century FoxWe 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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      Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell on How ‘Anyone but You’ Beat the Rom-Com Odds

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      Here are their takeaways after the film, debuting on Netflix, went from box office miss to runaway hit.As Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell promoted their romantic comedy, “Anyone but You,” last year, life appeared to be imitating art: The co-stars posed cheek to cheek while sightseeing in Australia. Powell dipped a gleeful Sweeney in his arms. Sweeney cast longing gazes up at Powell on red carpets. The pair flirted and giggled in interviews.When Powell and his long-term girlfriend broke up, and Sweeney remained engaged to her fiancé, Jonathan Davino (an executive producer of “Anyone but You”), rumors of an illicit offscreen relationship between the two actors took hold.The speculation played out, the stars said, exactly as they intended.“The two things that you have to sell a rom-com are fun and chemistry. Sydney and I have a ton of fun together, and we have a ton of effortless chemistry,” Powell said in an interview. “That’s people wanting what’s on the screen off the screen, and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit — and it worked wonderfully. Sydney is very smart.”Sweeney, who is also an executive producer through her Fifty-Fifty Films company, said she was intimately involved with the marketing strategy on the Columbia Pictures film, including, perhaps, fanning those headline-generating flames.“I was on every call. I was in text group chats. I was probably keeping everybody over at Sony marketing and distribution awake at night because I couldn’t stop with ideas,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that we were actively having a conversation with the audience as we were promoting this film, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who created the entire narrative.”The R-rated romance follows Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell), who share a night that ends badly and are then thrust together at a destination wedding in Australia, where Ben’s friend and Bea’s sister are getting married. The film is based loosely on Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and is full of bawdy zingers, grand gestures and sun-dappled scenery.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