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      ‘Dune: Part Two’ Review: Bigger, Wormier and Way Far Out

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      Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya make an appealing pair in Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up film, and the actors fit together with tangible ease.Having gone big in “Dune,” his 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s futuristic opus, the director Denis Villeneuve has gone bigger and more far out in the follow up. Set in the aftermath of the first movie, the sequel resumes the story boldly and quickly, delivering visions both phantasmagoric and familiar. Like Timothée Chalamet’s dashingly coifed hero — who steers monstrous sandworms over the desert like a charioteer — Villeneuve has tamed a Leviathan. The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in “Dune: Part Two,” and it’s a blast.The new movie is a surprisingly nimble moonshot, even with all its gloom and doom and brutality. Big-screen enterprises, particularly those adapted from books with a huge, fiercely loyal readership, often have a ponderousness built in to every image. In some, you can feel the enormous effort it takes as filmmakers try to turn reams of pages into moving images that have commensurate life, artistry and pop on the screen. Adaptations can be especially deadly when moviemakers are too precious with the source material; they’re torpedoed by fealty.“Dune” made it clear that Villeneuve isn’t that kind of textualist. As he did in the original, he has again taken plentiful liberties with Herbert’s behemoth (one hardcover edition runs 528 pages) to make “Part Two,” which he wrote with the returning Jon Spaihts. Characters, subplots and volumes of dialogue (interior and otherwise) have again been reduced or excised altogether. (I was sorry that the great character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, who played an eerie adviser in the first movie, didn’t make the cut here.) The story — its trajectory, protagonist and concerns — remains recognizable yet also different.“Dune” turns on Paul Atreides (Chalamet), an aristocrat who becomes a guerrilla and crusader, and whose destiny weighs as heavily on him as any crown. In adapting “Dune,” Villeneuve effectively cleaved Herbert’s novel in half. (Herbert wrote six “Dune” books, a series that has morphed into a multimedia franchise since his death in 1986.) The first part makes introductions and sketches in Paul’s back story as the beloved only son of a duke, Leto (Oscar Isaac), and his concubine, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). When it opens, the royals, on orders from the universe’s emperor, are preparing to vacate their home planet, a watery world called Caladan, to the parched planet of Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune.The move to Arrakis goes catastrophically wrong; Paul’s father and most members of House Atreides are murdered by their enemies, most notably the pallid, villainous House Harkonnen. Paul and the Lady Jessica escape into the desert where — after much side-eyeing and muttering along with one of those climactic mano-a-mano duels that turn fictional boys into men — they find uneasy allies in a group of Fremen, the planet’s Indigenous population. A tribal people who have adapted to Dune’s harsh conditions with clever survival tactics, like form-fitting suits that conserve bodily moisture, the Fremen are scattered across the planet under the emperor’s rule. Some fight to be free; many pray for a messiah.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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      ‘Spaceman’ Review: What Happened Here?

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      Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan star in a baffling Netflix misfire about a man in, well, space.When was the last time you looked at the exquisite list of synonyms for the word “baffled”? They may be among the best in the English language: puzzled, nonplused, discombobulated, flummoxed, stumped, fogged, wildered, buffaloed. They’re delicious, delightful, full of consonants, evocative of a very particular feeling: you’re presented with something that seems as though it should be clear, but you can’t make it make sense.The occasion for my bout of word nerdery is the Adam Sandler movie “Spaceman,” and for that I thank the film. It is not a particularly confusing movie on its own, in part because we’ve seen its likes before: a spaceman, alone in the inky blackness, goes a little nuts, and also gains clarity on his life back on earth. What’s flummoxing about “Spaceman” isn’t what it is, but why it is.Some bad movies were never going to be good (“Argylle”). Other bad movies never even tried (“Madame Web”). But “Spaceman” is that exquisite rare third thing — an awful movie, a very bad movie indeed, whose lousiness was almost certainly not apparent while it was in production.Every sign points toward, if not a masterpiece, at least a pretty interesting genre experiment. The film has Sandler, whose acting chops are often underrated, in a dramatic role as the titular spaceman, whose name is Jakub. It has the great Carey Mulligan, who is currently up for a best actress Oscar, playing his estranged, pregnant wife Lenka. It is scored by the ubiquitous Max Richter. Its director, Johan Renck, also directed the outstanding mini-series “Chernobyl,” among the best television made in the past decade. And though it’s the screenwriter Colby Day’s first major feature, it’s based on Jaroslav Kalfar’s novel “Spaceman of Bohemia,” which won praise from science fiction critics.I haven’t read Kalfar’s book, but a critic at The Guardian called it “‘Solaris’ with laughs,” which gives me a clue as to what may have gone awry. There’s some “Solaris” swimming around inside “Spaceman,” and also some “Gravity,” some “Interstellar,” some “First Man,” some “Ad Astra.” What there aren’t are laughs.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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      ‘Outlaw Posse’ Review: Van Peebles Is Back With a Western

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      Two decades after his previous Black western, Mario Van Peebles is back in the saddle again. This time, his son, Mandela, is with him.The wacky, low-budget quest “Outlaw Posse” by the writer-director Mario Van Peebles is not a direct sequel to his innovative Black western “Posse,” from 1993. It’s a companion piece, built in the same universe, that is equally indebted to the history of Black cowboys and the need for restorative justice in America.As Chief, an outlaw hiding in Mexico, the playful Van Peebles wears a dark-colored cowboy outfit similar to the one he sported in “Posse,” and mirroring what his father, Melvin Van Peebles, wore in his 1971 Blaxploitation flick “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” That film was the first father-son pairing between them; it’s fitting to see Mandela Van Peebles now teaming with his dad as Decker, the estranged son of Chief.Like “Posse,” “Outlaw Posse” concerns a cache of gold commandeered by a Black soldier. Set in 1908, the gold was stolen by Chief from the Confederate government decades ago for the purpose of reparations. A malicious squad of white men, led by the sadistic, one-handed Angel (William Mapother), is pursuing Chief’s ragtag gang across Montana.Angel takes Decker’s family hostage, forcing him to infiltrate his dad’s band of outlaws and report back. Along the way, historical figures like Stagecoach Mary (an underused Whoopi Goldberg) and funny characters like Horatio (Cedric the Entertainer) appear.In direct conversation with cinema’s many spaghetti westerns, Van Peebles’s shaggy script relies on winking nods and plentiful shootouts in lieu of production value. “Outlaw Posse” may not be innovative, but its regard for family affairs is worth treasuring.Outlaw PosseRated R for sweetback content, language and brief partial nudity. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dune: Part Two’: Here’s Everything You Need to Know

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      Before you see the second film in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the sci-fi epic, try this refresher on spice, the Imperium and the Kwisatz Haderach.Since the weird, wild universe of “Dune” emerged from the pages of Frank Herbert’s novel in 1965, filmmakers have yearned to bring it to the screen. In the 1970s, Alejandro Jodorowsky was thwarted in his attempt to turn his elaborate vision into cinematic reality. In 1984, David Lynch was forced to cram volumes of lore into two hours, and the result was an ugly-beautiful disaster. In the latest foray, Denis Villeneuve has created an engrossing, believable world, smartly dividing the first book in the series into two parts. “Dune: Part One” was a critical and box office hit when it was released in 2021, and now “Part Two,” which opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, is poised to pick up where the last film left off. Here’s a primer to bring you up to speed.Where are we?In the film, Paul Atreides becomes a member of the Fremen, a native people of the planet Arrakis living mostly in its hidden corners. Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.“Dune” is set about 20,000 years in the future, and much of the series takes place on the desert planet of Arrakis. Part of the galactic empire of the Imperium, which is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam, Arrakis is vital because it offers a necessary resource — spice — that exists nowhere else. In “Part One,” the emperor transferred control of Arrakis from the brutes of House Harkonnen to their longtime foes, House Atreides. But the gift was a trap, something Duke Leto Atreides suspected but hoped to turn to his advantage by establishing an alliance with the Fremen, a native people of Arrakis who live mostly in its hidden corners. Before Leto’s plans could bear fruit, the emperor secretly sent his elite force to aid Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) in regaining control of the planet and in destroying Leto’s troops and family. (In the process, Leto died.)Why is spice so important?“Part Two” opens with the words “Power over spice is power over all.” After a religious revolt against robots millenniums before the start of the series, the use of intelligent machines was banned. People have since relied on preternatural abilities that are developed through training and the use of psychotropic drugs such as spice, which can expand consciousness and extend life. The resource is particularly crucial to the navigators, who enable interstellar travel.What’s the deal with Paul Atreides?Paul Atreides battling Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) to determine who will control the spice — and the universe.Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is the son of Leto and his concubine, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), who is a member of the Bene Gesserit, a mystical sisterhood that surreptitiously manipulates the levers of power. It has been seeding self-serving myths and conducting a breeding program for generations. The relationship between Leto and Jessica had been arranged in hopes that she would give birth to a daughter who could then conceive the Kwisatz Haderach — a male Bene Gesserit with “a mind powerful enough to bridge all space and time.” Instead, Jessica bore Leto the son he desired. (A Bene Gesserit can control everything that goes on in her body.)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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      Josh Brolin Never Thought He’d End Up in Malibu

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      How the “Dune” actor made a home in a place he once resisted.IN HIS EARLY 20s, long before he became a leading man, Josh Brolin took a writing class taught by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. One of the assignments was to create an evocative phrase by combining two words. A fellow student came up with “Tylenol Christ”; Brolin, an enthusiastic storyteller, had trouble being that succinct. The experience has been on the actor’s mind recently as he finishes his forthcoming memoir, a mix of stories, anecdotes and poems scheduled to come out this fall. In a recently completed essay, he describes chasing a flock of sheep with two of his children when they were young on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye. (His son, Trevor, and eldest daughter, Eden, both from his first marriage to the actress Alice Adair, are now 36 and 31.) To their horror, one of the fleeing animals broke its back. “It’s about what had to transpire for the next hour,” says Brolin, 56, from his writing hut in Malibu, Calif., a gift from his wife of nearly eight years, the photographer Kathryn Boyd Brolin, 37, who modeled it after ones used by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. “It’s the clearest, most emotional thing I’ve written.”The actor gives a tour of his guesthouse and Airstream trailer in Malibu, Calif.Megan LovalloBrolin looks and presents like a modern-day cowboy. He was raised 200 miles up the Pacific Coast on a horse ranch in Paso Robles and inherited that property (which he sold in 2004 and bought back in 2010) from his mother, the wildlife conservationist Jane Cameron Agee, who died in a car accident the day after his 27th birthday. Although his father, the actor James Brolin, relocated to Malibu, where he now lives with his wife, Barbra Streisand, Brolin had always rejected the seaside community as a place for, as he puts it, celebrities “trying not to be seen as they’re trying to be seen.” He prefers the lawless energy of nearby Venice, in Los Angeles, where he’s been renting a beachfront apartment for almost 15 years. But in 2011, Brolin, who frequently looks at online real estate listings in bed, came across a 2,400-square-foot bungalow on one and a half acres in a part of Malibu once known as Poor Point. With money he made from “Men in Black 3” (2012), he bought the charmingly rundown four-bedroom house, which spoke, he says, to his “misfit, outcast mentality,” from the musician Jakob Dylan. Brolin, who also has a home in Atlanta, rented it out for years.Brolin’s Airstream trailer is furnished with a trefoil table by Herman Studio for Form & Refine and decorated with wallpaper by Anna Hayman Designs and custom pillows by Pierce & Ward.Ryan James CaruthersIn the guesthouse’s kitchen, a custom range hood in unlacquered brass with walnut accents and a 1960s Bijou desk lamp by Louis Kalff for Philips.Ryan James CaruthersIn 2018, he and Kathryn, who once worked as his assistant, decided to fix up the place and live there themselves. When the minimalist style of the first designer they hired didn’t align with Brolin’s vision — “Neutral makes no sense to me at all,” he says — Kathryn suggested they reach out to Louisa Pierce and Emily Ward, known professionally as Pierce & Ward. (Coincidentally, it was Ward’s partner, the actor Giovanni Ribisi, who had nearly outbid Brolin to buy the house.) The duo understood Brolin’s taste for what he calls “nutty kaleidoscope” and “Old World European busyness”: The walls of the residence are painted or papered in powdery colors, floral motifs and stripes; a playroom for the couple’s two daughters — Westlyn, 5, and Chapel, 3 — has been made to resemble the berth of a ship; the living and dining rooms are decorated with worn leather armchairs, creaky wooden tables and sun-faded kilim rugs. Except for the fake Academy Award in a closet that they use as a wet bar — and Brolin’s casual mentions of “Clooney’s place in the South of France” and “Momoa’s hundred motorcycles” — there’s barely any suggestion of Hollywood. “I was so in their face in the beginning [of the renovation],” he says about Pierce and Ward. “I’d send them hundreds of photographs. And then I thought, ‘The more I try to affect this whole thing, the worse it’s going to get.’ So I backed off.”Jay Miriam’s “The French Girls” (2019) hangs in the guesthouse’s pool table room.Ryan James CaruthersIn the living room, Holmes’s “Behind Golden Bars 2” (2021).Ryan James CaruthersWe 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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      Richard Lewis Recalled Friendship With Larry David in One of His Last Interviews

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      The occasion was a profile of a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” co-star, but Lewis got plenty of good lines in as he reminisced about starting out with Larry David.Richard Lewis called me barely a month ago, on Jan. 22, to gush about his friend Susie Essman.“I adore her,” he said, eagerly offering his thoughts for a profile of his co-star on the Larry David series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “She’s so on the money with her delivery.”Lewis, who announced last year that he had Parkinson’s disease, played himself as David’s friend on the show (as he was in real life). He and Essman, the comedian and actress behind the invective-spewing Susie Greene, the wife of David’s manager, provoked very different reactions from fans, he recalled.“When I’ve been with her in public, they want her to yell things back at them,” he said. “For me, it’s like, ‘You’re going to be all right, Richard.’”He dialed me directly, rather than having a publicist connect us, as is more common, and seemed happy to stay on the phone and crack jokes.Listening to the recording of our conversation, I hear a lot of my own laughter. Lewis was effortlessly funny and sharp.“I’ve got to give Jeff Garlin a lot of credit for hanging in,” he said of the comic who plays David’s manager and Essman’s beleaguered husband, the object of her expletive-filled, improvised tirades. “I mean, it’s a television show, but how he can have any self-esteem left after what he has taken — it’s just a barrage. Every time a scene is over, it looks like he’s limping back from the Civil War. He’s just all bloodied.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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      Micheline Presle, Actress Known for ‘Devil in the Flesh,’ Dies at 101

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      A link to France’s first golden age of cinema, she drew international attention for a 1947 film that created a scandal in France and was banned in Britain for years.Micheline Presle, a subtle and elegant actress who was a last link to the first golden age of French cinema, died on Feb. 21 in Nogent-sur-Marne, a suburb of Paris. She was 101.Her death, at the Maison des Artistes, a retirement home for artists partly funded by the government, was confirmed by her son-in-law, Olivier Bomsel.Ms. Presle (pronounced prell) was the final survivor of a trio of actresses — Danièlle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan were the other two — who were already stars in France by the outbreak of World War II, and who defined a certain style of French femininity, both at home and abroad. Ms. Presle’s subtle facial expressions conjured a wide range of human emotions, particularly in two films that, by critical consent, she never surpassed, “Le Diable au Corps,” or “Devil in the Flesh” (1947), and “Boule de Suif” (1945).A poster for “Le Diable au Corps,” known in English as “Devil in The Flesh,” featuring Ms. Presle and Gerard Philipe. The film was, one critic said, “the major work of her career.”Everette CollectionBoth of those films were based on masterpieces of French literature: The first was adapted from a novel by the brilliant but short-lived author Raymond Radiguet; the second from two short stories by Guy de Maupassant. These subtle and complex tales drew on Ms. Presle’s versatility.“Le Diable au Corps” depicted the passionate affair between a young woman, played by Ms. Presle, whose husband was away fighting in the trenches in World War I, and a teenage schoolboy, played by the very young Gérard Philipe, who during his brief career was both France’s leading heartthrob and its greatest actor.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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      ‘Code 8: Part II’ Review: Helping a Child in Danger

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      In this Netflix sequel, the acting cousins Robbie and Stephen Amell again play gruff men of action — physical and psychic — navigating an urban dystopia.If you didn’t see the 2019 movie “Code 8,” but for some reason decide to take a chance on the sequel, fear not: “Code 8: Part II” begins with a vivid account of a not-too-distant-future where 4 percent of people “possess superhuman abilities” and an authoritarian police force leans hard on robots both two- and four-legged.Having more or less caught you up, the movie, directed by Jeff Chan and streaming on Netflix, once again presents Connor (Robbie Amell), the first movie’s protagonist, now leaving prison and rebuffing his former partner in crime, Garrett (Stephen Amell). (They are real-life cousins, in case you were wondering.)Both are stuck in Lincoln City, a setting as bleak as any other sci-fi hellhole, wherein every day is a day without sunshine.The new story proper begins with Tarak (Sammy Azero), a young criminal who’s trying to help his teenage sister, Pav (Sirena Gulamgaus), find a better life. He steals a bag of money from a couple of corrupt cops and is pursued by a robot police dog in a chase scene that’s brisk, legible and passably tense. He doesn’t get away, and Pav goes on the run. Guess which adult helps her out?Along with a bunch of other contemporary sci-fi tropes (“designer drugs” also feature in this dystopia) we’ve got a child in danger — a child with, naturally, emerging powers of her own. Pav’s talent initially manifests itself by making the TV go wonky when there’s something on it she doesn’t like.In the end, even genre fans with relaxed standards might try to similarly rebel against this insipid offering.Code 8: Part IINot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More