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      Celine Song’s New Rom-Com ‘Materialists’ Takes a Deep Look at Love and Value

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      In her 20s, long before she wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “Past Lives,” Celine Song spent six months working as a matchmaker in New York. By day, she’d meet with single women rattling off requirements for a potential mate, from appearance and height to income. By night, over beers with her artist friends, she couldn’t help but notice a disconnect: Many of her favorite people would be instantly rejected based on those criteria.“I’d be like, ‘You guys would be not good mates for any of my clients,’” she said. “I spent all day listening to these women describe them as worthless people they do not want to meet, even though I ascribe so much worth to them because they are creative and brilliant and amazing.”That tension lies at the heart of Song’s new rom-com, “Materialists,” which stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York City matchmaker with an enviable track record of steering single women toward successful men. But when Lucy meets the handsome and rich Harry (Pedro Pascal), who’d prefer to woo Lucy instead of her clients, she must decide if the material things he can offer are more valuable than the deeper connection she feels with John (Chris Evans), her broke ex-boyfriend.Before making movies, Song worked as a matchmaker. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSong wrote the screenplay for “Materialists” in 2022 as she awaited the release of “Past Lives,” about a South Korean immigrant reunited with the childhood friend who still carries a torch for her. When I met Song last month over drinks at a West Hollywood hotel, she spoke candidly about love and longing as a creative through line in her work.“When I talk to people who are really, really smart, who seem to know everything, if you start asking them about their romantic life, everything falls apart,” she said. “They’ll just admit that they don’t know things about love, or they’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, she makes me feel like a kid.’ They’ll say things that are not becoming of the put-together, intelligent people they are, because love is a mystery.”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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      ‘Prime Minister’ Examines a New Zealand Leader and a Global Issue

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      The film is a memoir of sorts for Jacinda Ardern, who governed at a time of multiple disasters. But it was misinformation that proved hardest to cope with.When she became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017, Jacinda Ardern was the world’s youngest female head of state, at 37. From the start, she was playing on hard mode. After giving birth to a daughter not quite eight months later, she led her country through a series of generational catastrophes — shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, a deadly volcanic eruption, the Covid-19 pandemic — all while pushing a hefty set of progressive reforms through the legislature and getting re-elected, too.The new documentary “Prime Minister” (in theaters) mostly covers this tumultuous period, showing how Ardern, the Labour Party leader at the time, navigated her choices while also giving space to her misgivings. But it’s not a biopic or a puff piece. It’s more of a memoir: a bigger story told through the events of one person’s life. That tale goes far beyond Ardern, even beyond New Zealand.The directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe drew on a variety of sources. There’s footage from 2024, with Ardern teaching as a fellow at Harvard and working on her new book, “A Different Kind of Power.” But that’s just the framing device. The bulk of “Prime Minister” leans on video that her husband, Clarke Gayford, shot during Ardern’s time in office, including intimate glimpses of her home life and private thoughts, as well as audio interviews that haven’t been previously released.The result can be uncommonly frank. Ardern talks about reluctant governing and impostor syndrome. Her political journey, she says, has been a battle between two parts of herself, “the one that says that you can’t and the one that says that you have to.” She speaks her mind but is also in tune with her emotions. You can hear her voice crack when she contemplates the grieving families of the people slain in the Christchurch massacre, or considers the implications of pandemic lockdown policies on children who depend on school for food and women who will face domestic violence in isolation.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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      Inside the Jury Room at the Weinstein Trial, Rancor and Recrimination

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      As the panelists deliberated over whether the former Hollywood mogul should be convicted of sex crimes for a second time in Manhattan, accusations began to fly.Inside the jury room at the second New York sex crime trial of Harvey Weinstein, things were getting tense.The 12 jurors had already acquitted the former Hollywood mogul on one felony sex crime charge, and they had begun to deliberate on a second when the discussions suddenly turned pointed, and personal.One juror, who had been calm and had even prayed with the others, abruptly began accusing another of having been “bought out” by Mr. Weinstein or his lawyers.The moment, which occurred on the second day of deliberations in a case that was brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office after its earlier sex crime conviction against Mr. Weinstein was overturned, foreshadowed the rancor and dysfunction that would ultimately consume the panel.Although it ultimately voted to convict him of the second felony sex crime, it reached no decision on the third charge in the case, deadlocking on Thursday over whether Mr. Weinstein raped an aspiring actress in a hotel room in 2013.This account of what occurred in the jury room is based on interviews with several jurors, particularly one panelist who came forward twice to voice concerns to the judge about the behavior of his fellow jurors.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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      Enzo Staiola, Who Starred in ‘Bicycle Thieves’ as a Child, Dies at 85

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      Discovered on the street in Rome, he had a brush with stardom when he was cast in what many consider one of the greatest films of all time.Enzo Staiola, who played the staunch 8-year-old accompanying his father on a quest to recover a stolen bicycle in Vittorio De Sica’s classic 1948 film, “Bicycle Thieves,” died on June 4 in Rome. He was 85.His death, in a hospital, was widely reported in the Italian press.The father’s character, played by a sad-eyed real-life factory worker, Lamberto Maggiorani, is the star of the film, which was originally released in the United States as “The Bicycle Thief” and is routinely cited as one of the greatest films of all time.But Mr. Staiola (pronounced STY-ola), who played the child, Bruno, is in many ways the emotional center of De Sica’s work, which is considered a founding document of Italian neorealism and “a fundamental staging post in the history of the European cinema,” the film historian Robert S.C. Gordon wrote in his 2008 book, “Bicycle Thieves.”The story, set in impoverished postwar Rome, revolves around Antonio Ricci, Mr. Maggiorani’s struggling character, who must get his bicycle back to keep his new job hanging advertising bills around the city. The job requires the use of a bicycle. But he must also retrieve the bike to avoid disappointing his trusting son.The character of Bruno is portrayed with poise and vulnerability by a little boy who, until then, had been more interested in playing soccer in his working-class Roman neighborhood than in acting.The father’s quest, unfolding through a series of sharply etched mishaps in the streets of the city, takes on weight for the audience as the despair becomes not just that of an adult but also of a plucky boy with expressive eyes, the young Mr. Staiola.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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      ‘Sex’ Review: Two Men Talk About and Around the Subject

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      A chimney sweep and his colleague get deep on the roofs of Oslo in Dag Johan Haugerud’s curious meditation on marriage and masculinity.The two men who circle each other in the serious, deliberate Norwegian talkathon “Sex” chat about different things, including life, love, desire, freedom and fidelity. Their discussions are searching, at times surprisingly intimate — especially for male characters — sometimes naturalistic and often sufficiently self-consciously mannered to make you aware of just how written the material is. At once specific and general, the story charts the lives of these two, who while they appear contentedly married to women, are each experiencing difficulties that, for all their words, neither can fully articulate, including to themselves.The men are colleagues in Oslo, which is never identified in the movie. They and their wives are similarly unnamed, although a smattering of other characters do have proper names. The men work as chimney sweeps, a strikingly novel profession, at least in American cinema; the only other one who comes easily to mind is Dick Van Dyke’s sooty charmer in the original “Mary Poppins.” At one point, the men in “Sex” sit on a roof together after one suffers a dizzy spell, but they simply talk and talk some more. The only fires that they seem to be trying to prevent are their own.“Sex” is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting. Its strengths are the largely appealing performances from the two principals, Jan Gunnar Roise (called “sweep” in the end credits) and Thorbjorn Harr (“department head”). Tall and lean, with a blond mustache to match his hair, Harr’s character is thoughtful, interested and religious. He’s also a committed, solicitous father to his only child, Klaus (Theo Dahl), a sweet teenager. His wife (billed as “social worker” and played by Birgitte Larsen) is a secondary character who registers as an afterthought.The movie’s first long conversation begins during some place-setting images of Oslo, with geometric shots of buildings, sweeps working on roofs and cars zipping on a freeway. As if tethered to a drone, the camera drops down and pushes toward a building window that frames two obscured figures. Inside, Harr’s character is telling Roise’s about a recent, unsettling, if amusing dream. David Bowie, he explains while seated before the window, appeared to him with some gnomic utterances, starting with the mysteriously fragmentary: “If you, as a human being, have the capacity to recognize goodness and beauty, and be excited by it.”It’s fuzzy which iteration of Bowie (Ziggy Stardust? The Thin White Duke?) graced the department head’s dreams. He isn’t a fan, and he isn’t entirely sure, he admits, if it was even the musician. “I thought it was God,” he says (a fair assumption). As he continues talking, he explains that what made the dream so unsettling for him was that Bowie looked at Harr’s character as if he were a woman. The other man, the sweep, asks if the dream was sexual. It wasn’t, but shortly thereafter, the camera pans to the sweep, who tells his colleague that the day before, he had sex with a man for the first time. And then, the sweep says, he told his wife.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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      ‘Tatami’ Review: A Bitter Fight, Both on and Off the Mat

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      A flinty Iranian judoka competing in the World Judo Championships is menaced by her government in this absorbing political thriller.In the beginning of “Tatami,” Leila (Arienne Mandi), a flinty Iranian judoka competing in the World Judo Championships, looks unstoppable. A gold medal seems within reach, which would be a first for Iran in the tournament’s history.Unfortunately for Leila, hers isn’t a feel-good underdog story — more like a Kafkaesque nightmare. Winning gold is negligible to her authoritarian government; it’s more concerned with her obedience.Directed by Guy Nattiv and Zar Amir (a rare collaboration between an Israeli and an Iranian filmmaker), “Tatami” draws inspiration from the real-life experiences of Iranian athletes who were punished or forced to seek asylum abroad after refusing to wear a hijab during their international sporting events. We see Leila defiantly release her black mane of hair on several occasions — as in flashbacks to her life in Tehran in which she’s in bed with her husband or partying at an underground club.But it’s not Leila’s hijab that’s the problem: Midway through the tournament, Leila’s coach, Maryam (Amir, an Iranian exile herself), gets a call from the Iranian authorities demanding that Leila fake an injury and drop out immediately to avoid competing against an Israeli athlete. (Iran doesn’t recognize Israel, and forbids its athletes from competition with Israeli athletes.)The script is annoyingly fuzzy on these details, brushing knotty geopolitics aside for a more straightforward story about the oppression of Iranian women and the menacing, absurd ways in which they’re policed. We see plenty of Leila’s scuffles on the mat, shot stylishly in velvety black and white, but the meat of the conflict happens on the sidelines and in the corridors of the stadium. That is where Leila (who refuses to to stop competing) and Maryam lock horns; the Iranian government’s cronies appear dressed as plain-clothed spectators; and the tournament’s organizers struggle to decide how best to protect Leila.The mounting tensions of these moving parts — and steely performances by Mandi and Amir — make for an engrossing thriller fueled by female rage.TatamiNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Deep Cover’ Review: Fighting Crime With Improv

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      Three hapless comics, played by Orlando Bloom, Bryce Dallas Howard and Nick Mohammed, infiltrate the criminal underworld.The movie opens with a furious cops-and-robbers car chase through London that eventually draws in a helicopter. Flying low, the chopper zips past a busy brokerage floor where Hugh (Nick Mohammed), a weary drone, watches it in awe and terror. In a relatively short amount of time he’ll be drawn into an underworld that will place him in between lines of fire from opposite sides of the law.In “Deep Cover,” directed by Tom Kingsley, Hugh determines to boost his social confidence by taking a course in improv comedy run by Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard), whose chipper exterior barely masks her befuddlement at how she wound up in her position. Orlando Bloom plays Marlon, who wants to hone the extemporizing “skills” that his TV-ad-booking agent wished he would bury. The three are soon scouted by Sean Bean’s hard-bitten cop Billings, who enlists them to run a small sting.The gang get so carried away trying to entrap a low-level dealer that they wind up being taken for major players, and infiltrating a network overseen by a relatively amiable Paddy Considine and a typically no-nonsense Ian McShane. The plot convolutions test the trio’s survival skills — and their improv chops.Nowadays crime comedies don’t so much toggle between horror and hilarity as try to intermingle them: One example is a scene in which a corpse needs to be chopped up and disposed of, and poor Hugh is handed the chain saw. Humor is also derived from the fact that the crew is frequently called upon to ingest various intoxicants, legal and taboo. The ensemble is packed with seasoned acting professionals across the board, who more than sell their drunk scenes and deliver more than a few laughs on their way to redemption.Deep CoverRated R for language, corpse dismemberment, other violence, crime in general. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More