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      ‘La Cocina’ Review: The Melting Pot Boils Over

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      This drama by Alonso Ruizpalacios takes a bitter look at the American dream from the perspective of the workers at a fast-paced diner.“Somebody tell us a dream,” says Pedro (Raúl Briones), a charismatic line cook at a Times Square diner. He’s on a smoke break with co-workers — “the United Nations,” quips one of them, referring to their diverse origins. Nonzo, a Brooklyn-born dessert chef (Motell Foster) responds to Pedro, who is from Mexico, waxing philosophical about an immigrant who spends his sad, long days after passing through Ellis Island working at a pizza joint.“La Cocina,” a kitchen drama shot in velvety black-and-white, is the first English-language movie by the Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios. But the kitchen staff’s Spanish takes up nearly as much of the dialogue, fueling the film’s cultural and political tensions.Ruizpalacios adapted the script from Arnold Wesker’s play “The Kitchen,” which was set in London. He keeps the central romance between Pedro and Julia (a waitress played by Rooney Mara), and also explores the realities of undocumented immigrants and worker exploitation in New York City.The film starts from the point of view of the new cook, Estella (Anna Díaz), and then skips around the ensemble’s various dramas: a white American cook (Spenser Granese) is fed up with the Spanish speakers in his midst, an abusive manager (Eduardo Olmos) is tasked with finding a thief and Julia is at odds with Pedro over an abortion. In one scene, the soda machine breaks, flooding the kitchen during a lunchtime rush; the workers look like sailors on a sinking boat.Hellish moments like this help explain why everyone’s a bit cruel and calloused at work. Imagine such pressure — and, for many undocumented workers, the knowledge that you won’t be hired anywhere better. But Ruizpalacios diminishes these hard truths with flashy bids at profundity. The film’s epic finale feels stagy — while these real-life frustrations are anything but.La CocinaRated R for sex and physical violence. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Your Monster’ Review: Beast Intentions

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      An aspiring Broadway musical star (Melissa Barrera) taps into her inner anger with some help from the creature who lives in her closet.Caroline Lindy’s debut feature, “Your Monster,” claims to present a “true-ish story.” Presumably, the “true” aspect refers not to the monster, but to the cascading cruelty of the plot’s inciting breakup: While Laura (Melissa Barrera), an aspiring Broadway star, is recovering from cancer surgery, her boyfriend, Jacob (Edmund Donovan), a theater director, abandons her, then freezes her out of the lead in his new show, which she helped develop.Rather than exploding in a rage, Laura cries her eyes out in a montage that finds her repeatedly ordering boxes of tissue from Amazon. But there are strange thumps in the house, and she soon learns why: A monster (Tommy Dewey) who has lived in her closet since her childhood is still there and is, for a monster, pretty affable, eager to kick back with takeout and watch “Night of the Living Dead” on TV. With his brutish ways, he can also conveniently teach Laura the catharsis of smashing dinnerware.Monster — the only name he’s ever given — turns out to have an artsy side: He has a knack for Shakespeare and a thing for Fred Astaire movies. And he stands by warily when Laura takes a consolation role in her still-smarmy ex’s ensemble.Inner anger, watchful protector, possible love interest? Lindy’s monster won’t win points for metaphorical coherence. But “Your Monster,” while falling short of the Critic’s Pick status that Jacob vociferously covets for his show, has its charms, namely the backstage intrigue, onstage songs by the Lazours (of the current Off Broadway musical “We Live in Cairo”), and a disarming lead in Barrera.Your MonsterRated R for sex and violence. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Venom: The Last Dance’ Review: A Long and Winding Tongue

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      Playing both Eddie Brock and the alien parasite who possesses him, Tom Hardy gives another roiling one-man-band of a performance in this third installment of the franchise.With the 2018 film “Venom,” Tom Hardy locked himself into a three-picture deal, giving his time, talents and torso to this saga about a man named Eddie Brock possessed by a fanged, body-snatching alien parasite named Venom who pops in and out of his skin like a hyper-violent prairie dog. The overly plotted “Venom: The Last Dance,” written and directed by Kelly Marcel, concludes the trilogy by hammering home all that Eddie has sacrificed to merge with this impulsive, smack-talking goo blob. In the first movie, Eddie was an ambitious San Francisco investigative journalist with a fiancée played by Michelle Williams; here, he’s a filthy drifter on a Mexican bender who’s lost his career, his woman and his reputation. Forced to go on the lam to flee a murder accusation, Eddie makes a running joke out of the fact that he can’t even hang on to a pair of shoes.In glimpses, this is a drama about a drunk who finds himself unbearably lonely despite being conjoined with a garrulous monster. Hardy voices both reedy Eddie and gravelly Venom and his roiling one-man-band of a performance continues to be the only reason to keep up with the films. Highlights here include the herky-jerky chaos Eddie/Venom causes as he mixes a Michelada while grooving to “Tequila,” and the moment when he’s suctioned to the fuselage of an airplane like a Garfield plushie and sighs, “It is so unpleasantly cold.” Eddie and Venom even detour to Las Vegas, the capital city of self-destruction, and dub themselves Thelma and Louise.But these mild pleasures are overwhelmed by a barrage of underdeveloped supporting characters — Chiwetel Ejiofor as a general, Juno Temple and Clark Backo as Area 51 scientists, a hippy family headed by Rhys Ifans — plus a nifty spidery nasty who gobbles its victims like a scuttling wood chipper and, when sliced up, stitches its long limbs back together. There’s also a barely introduced major villain named Knull (Andy Serkis, the director of 2021’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage”) who seems to exist only so that the studio can bridge this finale to some other future comic book flick.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 Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ Review: More Real Than Reality

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      An unconventional documentary tells the story of a Norwegian gamer — and of how we live life on the internet.Almost from the start, the internet scrambled our sense of reality. You could never really know if whoever you were talking to was the person they said they were. Now it’s hard to know if they’re even a person.This is destabilizing and frightening, and also the premise for a good movie. But there has to be more to the story than just the scary parts. No, we don’t exist physically on the internet, but our virtual selves do things that have real-world consequences, and our emotions and minds, in some phenomenological way, extend into cyberspace, too. For better or worse, the internet is a place in which we live and love and rage and mourn. We bring our humanity with us, the bad parts but also the good ones.Movies haven’t always captured this aspect of 21st-century life well, in part because rendering the internet visually is weird and tricky. I loved Joe Hunting’s 2022 documentary “We Met in Virtual Reality,” filmed entirely inside a V.R. platform, for how it captured love and generosity in virtual space. And now we have Benjamin Ree’s “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” which is a rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way.“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” is about Mats Steen, a Norwegian man who died in 2014 at the age of 25. Mats lived out his final years nearly immobilized, the result of being born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare inherited disease which presently has no cure. Mats’s family knew him as smart and loving, but grieved while watching him grow more withdrawn as his symptoms progressed. He would spend most of his waking hours on his computer, playing games. “Our deepest regret was that he would never experience friends, love, or make a difference in other people’s lives,” his father, Robert, tells Ree.Mats’s family were loving, attentive and supportive of him to the very end. But they were wrong about the friends and making a difference part. Oh, were they wrong.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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      ‘Memoir of a Snail’ Review: Escaping the Spiral

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      An animated tragicomedy for adults tells the story of a woman breaking out of her shell.First things first: “Memoir of a Snail” is not, in fact, the memoir of a snail. It is the memoir of an Australian woman named Grace Pudel (pronounced “Puddle”), who loves snails very much. Grace is voiced by Sarah Snook and rendered in slightly lumpy clay by Adam Elliot, who wrote, directed and produced this stop-motion animation film. It is a weirdly affecting tragicomedy, full of Dickensian turns and eccentric figures. (It is also, lest you be confused by the whimsy, definitely not for children.)We meet Grace, who wears a knit cap sporting two little eyeballs on the ends of stalks, by the bedside of a wiry-headed woman who’s moaning and groaning toward death. The woman is named Pinky (Jacki Weaver), and within moments, she has actually given up the ghost. Soon after, Grace brings Pinky’s ashes outside to the garden, after which she sits on a bench and sets a jar full of snails free. One of them, Sylvia, has always been Grace’s favorite.But snails move slowly, and so Grace has the time to tell Sylvia her life story as the skeptical snail inches away at the appropriately named pace. This life story, too, is full of death: Grace’s mother, a malacologist and lover of snails, dies giving birth to Grace and her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Their father, a French juggler, becomes an alcoholic, and eventually he dies too. Grace and Gilbert are split up and sent to equally bizarre foster families — her to a negligent but nice-enough couple in Canberra who spend their weekends at key parties, and him to a cruel family of cultlike religious apple farmers in Western Australia.Tremendous numbers of bad things happen to Grace as she moves into puberty, then adulthood. She shrinks slowly into herself over her lifetime, which includes becoming a hoarder, marrying a horrible man and, blessedly, meeting Pinky, a strange older woman who becomes her friend and mentor. With every blow, Grace recedes into her home a little more, which she fills with small snails on every shelf, because they make her feel safe. But in recounting the stories of woe to Sylvia the snail, Grace always seems upbeat.Elliot’s style of animation feels a bit like what Tim Burton would have gone for in his own animated films, if his style were far more deranged and grimy and possessed by the spirit of Edward Gorey. It’s also, at times, sexual and violent and somewhat explicit (and, at one point, vaguely weird about weight). His animated figures are people with desires and terrors, some quite twisted. They are haunted. They can be gross.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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      ‘Black Box Diaries’ Review: A Public Face for #MeToo in Japan

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      In a new documentary, Shiori Ito recounts her yearslong crusade for justice in Japan after accusing a powerful journalist of rape.Not everyone gets to be the heroine of her own story, much less a champion for others. On May 29, 2017, a 28-year-old Japanese journalist, Shiori Ito, did just that when she announced at a news conference that she had been raped in a Tokyo hotel two years earlier by a powerfully connected journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi. (He has denied the allegation.) Ito had decided to speak her truth despite intense pressure to remain silent. “People need to know about the horrors of rape,” she told a room of reporters, “and how deeply it affects one’s life.”Undaunted, Ito talks openly throughout “Black Box Diaries,” her moving if sometimes frustrating documentary about how she became a public face of the #MeToo movement in Japan, all while she grappled with police obstructionism, misogynist laws, sexist vitriol and fears about her safety. Going public was gutsy, and unusual. “One of the first things many Japanese women do while still shivering and bleeding at home is to read online about the experience of others — and deciding it’s just not worth pursuing,” David McNeill, an editor at Asia Pacific Journal, wrote in an interview he did with Ito after her first news conference.At the time, to protect her privacy, Ito wasn’t using her surname; not everyone in her family wanted her to speak out. Yet she soon went fully public, and her name became headline news. It remained so as she continued to seek justice in a fight that — as one year turned into another — grew into a cause, eventually becoming part of a national reckoning on sexual violence and harassment. With friends and lawyers, and buoyed by allies and sympathetic strangers, Ito fought to transform Japan’s laws and ideas relating to sexual violence. (In 2023, Japan criminalized nonconsenual sexual acts; in 2019, the United Nations had issued a statement saying the “absence of consent” should be the global definition of rape.)The documentary, based on her 2017 memoir, “Black Box,” is a chronicle of Ito’s ordeal and her fight. As the title suggests — a prosecutor, Ito has explained, called her case a “black box” because it happened behind closed doors — there’s a confessional aspect to her project. The documentary, for one, opens with some first-person statements styled as handwriting, the words running over an image of flowing water. “Please be mindful of the triggers in this film,” it reads, as cherry blossoms drift across the screen. “Close your eyes and take a deep breath if you need to.” As water and petals flow, so do her words: “That has helped me many times.”What follows is effectively a tense and tangled crime story, one in which Ito is at once the victim, lead investigator, dogged prosecutor and crusading reporter. In 2015, following the assault and after she filed a criminal complaint with the police department, Ito realized that she had to become her own advocate. She began chronicling the investigation in secret audio recordings, detailed written records and videos. After prosecutors dropped the case, despite DNA evidence and testimony from a taxi driver who dropped her at the hotel — she decided to take her personal investigation to the world.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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      Lawsuit Accusing Roman Polanski of 1973 Rape Is Settled

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      The suit accused Mr. Polanski of giving a minor alcohol before sexually assaulting her. A lawyer for the director said on Wednesday that the case was settled over the summer but gave no details.The film director Roman Polanski will no longer face a civil trial next year over accusations that he sexually assaulted a teenage girl more than five decades ago, after reaching an out-of-court settlement with his accuser that led to the dismissal of the lawsuit, lawyers for both sides said on Wednesday.The lawsuit against Mr. Polanski, 91, was filed in the Superior Court in Los Angeles County in June 2023 and had been scheduled to go to trial in August 2025. The terms of the settlement were not immediately disclosed.In the lawsuit, the accuser, identified only as Jane Doe, says she met Mr. Polanski at a party in 1973, when she was a minor. Months later, she met him a second time at his home in Benedict Canyon, where he gave her two shots of tequila, the lawsuit says. Later they went to dinner in Los Angeles, where she was given more alcohol and eventually became sick, before going back to his house, the lawsuit says.“Plaintiff remembers waking up in defendant’s bed with him lying in the bed next to her,” the lawsuit reads. “He told her that he wanted to have sex with her.” The plaintiff, though groggy, told him, “No” and, “Please don’t do this,” the lawsuit says. He ignored her, removed her clothes, and “proceeded to rape her causing her tremendous physical and emotional pain and suffering,” according to the suit.Mr. Polanski denied the allegations when the suit was filed.Mr. Polanski’s lawyer, Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, said in a statement that the case was settled over the summer and that the lawsuit had been formally dismissed. He declined to disclose details of the settlement.Gloria Allred, the lawyer for the woman, confirmed the settlement in a brief statement, saying that the terms had been “agreed to by the parties to their mutual satisfaction.”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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      ‘Family Pack’ Review: Trapped in a Game

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      The beauty of a game of Werewolf lies in the treachery. In this film adaptation, the director focuses on mild comedy and tedious action instead.François Uzan’s comic fantasy “Family Pack” is based on the French board game The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow, a sly contest of social deduction in which players are secretly assigned to one of two groups, the evil Werewolves and the benign Townsfolk, and must decide among themselves who’s the enemy.If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because it was modeled on Mafia, a popular Russian party game, which you might also know as Werewolf, a variation created by Andrew Plotkin — itself the inspiration for the video game Among Us, the horror film “Bodies Bodies Bodies” and the reality TV show “The Traitors.” It’s a great game, but considering the breadth of the original influence, “Family Pack” can’t help but feel stale.“Family Pack” approaches the material in the Jumanji way: An ordinary family finds itself transported into the world of a game. Trapped in a medieval village, the “Family Pack” players have to contend with both time-travel problems (not having the right clothes, culture clashes about feminism) and the nightly attacks by werewolves (rendered with cheap visual effects).The beauty of a game of Werewolf lies in the treachery: Friends lie, betray, blindside and backstab one another, and it’s glorious. “Family Pack” expresses little interest in these mechanics. Uzan focuses instead on mild comedy and tedious action. The actors, including Franck Dubosc and Jean Reno, spend a lot of time bantering, until an overactive plot gives them superpowers. The game itself is so good. I’m not sure the movie understands why.Family PackNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More