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      ‘The Ugly Stepsister’ Review: Nipped, Tucked and Royally Fussed Over

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      This deliciously nasty reworking of the Cinderella fairy tale imagines how far one of the stepsisters would go to marry her prince.During the opening credits of “The Ugly Stepsister,” the camera pans slowly across an abandoned wedding feast, the food gooey and gluttonous. The aging groom has dropped dead and his new wife, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), has learned that the fortune she expected does not exist. Instead, she has acquired a stunning stepdaughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), and the immediate need for a replacement benefactor.To that end, Rebekka’s elder daughter, Elvira (Lea Myren), must marry the picture-book Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). Unlike Agnes, Elvira is gawky and gauche, her teeth wrapped in metal braces and her body less than lithe. But with the help of a cocaine-snorting plastic surgeon (Adam Lundgren), she can be remade in time for the grand ball where Julian will choose his bride. All that’s needed is a hammer, a chisel and a hungry tapeworm.Like last year’s “The Substance,” this fleshy folk horror forces us to look — in unsparing, often revolting close-up — at the physical agony of aesthetic conformity. Yet the movie, adapted by the Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt from the Cinderella story, is the opposite of didactic: Slyly funny and visually captivating (the luscious cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind), its scenes move with ease from gross to gorgeous, and from grotesque to magical. One minute, a tribe of maggots is feasting on the expired groom’s rotting corpse; the next, they’re weaving a silken ball gown.And oh, those gowns! Designed by Manon Rasmussen (a favorite of Lars von Trier), the film’s costumes are delicious. At the ball, mothers display their preening, bedazzled daughters like show dogs; but the camera’s real interest lies in the flesh beneath the finery, in the plump swellings of belly and buttocks and the defenseless innocence of soon-to-be-chopped toes.Contrasting the freshness of youth with the decay of a world where beauty is the only currency and romance an illusion, “The Ugly Stepsister” strikes gold in Myren’s extraordinary performance. As Elvira’s dreams are dashed and her body mutilated, we feel for her: Like all of us, she just wants to be loved. And, of course, rich.The Ugly StepsisterNot rated. In Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Wedding Banquet’ Review: The Family You Find

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      A retelling of Ang Lee’s classic of queer cinema comes at the same farcical situation in a new way.Though it’s as modern as can be, there’s a touch of something Shakespearean about “The Wedding Banquet.” The plot, on paper, is just straight-up farce: Trying to solve a complicated set of problems, a lesbian agrees to marry her best friend’s boyfriend — but then his grandmother comes to town, intending to throw them a huge traditional celebration.That premise is a 21st-century twist on Ang Lee’s 1993 queer classic, written by James Schamus. In that film, a Taiwanese American man marries his female tenant, rather than his own male partner, both to hide his real relationship from his parents and to help her get a green card. This version, directed by Andrew Ahn and written by Ahn and Schamus, gets more knotty, mostly because same-sex marriage is now legal in the United States, so the characters face a different series of snags. Both films explore how someone from a traditional Asian family navigates queer identity, highlighting the comedy and discomfort and discovery that result when cultures collide. But in this new “Wedding Banquet,” the focus shifts too.In this story, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are deeply in love, living in the Seattle house that Lee inherited from her mother. Angela’s mother (Joan Chen) is an exuberant ally to Seattle’s queer community, in a manner so performative that it seems like she might be making up for something. The pair are feeling the strain as Lee tries to conceive through a second round of expensive in vitro fertilization. When it doesn’t work, they start to give up hope: They just don’t have the money for a third round, and Lee is beginning to wonder if her age has something to do with it.Their lives are tightly entwined with those of Angela’s best friend, Chris (Bowen Yang), and his artist boyfriend, Min (Han Gi-Chan), who live in a guesthouse in Lee and Angela’s backyard. Min also happens to be the wealthy heir to a large corporation that his grandmother (Yuh-Jung Youn) expects him to run. He does not wish to do this. He could escape it if he had a way to renew his visa, and thus he proposes to Chris. But Chris is scared of commitment, and so Min, desperate to avoid his fate, concocts a plan.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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      ‘Sinners’ Review: Ryan Coogler’s Southern Horror Fantasia

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      The director goes boldly out there in his fifth feature, a genre-defying, mind-bending shoot-em-up that stars Michael B. Jordan as twins.Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies. Set in Jim Crow Mississippi, it is a genre-defying, mind-bending fantasia overflowing with great performances, dancing vampires and a lot of ideas about love and history. Here, when a Black musician plays the blues at a juke joint, he isn’t just performing for jubilant men and women. He is also singing to the history that flows through them from generations of ancestors to others not yet born. Like Coogler, the musician is a kind of time traveler, blasting off into horizonless possibilities.Few American filmmakers in recent memory have risen with the dizzying speed of Coogler, who a decade ago vaulted to attention with “Creed,” his franchise rethink that took the “Rocky” series off life support. With his ensuing “Black Panther” superhero movies, Coogler rose higher still, proving that he could retain both a distinct aesthetic sensibility and a sense of human proportion (and stakes) even in the Marvel movie factory. His vision of Wakanda, the otherworldly country that the Black Panther calls home, works in part because of its far-out visions and technological wonders. Yet if it’s persuasive it’s because in Coogler’s Wakanda, you are also never far from the reality that’s roiling right outside the cinematic frame.That reality is even more vividly present in the dusty roads and bustling vibrancy of “Sinners,” which takes place in 1932 in and around Clarksdale, Miss., a Delta town tucked in the northwest corner of the state. There, amid endless fields of cotton, Sammie (the appealing newcomer Miles Caton), a sweetly sincere son of a preacher man, yearns to play music. He gets a break when his cousins, the identical twins Smoke and Stack — both played with luminous feeling by Michael B. Jordan — transform a derelict building into a juke joint. There, Sammie all but burns the place down with his resonant voice and twangy dobro, a guitar with a provenance as devilish as that of the bluesman Robert Johnson.Coogler, who also wrote the screenplay, gets his game on early in “Sinners,” which opens with a grabber of a scene and a dazed, bloodied Sammie bursting into his father’s church mid-sermon, a jaggedly broken-off guitar neck clutched in one hand. A few beats later and the story skips back to the recent past. Such temporal scrambling is overused; presumably because “Citizen Kane” continues to cast its shadow over film schools. But as intros go, this one is enough of a question mark to stir your curiosity, which only intensifies with the entrance of Smoke and Stack, syncopated dandies with high style and a heavy past, who’ve endured war, survived Al Capone’s Chicago and held fast to smoldering romances.Smoke and Stack are two sides of the same charismatic coin; it’s hard not to see the filmmaker and his star in similar terms. The first time you see the twins they’re waiting on the building’s owner. Stack has on a sharp reddish fedora and tie, a handkerchief neatly tucked in a breast pocket. There’s a hint of gold in his ready smile, and more than a suggestion of malice. His brother is wearing a blue cap and soon dragging on a cigarette, tendrils of smoke wafting across his sterner, more melancholic face. The effect of these lookalikes is lightly destabilizing, and when Stack leans across to light Smoke’s cigarette, you may find yourself leaning toward the screen, mesmerized by the synchronicity of bodies and digital wizardry.Once the twins seal the deal, the other narrative pieces begin falling in place. There are many, some of which fit together better than others. Delroy Lindo shows up as another bluesman, Delta Slim, as do Li Jun Li and Yao as the grocer wife and husband, Grace and Bo Chow. Each brother reconnects with an old lover — Smoke with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Stack with Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) — mirrored romances that never line up as neatly as Coogler seems to intend. Annie breaks your heart; Mary works your nerves. That would be less of a problem if Mary, a woman with a fraught identity, wasn’t burdened with so much symbolism. Mosaku, by contrast, is playing a flesh-and-blood woman, not a conceit, and her reunion with Jordan’s Smoke is so beautifully felt (and smokin’ hot) it deepens the emotional texture.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 Shrouds’ Review: For Cronenberg, Grief Is an Obsession

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      The director’s latest stars Vincent Cassel as an entrepreneur who mourns the death of his wife by inventing technology that surveils her entombed body.In David Cronenberg’s latest film, “The Shrouds,” the lines between life and death, emotion and pathology, biology and technology, become blurred. Even the movie’s tone lands in a liminal space where gravitas slips into comedy — I couldn’t help but snicker when someone tells the main character, “Karsh, don’t crash!”A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg’s work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity. Since an important source of inspiration was the death of Cronenberg’s wife from cancer, in 2017, are we really supposed to find this funny? I would argue, yes — among other details in keeping with the Canadian director’s approach, a woman is revealed to find conspiracy theories sexually arousing — but there is still enough doubt to mess with viewers’ heads.The aforementioned Karsh (an understated Vincent Cassel, in his third Cronenberg movie after “A Dangerous Method” and the terrific “Eastern Promises”) is a Tesla-driving Toronto entrepreneur. His business, GraveTech, involves burying the dead in shrouds that transmit images to screen-embedded headstones. At his cemetery, you can, in effect, watch a livestream of a decomposing body. (This is not so far-fetched, considering recent developments in both wearable technology and invasive voyeurism.)Karsh is personally invested in this corpse cam because his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), died of cancer four years earlier. She is buried in one of his shrouds, and he can check on her decay’s progress.This we all learn in a surreal introductory scene in which Karsh explains GraveTech to a lunch date, Myrna (Jennifer Dale), at a restaurant overlooking his wired-up cemetery. He even shows her Becca’s feed, which might not beat brandy as a digestif.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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      ‘Queens of Drama’ Review: A Half-Century Feud

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      Alexis Langlois’s musical romance is an unruly story of a love-hate relationship between two ambitious musicians.In the French musical romance “Queens of Drama,” the offices of the Starlet Factory brim with hopefuls warming up for a singing competition show when the punk rocker Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura) struts in. Aching for pop stardom herself, Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura), all curls and doe-eyed warmth, remarks to Billie that they are each wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of an edgy 1980s singer.What looked to be a moment of an insta-crush turns into a snarky exchange, ending with each petulantly sticking a tongue out at the other. In “Queens of Drama,” these soon-to-be tumultuous lovers meet more contemptuous than cute.The year of that encounter is 2005. But the director Alexis Langlois’s unruly, ideas-freighted romance actually begins in 2055 as Mimi’s No. 1 fan, SteevyShady (Bilal Hassani), recounts the couple’s vexed love story. “This is not about me,” Steevy, a video influencer, says with flair. But of course it is. And it’s SteevyShady’s role in the extended flashback that turns the queer romance into a meta-ride in pop-culture obsession, with nods to every letter in the L.G.B.T.Q.+ rainbow, and considerations both fond and disparaging of punk and pop music.With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.Queens of DramaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The President’s Wife’ Review: Would Madame Get Your Vote?

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      Catherine Deneuve plays the former French first lady Bernadette Chirac in this puckish, highly fictionalized biopic with a pop-feminist edge.From 1995 to 2007, the conservative (if politically capricious) Jacques Chirac was the president of France. But, “The President’s Wife” isn’t all that interested in Chirac, played as a clueless yet charismatic charlatan by Michel Vuillermoz. The first lady, Bernadette Chirac, gets the spotlight, with the French film icon Catherine Deneuve bringing glamour and droll gusto to the part.Spanning the years of Chirac’s presidency, this low-key comedy by Léa Domenach tracks the evolution of Bernadette’s public image from scorned spouse in kitschy-colored skirt suits to beloved girl-boss in modern Chanel threads. A Greek chorus of church singers and a disclaimer in the opening title cards tell us that this quasi-biopic is highly fictionalized. No, Bernadette didn’t secretly meet with rival politicians in confessional booths or frequent nightclubs with pop stars to rally fund-raising for her children’s hospital charity.The film takes creative leaps in scenes like these as part of its puckish approach to mythmaking. Though other seemingly absurd moments are ripped straight from the TV news archives, such as her visit with Hillary Clinton to a primary school in central France (Deneuve is transposed onto footage of that real-life encounter with the help of green-screen tech).Belittled by rivals and family members alike — including her daughter Claude (Sara Giraudeau), who is one of her father’s advisers — Bernadette teams up with her chief of staff, Bernard Niquet (Denis Podalydès), to revamp her political career. The duo’s scheming and easy rapport make up much of the film’s brisk humor, which at times can be a bit too culturally specific to resonate fully with non-French viewers. And while Deneuve brings a wonderful blend of neuroses and feigned indifference to her character, the film’s pop-feminist through line dulls the comedy, creating a more conventionally celebratory portrait.The President’s WifeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Legend of Ochi’ Review: The Great, Familiar Adventure

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      A 1980s throwback movie about a teenager who sets out on a journey with a mysterious being.There was a pleasing kind of weirdness and danger to a lot of children’s entertainment in the 1980s. Extraterrestrials and fantastical creatures populated the waking dreamscapes of children in those movies, teaching them lessons and helping them to find the courage to face more pedestrian real-life monsters. And because effects hadn’t gotten all digital, even the best of those nonhuman creatures often felt a little janky, like souped-up versions of puppets you might create out of the random bits of craft supplies from your grandma’s closet.It’s very clear that “The Legend of Ochi,” Isaiah Saxon’s debut feature as a writer and director, is an elaborately designed and very effective nostalgia piece for the movies of that time, starting from the title design, which renders each letter in a kind of glowing orange yellow. The movies you’ll think of while you’re watching it are the ones that stuck with you most: For me, “The Neverending Story” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” Here the creatures are a little more smoothed out, but the Frank Oz influence is obvious.Those creatures are the Ochi, which look like a cross between tree monkeys and Yoda. In the world of this movie, they are secluded creatures that live in the woods, keeping away from human civilization. The people of Carpathia fear them, hunt them and teach their children to do the same. One man, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), trains the local boys — including the orphaned Petro (Finn Wolfhard), whom he’s adopted as his own son — in the best ways to find and kill the Ochi.But Maxim won’t allow his own daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel), to join in, for reasons that have a lot more to do with him than with her. Angry and disaffected, Yuri seethes mostly alone, and longs to talk to her mother, who left the family a long time ago. It doesn’t help that Petro idolizes Maxim and is rude to Yuri in front of the other boys. Then, one night, Yuri discovers a baby Ochi who seems lost and injured. Determined to return the creature to its home, she sets off on a great adventure, with Maxim soon hot on her trail.It is not hard to spot the derivative nature of this plot, with all its classic ’80s movie elements: the creatures the humans would rather kill than understand; the divorced parents; the disaffected young person; the hero’s journey. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though: “The Legend of Ochi” is designed to pay tribute to a kind of movie that rarely gets made anymore, even though the success of the similarly derivative Netflix show “Stranger Things” suggests that there’s an appetite for it. Echoing tropes of that era is one way to remind us of what we used to see down at the multiplex.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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      ‘Invention’ Review: Patent Pensive

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      In this strange experimental feature from Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez, a grieving daughter investigates the mysterious gadget her father left behind.“Invention” is the sort of D.I.Y. project that’s tough not to admire, even if its aims remain stubbornly private. This strange, personal movie is a mind meld between the experimental filmmaker Courtney Stephens (“Terra Femme”) and the actress Callie Hernandez (“Alien: Covenant”). Stephens is credited as director, while the two share a “film by” credit.Hernandez plays a barely disguised version of herself, “Carrie Fernandez,” who has just lost her father and is now contending with the logistics. The father character, inspired by Hernandez’s own dad, trained as a doctor but later turned to hawking crackpot treatments. He also had a “different” way of handling personal finances, an executor (James N. Kienitz Wilkins) tactfully reminds Carrie. For a start, he conducted business under multiple names.Carrie’s father has bequeathed her the patent for an “electromagnetic healing device,” a contraption that we’re told the Food and Drug Administration has left in legal limbo. Much of “Invention” consists of scenes between Carrie and her father’s associates as she weighs whether the machine was legit — and what to do about it even if it was. “Did you ever use it?” she asks one of the investors (Tony Torn). “Ah, no,” he replies. “I got a stent.”Video clips of Hernandez’s real father pitching treatments on TV and theorizing on how “cells are like your cellphone” are interspersed throughout. The dialogue and the imagery allude to transcendental writers. (“Invention” was shot on 16-millimeter film in Massachusetts.) Periodically, Stephens will cut to moments in which she and the actors break the fourth wall. Whether these meta elements should mean much to those who weren’t involved may be beside the point. “Invention” is committed to finding its own wavelength.InventionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters. More