Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      The ‘Wicked’ Practice of Taking Pictures of the Movie Screen

      by

      Why are so many people snapping photos and taking videos at the movies? Will this trend ever go away?During an opening weekend screening of the movie musical “Wicked,” a woman sitting in front of me reached for her phone during “The Wizard and I,” Cynthia Erivo’s first big number as the misunderstood green sorceress Elphaba. I watched while this person snapped several photos of Erivo as she belted.This behavior both bewildered me and, naturally, distracted me from the film. I became more focused on what exactly was being photographed — and why — than on Erivo’s performance. And yet this disruption is apparently not unusual if you have seen “Wicked” in a theater. Social media has been flooded with images that people have taken during the movie. One post actually prompted others to share their photos as if taking them was a badge of honor. (Even one of the movie’s stars, Ariana Grande, posted an Instagram Reel of her grandmother watching her sing “Popular.” That one we can let slide.)It’s not just “Wicked.” Taking photos and videos of the screen at movies has somehow become a common practice these days. For instance, major spoilers from “Deadpool & Wolverine” were plastered all over X and TikTok shortly after it hit theaters thanks to poor-quality shots from audience members. Blockbusters aren’t the only films getting this treatment: Look hard enough and you’ll find bootleg clips of just about any theatrical release, from the French body horror film “The Substance” to the pope drama “Conclave.”Demi Moore in “The Substance,” another movie at which audiences have been using their phones to snap photos of scenes in the theater.MubiThe problem with cellphones in theaters used to be mostly errant ringing or excessive texting. Now it’s people holding up their devices so they can get bits of the film and post to their accounts. For those of us who just want to watch in peace, letting ourselves be completely absorbed, it’s another way in which moviegoing etiquette has crumbled in the 21st century.But let’s back up: Why is this happening in the first place? While I don’t think I can ever fully understand the desire to participate in the trend, I have a good guess as to why it exists.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

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Bringing the Magic of ‘Fanny and Alexander’ to the Opera Stage

      by

      A new opera by Mikael Karlsson and Royce Vavrek, directed by Ivo van Hove, aims to capture the lavishness of Ingmar Bergman’s film, in half the time.Ingmar Bergman’s film “Fanny and Alexander” luxuriates in space. In its longest version, a television mini-series that spanned more than five hours, the camera lingers on interiors that in their accumulating details say as much as the characters, who themselves say quite a lot.Bergman made another edit of the film, of a little more than three hours, for theatrical release. But the longer “Fanny and Alexander” spends 90 minutes alone on a single Christmas Eve and morning in the lives of the loving but complicated Ekdahl family in early 20th-century Uppsala, Sweden.Opera, too, is a slow-moving art form that luxuriates, but in different ways. Composers and singers relish sound, not sight. And so, in a new opera based on “Fanny and Alexander,” opening at La Monnaie in Brussels on Dec. 1, that Christmas scene takes half as long as it does in the TV cut. It’s one of several changes that were made for this adaptation, composed by Mikael Karlsson to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, and with a starry team that includes the director Ivo van Hove and the singers Sasha Cooke, Thomas Hampson and Anne Sofie von Otter. (The production will be streamed on multiple platforms on Dec. 13.)The director Ivo van Hove and the singer Anne Sofie von Otter, rehearsing the new opera. Ingmar Bergman, van Hove said, is “a realist about human emotions, but he is also poetic.”Simon Van RompayMost obviously, the opera has a running time of two and a half hours, less than half that of the longer cut of the film. Still, the stage version will be recognizably “Fanny and Alexander,” Bergman’s partially autobiographical coming-of-age tale, in which fantasy lives freely alongside reality as a vast tableau of human experience is seen through the eyes of a child. Bergman, who had planned for it to be his last film, said around its release, in 1982, that it represented “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”The film plays on television every Christmas in Sweden, and Karlsson, who is Swedish, said he felt the most pressure to get that holiday scene right. When he, Vavrek and van Hove met early in the opera’s development, van Hove suggested hurrying through Christmas to get to the wedding: the marriage of Alexander’s recently widowed mother to the local bishop, the precipitating event of the story’s darkest dramas.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

    • 50 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      Best Movies of 2024

      by

      Our film critics rank their 10 favorites this year.As you browse, keep track of how many movies you’ve seen or want to see. Find and share your personalized watch list at the bottom of the page.Manohla DargisDazzling in Plain SightEvery year, as I start the herculean (and absurd!) task of winnowing down a year’s worth of movies into a top 10, I also sift through a lot of grim media coverage about the terrible, horrible, possibly salvageable state of the entertainment industry. In the movie world, things are always looking up (maybe) unless they’re catastrophically down, a cycle of boom and bust that has gripped the industry for much of its history and always convinces someone, somewhere, that the movies are dead. It’s a familiar charge with a changing cast of murder suspects: synchronized sound, television, cable, streaming and, of course, corporate idiocy.Despite their continued decline, the big American-based studios still dominate the mainstream media coverage and what little attention an increasingly fragmented, distracted audience has remaining. To that end, nearly every week another megadollar production comes hurdling toward us, gobbles up all the media interest, rakes in fortunes or becomes just another tax write-down or write-off. Some of these movies are OK, others are bilge; a scant few are memorable. Yet as my hardworking colleagues and I eagerly share in our reviews for The New York Times, the movie world is much vaster than what these companies offer, and good, great and miraculous work often flies under the radar. Here’s a sampling of the bounty.1. ‘All We Imagine as Light’ (Payal Kapadia)This delicate, achingly wistful story about empathy is an example of the same, and centers on two female nurses and a cook, friends who work at the same hospital in Mumbai. Over the course of the movie, Kapadia shifts between these caregivers who together and separately experience ordinary pleasures, face painful difficulties and find comfort, support and companionship in one another. Every so often, Kapadia, who has also made documentaries, incorporates images of everyday people milling through the city, images that connect her characters to a sea of humanity and, by extension, to those of us watching. (In theaters)____2. ‘Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic’Some of the most transporting movies that I watched this year were in a retrospective of Gehr’s work in March at the Museum of Modern Art. Generally short and now shot in digital, these moving images have no scripted dialogue and nothing resembling a plot. Liberated from the stranglehold of story, Gehr’s movies instead present and re-present outwardly ordinary places, objects and moving bodies — white clouds drifting across a stretch of blue city sky, people walking in front of a windowed storefront — that Gehr turns into heady studies of energy, chance, light, surface and space. Your perception of the world change when filmmakers like Gehr show it to you through their liberated lenses and frames. These are movies that expand and, at times, gloriously blow your mind.____ More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Looking for Quality Indie Cinema? Try Ovid.

      by

      The streaming service is a great place for independent films off the beaten path.Over the past several months, we’ve examined and recommended several streaming services for the discriminating movie lover — sites and apps for those whose tastes run toward titles a bit more esoteric than the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Our latest entry spotlights a terrific subscription streamer for independent film fans.When the streaming service Ovid launched in March 2019, it aimed to fill a gaping hole in the online cinematic landscape. An initiative of Docuseek, L.L.C., Ovid’s founding distributing partners (Bullfrog Films, First Run Features, The dGenerate Films Collection, Distrib Films US, Grasshopper Film, Icarus Films, KimStim, and Women Make Movies) had watched services like Netflix, which were initially happy to host independent movies, turn away from smaller films in favor of splashier mainstream fare and their own, in-house offerings. At Ovid (and a few other streamers we’ve spotlighted in this column), those titles could find a home for viewers with an interest in cinema from the fringes.The service initially housed 350 titles, most of them from the nonfiction space. It now boasts 2,282 titles, and has expanded from those initial eight distribution partners to over 60 from around the world. The library remains heavy on documentary, with films helpfully curated into categories of (among others) biography, arts and culture, politics, the environment, L.G.B.T.Q.+ issues, civil rights and, of course, movies about movies. The service also curates specialized collections, including films about basketball, journalism, the Vietnam conflict, jazz music and “dead French philosophers.”Ovid isn’t merely for doc-heads, however; the service has also grown its library of narrative films, primarily from the worlds of independent and international cinema. Their offerings include contemporary award-winners like Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex,” Jem Cohen’s “Museum Hours” and Sophia Takal’s “Always Shine,” as well as recently rediscovered and restored gems like “The Strangler,” “Delta Space Mission” and “The Tune.” And bingers will find an assortment of fine television shows as well, from the docuseries likes of “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” “With God on Our Side” and “Reporters Against Power,” along with some less-expected titles (such as the BBC series “Do Not Adjust Your Set” and “At Last the 1948 Show,” which featured various members of Monty Python before they teamed up for that troupe).The interface is smooth and intuitive, and picture quality is sharp, even for older, presumably long-neglected titles. And the service is priced quite competitively — a great deal at $6.99 per month, or at a discounted rate of $69.99 for a full year, one of the most competitively-priced specialty streamers.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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Mark Duplass Reprises a Killer Role in ‘The Creep Tapes’

      by

      The murderer with the unnerving smile from the “Creep” movies is back, this time in a found-footage-style series on Shudder. Keep the camera rolling.It has been almost 10 years since Mark Duplass put on a monstrous smile in “Creep,” a found-footage horror movie about a serial killer named Josef who lures videographers to his home and slaughters them mercilessly on camera.It’s a universe removed from his Emmy-nominated performance as the high-strung Chip in “The Morning Show” — but it’s a role he seems to relish. Following a “Creep” sequel from 2017, Josef is back again in Shudder’s “The Creep Tapes,” a TV rarity in that the entire series was done in the found-footage style. Not that Duplass knew that he was doing anything particularly new going in.“If there’s anything fresh about what we’re doing it’s because there is an ignorance to the form,” he said in a recent video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “It didn’t strike me that it would be groundbreaking.”Patrick Brice, who with Duplass created the series and wrote and starred in the original “Creep,” directed all six half-hour episodes of “The Creep Tapes.” (The first two episodes debuted on Shudder and AMC+ Nov. 15; new ones arrive on Fridays through Dec. 13.) In a separate interview, he said that he had drawn inspiration for the “Creep” franchise from Jim McBride’s proto-found-footage horror film, “David Holzman’s Diary” (1967), and from the 1980s anthology series “Tales From the Darkside.”“The Creep Tapes” itself is based on an anthological concept: Every episode is purported to be footage from one of the many videotapes that Josef, as revealed in the first movie, has been amassing in his closet, each labeled with a victim’s name.Basing the show on a depraved VHS library, Brice said, allowed him and Duplass to explore more “Creep” but “not have to fully commit to a third film.” But there was another benefit.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

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Jim Abrahams Brought Timeless Gags to “Airplane!” and More

      by

      With the death of Jim Abrahams, one third of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker writing and directing trio, a looks at some of the funniest moments from their key films.It’s almost hard to believe that at one point Leslie Nielsen was thought of as a serious actor who was an odd choice to play a comic role like the deadpan doctor in the disaster movie spoof “Airplane!”But casting the unflappable Nielsen to deliver lines like “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley” in response to the completely reasonable phrase, “Surely you can’t be serious,” was part of the brilliance of Jim Abrahams, who died Tuesday at the age of 80. Along with David and Jerry Zucker, his pals from his youth in Wisconsin, Abrahams was a pioneer of some of the most beloved, gleefully over-the-top comedies in cinema history.Nielsen delivering his “don’t call me Shirley” line in “Airplane!”Paramount Pictures, via Everett CollectionThe Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies took their extreme silliness extremely seriously. Their actors, like Nielsen, were as committed to the bit as they were. With a few exceptions — like the kidnapping comedy “Ruthless People” (1986) — the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker mode was parody, taking genres that audiences loved and deliciously skewering them. But their humor was so undeniable that even if you didn’t know what they were making fun of you could lose your breath laughing.When my parents sat me down at a young age to watch “Airplane!,” I had never seen any of the flicks it was riffing on, like “Airport” (1970) or “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), the latter of which also featured Nielsen. Instead, I was captivated by the sheer absurdity and sometimes perplexing strangeness. The quotable lines are legion, but the bizarrely funny images are also why “Airplane!” lingers so large in the cultural memory.For me, it’s the eggs. During the flight where nothing can seem to go right, Nielsen’s Dr. Rumack attends to a woman who is feeling ill. With ominous music in the background he starts gently, but firmly extracting a series of eggs from her mouth. After the third one comes out, he cracks it against the side of a cup. A little bird flies out. The tension that exists in the scene is real and almost frightening, the woman’s face contorting like something out of a horror film, but the end result is just so ridiculous.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

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Sweethearts’ Review: Friends Without Benefits

      by

      Two college freshmen conspire to simultaneously dump their exes in Jordan Weiss’s unremarkable debut feature.Bright, breezy and requiring little in the way of close attention, the teen rom-com “Sweethearts” is perfect for those who prefer their movies to be barely more than background noise. Otherwise, the lame plotting (by Dan Brier and Jordan Weiss, who also directs) and lack of jokes soon become painfully obvious.Even so, this direct-to-streaming bauble benefits from two leads whose charm effortlessly outshines the material. Kiernan Shipka and Nico Hiraga play Jamie and Ben, friends since childhood and now freshmen at the same college. Both are feeling hobbled by their high-school sweethearts, whose incessant sexting is ruining their enjoyment of college life. Deciding to dump these millstones, Ben and Jamie head home to Ohio for Thanksgiving and a spectacularly convoluted plan to free themselves from their romantic pasts.Though embodying a rather sweet message about finding community and healing the scars of high school, “Sweethearts” is more often vulgar than funny. A gentle but unnecessary subplot involving the public coming-out of a close friend (Caleb Hearon) at least allows the fine Tramell Tillman to low-key capture some scenes as a gay football coach. Likewise the talented comedian Sophie Zucker, who makes the most of her too-brief appearances as Jamie’s mouthy hometown nemesis.Like so many movies these days, “Sweethearts” languishes for the want of a decent screenplay. You can’t just shoehorn in clips from “When Harry Met Sally” (1989) and hope some of that film’s magic rubs off.SweetheartsRated R for flying urine and a flaccid full-frontal. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Max. More

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Reinas’ Review: Memories of Lima

      by

      The political turmoil of Peru in the 1990s serves as the backdrop for this intimate domestic drama about growing up and learning to let go.To this day, political violence continues to be an issue in Peru, though the ‘80s and ’90s — when the Maoist guerrilla movement Shining Path waged bloody conflicts against the Peruvian government before being crushed by President Alberto Fujimori — are considered the country’s rock-bottom.“Reinas,” by the Swiss-Peruvian filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke, takes place during this tumultuous period. For most of the running time, it keeps politics on the margins, like a phantom presence looming over the members of one bourgeois family’s everyday lives.The principal characters are two sisters, the teenage Aurora (Luana Vega) and her younger sister, Lucia (Abril Gjurinovic), both of whom can’t entirely wrap their heads around why their mother, Elena (Jimena Lindo), wants so desperately to leave Lima.Preventing their departure is the girls’ estranged father Carlos (Gonzalo Molina), a taxi driver who decides to reconnect with his daughters on hearing that Elena might soon whisk them away to the United States. Both parents must sign a notarized form for their children to leave the country, but Carlos stalls, and his renewed interest in the family gives Aurora (whose world seems to revolve around her friends and the beach) hope that she might be able to stay behind with him.More compelling than this somewhat unconvincing family dynamic, structured around the coming-of-age arc and the trite theme of learning to let go, is the film’s intimate sense of time and place, and the subtly effective manner by which the grim social context is made known (such as a citywide curfew and sugar shortage). Seemingly inconsequential moments — like a cozy house party scene — shine with loving specificity, making the perpetual return to the Carlos drama feel dutiful. In this case, thematic focus is bit of a buzz kill, pulling an otherwise unique portrait onto generic grounds.ReinasNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More