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      ‘The Friend’ Review: The Writer vs. the Great Dane

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      Naomi Watts plays a writer in mourning who is given a formidable gift from a friend in this adaptation of the Sigrid Nunez novel.Across the compact space of a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, a frazzled writer and a dog the size of a small pony exchange pleading looks. It’s a classic odd-couple setup, and you might call the central duo in “The Friend” unlikely roommates. But, more to the point, they’re two grieving souls, brought together by the death of a man who was a pivotal figure in both their lives.As the writer, Iris, Naomi Watts is an engaging fusion of intellectual acuity and emotional translucence. The role of Apollo goes to a magnificent fellow named Bing, a harlequin Great Dane with one brown eye, one blue, and an exceptionally expressive pair of eyebrows. Left to Iris by her friend and mentor Walter, a literary lion and a bit of a cad played with a mournful gaze by Bill Murray in a few well-deployed flashbacks — or perhaps merely hoisted upon her by Walter’s dog-averse widow (Noma Dumezweni) — Apollo is no magical creature, no cuddly cure for writer’s block. He’s a full-fledged character, and a mysterious one at that.At first the screen adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s exquisite novel of the same name, a quiet miracle woven of wry glances at New York literati and a piercing ache, feels too smooth, too glossy. But if Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the writer-directors, can’t match the novel’s sharp first-person narration, they find the sweet spot between sardonic and openhearted as Iris and Apollo get to know each other, and as she sorts out the complexities of her friendship with Walter. Theirs was a bond that inspires a bit of envy on the part of his widow and former wives (a sympathetic Carla Gugino and Constance Wu, in hissable frenemy mode).Refreshingly, Iris’s single status is not viewed as a problem to be solved. The problem is whether she should keep Apollo, and given his size, it’s a situation that announces itself to the world, sparking the warnings of her building’s superintendent (Felix Solis), the concerns of a neighbor (Ann Dowd) and snarky cracks from strangers.McGehee and Siegel (“Montana Story”) juice this smart, affecting feature with sly nods to big-screen New York romances. This is a love story, after all, and one with a keen grasp of the mournful, curious glances between its two leads — of how much goes untranslated between them, and how much is conveyed.The FriendRated R for sexual references and doggie genitalia. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Death of a Unicorn’ Review: Into the Woods (Chomp, Chomp)

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      Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play a father and daughter who run down a mystical beast and end up running amok with a monstrous brood.There’s no real spoiling “Death of a Unicorn,” an unabashedly nonsensical movie that doesn’t take anything too seriously, itself included. There are misty-eyed parent-child moments, digs at the wealthy, nods at the environment. Mostly, though, the whole thing is a wall-to-wall goof, despite the grandeur of its mystical attraction, whose traditional rangelands have included the King James Bible, illuminated manuscripts, medieval tapestries, fantasy literature, pop culture, children’s playrooms and Ridley Scott films (well, two: “Blade Runner” and “Legend”). Here, it nearly ends up as roadkill on a remote Canadian highway.The guy behind the wheel, Elliot (Paul Rudd), is busy yammering and trying to placate his demonstrably unhappy daughter, ahem, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), when he hits something big with his rental car, causing it to spin out. Elliot is en route to his boss’s remote family compound to deal with some pressing business that he hopes will insure his and his daughter’s future. They’re clearly loving but also clouded with grief from the death of Ridley’s mother, a tragedy that informs Elliot’s determined careerism and Ridley’s melancholy, both of which flicker on and off throughout the movie, amid jokes and pratfalls, scheming and dealing, firing guns and rampaging monsters, some with two legs and others with four.What happens next is a high-concept, middlebrow, low-stakes comedy about the haves and the (kind of) have-nots that’s effectively an elevator pitch — be afraid of unicorns, be very afraid — stretched to feature length. The setup is a mush of old standbys (the comedy of rich fools, the horror of other people) spiced up with myth, headline news and cinematic allusions. The writer-director Alex Scharfman has, for one, borrowed visual and thematic ideas from the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters, the medieval branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he’s clearly watched nerve-shredders like “Alien.” As he’s noted in interviews, he has also drawn inspiration from the Sackler family, the longtime owners of Purdue Pharma.The story kicks in once the unicorn in question goes splat. Much of what ensues takes place at the boss’s preposterously grandiose lodge — nay, castlelike fortress — tucked in wilderness and protected by armed guards. There, Elliot and Ridley pull up with a small motionless unicorn in the car that soon proves very much alive; high jinks ensue with enough scrambling silliness to suggest that Scharfman is also familiar with Abbott and Costello. To that comic end, Rudd and Ortega soon run amok with the rest of the sterling cast, starting with the peerless Richard E. Grant as Odell Leopold, the paterfamilias whose villainous bona fides are evident the minute you hear that this brood owns a pharmaceutical giant.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 Ballad of Wallis Island’ Review: A Sour Note

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      Carey Mulligan briefly warms this damp, downbeat comedy about two lonely men and their musical obsession.Like many of us nowadays, I needed a reason to laugh. My mistake — encouraged by the offbeat bona fides of the British performers Tom Basden and Tim Key — was expecting “The Ballad of Wallis Island” to provide one.Bereft of chuckles or even a substantial story, this maudlin musical fable never escapes the drag of a lead character with supporting-player energy. From the instant Herb McGwyer (Basden) washes up — quite literally, having tumbled out of a rowboat — on the fictional Wallis Island, it’s clear he’s a drip. A decade earlier, Herb was a big deal in folk music as one half of the popular duo McGwyer Mortimer; now he’s a struggling solo artist who can’t even finance his latest album.All of which explains his sodden arrival on this depopulated rock, the home of an eccentric lottery winner named Charles (Key), who has offered Herb an astonishing half-million pounds to play a single concert. Herb’s annoyance at the lack of a showbiz welcome — no car, no publicist, no fancy hotel — intensifies when he learns that his host, a lonely widower, will be the sole audience member. And that this McGwyer Mortimer superfan has also persuaded Herb’s former bandmate and erstwhile lover, Nell (Carey Mulligan), to join them, apparently hoping that the two will rekindle their artistic, and perhaps even their romantic alchemy.For the sake of Nell, who now prefers cooking chutney to composing tunes, viewers should hope otherwise. Petulant and whiny, Herb is such a charmless sourpuss it’s a relief when Nell shows up with a cheery husband, Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), in tow. Yet rather than mine this awkward ménage for much-needed humor, Basden and Key’s screenplay hustles Michael hastily offscreen to search for puffins. (Lest we be left in suspense, he pops back at the end to confirm he found them.)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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      ‘Art for Everybody’ Review: The Hidden Life of the ‘Painter of Light’

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      Thomas Kinkade turned himself into a ubiquitous brand — but there was more to him than that, a new documentary shows.One of my high school jobs was stocking shelves and tending the register in a Christian bookstore in upstate New York. “Bookstore” is a bit of a misnomer: while we did sell books — Bibles, relationship manuals about love languages, “Left Behind” novels — most of the store’s floor space was devoted to things that were not books at all: Christian music CDs and cassette tapes, plus “gift” items, usually displayed in themed zones: baptisms, amusements and brands like Willow Tree, Precious Moments and Veggie Tales.When I was there in 2001, our biggest sellers came from one section in the store that was set up to resemble a small living room, with a couch and a rug and a wall hanging. This was the Thomas Kinkade section, named for the artist who created the images of colorful homes nestled into sweet landscapes that were then painted and embroidered and printed onto anything a typical Christian bookstore patron might desire. You could buy Thomas Kinkade collectible plates, Thomas Kinkade throw blankets, Thomas Kinkade lamps, Thomas Kinkade crosses, Thomas Kinkade mass-produced cross-stitched Bible covers. With the flick of a button, Thomas Kinkade framed prints would convert images of glowing windows to actual glowing windows via little embedded lights. You could deck your whole life out in Thomas Kinkade.Kinkade, who turned out these original images and called himself the “Painter of Light,” is the subject of the new documentary “Art for Everybody,” directed by Miranda Yousef. Kinkade is sort of the Kenny G of American art, ubiquitous and beloved and very easy to deride. The documentary brings in a variety of art critics, journalists and historians to do just that, with reactions ranging from sniffs to an earnest consternation over what Kinkade’s anodyne, even retrograde images signify about their buyers. The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, who profiled Kinkade in 2001, provides some background from a decidedly outsider perspective: she hadn’t heard of Kinkade in his ’80s and ’90s heyday, and found him to be as much of an oddity as a cultural phenomenon.But I suspect Orlean is an outlier, and not just because according to the documentary, at one point one in every 20 American households purportedly purchased “a Kinkade” — meaning a licensed print — to put on the wall, and possibly many more. For those who grew up in and around Christian culture in the United States, especially the evangelical flavor, he was ubiquitous from the 1980s onward, present in church lobbies and grandma’s living room. As the art critic Blake Gopnik notes in the film, Kinkade “fed on the disdain” of critics and the establishment, positioning himself as diametrically opposed to an art world seen as degenerate and anti-family during the 1980s and ’90s culture wars. Kinkade served up a vision of a perfect, beautiful world, with himself as a defender (as he says in archival video) of “family and God and country and beauty.”All of this was very lucrative for Kinkade, who was a marketing genius — one interviewee suggests Warhol might have been jealous — and an outspokenly religious family man. But that makes his death in 2012, at the age of 54, even more startling. After a precipitous decline owing to mounting alcoholism and including public urination, heckling and erratic behavior (plus a failed stint in rehab), Kinkade died of an alcohol and Valium overdose.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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      How ‘No Other Land’ Became an Unlikely Box Office Success

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      The Oscar-winning documentary has surpassed $2 million at the box office despite the lack of a traditional distribution deal.“No Other Land” has racked up festival awards, critical acclaim and the Oscar for best documentary feature. Yet the film, a narrative exposé about Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes directed by two Palestinians and two Israelis, has not been acquired by a traditional North American distributor. This is partly a reflection of the collapse of studio interest in newsy documentaries as well as hesitance around a movie that condemns Israeli policies.But as the filmmakers rolled out the movie without the marketing muscle and prestige of a typical release, it has flourished. By the admittedly parched standards of post-pandemic theatrical releases of topical documentaries, it is a hit.“No Other Land” has been a top 25 film each of the past three weeks since its Oscar win, according to the film database Box Office Mojo, with ticket sales set to eclipse $2 million domestically by the end of next weekend. It was playing on 130 screens across the country last weekend, a small number when compared to the thousands of a studio blockbuster, but robust given its circumstances. (The film’s theatrical rights have been acquired in more than 20 other countries.)“Documentaries are having a harder time theatrically these days,” said Connie White, who has programmed “No Other Land” at a dozen theaters from Brookline, Mass., and Pleasantville, N.Y., to Tucson, Ariz., and Omaha. “This is remarkable.”At Film Forum in Manhattan, “No Other Land” sold out seven shows its opening weekend in February and a week’s worth of evening screenings after its Oscar win. It “is shaping up to be among the highest-attended films in our 55-year history,” said Sonya Chung, the cinema’s president and director.At the national Alamo Drafthouse chain, which screens studio tentpoles like “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Snow White,” “No Other Land” has been the 14th-biggest film since its Jan. 31 release, a spokesman said.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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      Why ‘Last Tango in Paris’ Derailed Maria Schneider’s Life

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      “Being Maria” uses the actress’s own words to show how the star’s frank discussion of the experience was an early salvo in the #MeToo movement.In a 1983 interview for a French television show, the actress Maria Schneider was asked whether she would mind if the program broadcast a clip from “Last Tango in Paris,” a film she had made 11 years earlier. “No,” she said, pleadingly. “I’d rather not.”Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, that movie depicts the heated sexual relationship between a young Frenchwoman, Jeanne (Schneider), and an older American expat, Paul (Marlon Brando). What ended up making “Tango” more infamous than famous was a scene in which Paul forces himself on Jeanne, with the help of a smear of butter.That scene would haunt Schneider, who died at 58 in 2011, the rest of her life. In a 2007 interview, she said that the moment had been sprung upon her with no warning: “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”It’s easy to see why this posed a moral and ethical problem for the director Jessica Palud, whose new film, “Being Maria,” stars Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider and Matt Dillon as Brando.“That was the big question mark when we started writing our film: Do we re-enact the scene or not?” Palud said in a video interview from France. “Everybody I talked to who had known Maria mentioned the trauma caused by that scene, so I just couldn’t avoid it.”“Being Maria” starts with Schneider observing her father, the well-known French actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal) on a set. She is fascinated by the world of filmmaking, and right away we are conscious of the importance of who is watching and who is being watched. When, not long after, the 19-year-old Maria is cast in “Tango” and becomes the focus of attention, Palud felt it was important to continue to concentrate on the woman’s gaze.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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      ‘Being Maria’ Review: The Muse’s Side of the Story

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      Starring Anamaria Vartolomei and Matt Dillon, this French drama chronicles the life of the actress Maria Schneider after her traumatic experience on the set of “Last Tango in Paris.”When it comes to telling stories about the victims of abuse, filmmakers are often faced with a dilemma: to show or not show the act of violence. Showing could mean exploiting the victim’s pain to satisfy viewers’ curiosity; not showing could mean hedging around a hard truth.Jessica Palud’s “Being Maria” — a biopic of Maria Schneider, a French actress perhaps best known for playing the mistress of Marlon Brando’s character in “Last Tango in Paris” — chooses to show.In 1972, when the 19-year-old Schneider was shooting one of the film’s many sex scenes, Brando (with the director Bernardo Bertolucci’s blessing) improvised without telling her his intentions, using a stick of butter to perform what on-screen looks like anal penetration.“Being Maria” recreates the scene — and it’s a tough watch. Anamaria Vartolomei, who plays Schneider, conveys shock, discomfort, fear and shame in distressing close-ups. When the scene cuts, Brando (Matt Dillon), who had previously been chummy with Maria, looks sheepish. Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio) is unapologetic; he tells Maria the scene was meant to be intense.Loosely adapted from the memoir “My Cousin Maria Schneider,” by Vanessa Schneider, the film doesn’t stick around too long on Bertolucci’s set. Benjamin Biolay’s treacly string score adds an unsavory sentimental touch, but the rest of the film is quite sober as it moves through the decade of Schneider’s life after “Last Tango.”Showing how Schneider’s trauma festered over time — and eventually calloused over — the film moodily weaves together scenes of her struggles with addiction, nights at the discothèque and experiences on other movie sets, relying on Vartolomei’s edgy, delicate performance to signal Maria’s underlying anxieties. If the meandering nature of the film makes the psychic fallout seem tonally scattered, it nevertheless conveys the sense that she’s sleepwalking through life — and always fighting to snap out of it.Being MariaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Comedian Who Anticipated Our Reality-Bent World

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      You’re in a comedy club, and the guy onstage has gone quiet. He looks down at his feet, fidgets with the microphone, smiles a queasy, tight-lipped smile and, after nearly a minute of this, looks as if he might be about to cry.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinHis name is Andy Kaufman, and it’s 1977. Maybe you’re unfamiliar with him, or maybe you’ve heard he’s an up-and-coming comedian with a gift for prankish anti-bits. He has performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Saturday Night Live,” and he killed on those shows. But tonight, taping his part in an HBO “Young Comedians Special,” he has told one stinker after another, and the people who have laughed have laughed in the wrong places: at him, not with him. Other people have started to groan and boo, and Kaufman seems to be breaking down. “I don’t understand one thing,” he finally says. People laugh again, sure it’s a put-on, or hoping it is, because the alternative would be too embarrassing. He goes on: “No, seriously, why everyone is going booo, on, like, when I told some of the jokes, and then when I don’t want you to laugh, you’re laughing? Like right now.”He continues to stammer, and then he’s sobbing outright, scolding the crowd through tears. “You really showed me where I’m at tonight,” he says, emitting a raw, ugly sound, like the honk of a sick goose: Heegh-heegh. “I was just trying to do my best heegh-heegh.” He keeps scolding and honking, but as he does, the honks form a rhythm. With one hand, then both hands, he begins to play bongos in time with the honks, shaping it all into a ridiculous song. The crowd laughs harder at this twist than they’ve laughed all night, and their delight seems mixed with gratitude — for this reassurance that Kaufman wasn’t really upset, for this slippery return to terra firma.In the history of comedy, no one has shown a fuller commitment to cultivating silence, awkwardness, concern, bewilderment and vitriol than Andy Kaufman. Any comedian trades in misdirection on the way to the surprise of a punchline. But Kaufman, as much of a performance artist as he was a stand-up, saw misdirection as the main event. “I’ve never told a joke in my life,” he once said. Laughter was one among many responses he sought to engineer. “He just behaved strangely, in order to get a reaction of any kind,” Jay Leno, who worked the same clubs as Kaufman in the ’70s, has recalled. “Even hostile.”Trading against his air of childlike sweetness, Kaufman scrambled the line between entertainment, tedium, self-indulgence and combativeness. For years, he assumed the persona of a snarling misogynist and wrestled women in clubs and on TV. Some of the women were plants, some were volunteers. Kaufman beat them all. This routine, along with his belligerent lounge-act alter ego, Tony Clifton, proved so unpopular that Kaufman’s manager feared it was ruining his career. But Kaufman, more interested in provocation than adulation, only dug in more.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