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      ‘The Kitchen’ Review: No Direction Home

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      Directing their first feature, Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya spin a warmly humane story of cross-generational connection.The vitality and bonhomie that characterize many scenes in “The Kitchen,” a dystopian drama set in a near-future London, might seem at odds with the film’s focus on deprivation and persecution. Yet there’s nothing despairing about the close-knit, mostly nonwhite community that swarms and surges inside the titular public housing project, one of the last to be swallowed by private developers.It’s an estate under siege. From the authorities, who block essential services and food deliveries, and from the police, who deploy surveillance drones and armed raids. Inside this vibrant warren of market stalls and cell-like living spaces, though, the air hums with the punchy energy of people pulling together against a common enemy. Standing alone is Izi (a fabulous Kane Robinson), a selfish striver saving for a deposit on an upscale apartment. Izi sells burial packages at a futuristic funeral home, spinning fabricated tales of personal loss to juice his commission. His plans are soon compromised when he encounters Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), a recently orphaned mourner who proves difficult to dislodge.In part an outcry against gentrification and the privatization of England’s once-thriving social housing, “The Kitchen” dilutes its abjection with unlikely humor and a vividly eclectic soundtrack (mostly dispensed by the community’s resident D.J., played by the former soccer star Ian Wright). The direction, by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, is sure and unfussy, spinning a warmly humane story of cross-generational connection. Whenever the film threatens to slide into sentiment, the actors yank it back, with Hope Ikpoku Jr. especially effective in a too-brief turn as a wily competitor for Benji’s allegiance.Against expectation, “The Kitchen” ends with a question mark rather than an exclamation point, having said all that it wants and not a word more than it needs.The KitchenRated R for smashed windows and broken promises. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Oppenheimer’ Leads BAFTA Nominees

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      Christopher Nolan’s movie received 13 nods, and will compete for best picture against the likes of “Killers of The Flower Moon” and “Poor Things,” but not “Barbie.”“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s movie about the development of the atomic bomb, on Thursday received the highest number of nominations for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.The film secured 13 nods for Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including for best film, where it is up against four other titles including “Killers of The Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s epic about the Osage murders of the 1920s, and “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s sexually-charged take on a Frankenstein story starring Emma Stone. “Poor Things” followed “Oppenheimer” with 11 nominations overall.The other titles nominated for best film are “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner about a woman accused of murdering her husband, and “The Holdovers,” Alexander Payne’s tale of a boarding school teacher who has to look after students during the holidays.The nominations for “Oppenheimer” come just days after the movie won three of the major awards at this year’s Golden Globes, and will be seen by many as further boosting its chances at this year’s Oscars; the BAFTA and Oscar voting bodies overlap. This year’s Oscar nominations are scheduled to be announced on Tuesday.Although “Oppenheimer” secured the most nominations, the highest profile categories featured a variety of movies. In the best director category, Nolan, Triet and Payne were nominated alongside Bradley Cooper for “Maestro,” his biopic of Leonard Bernstein; Jonathan Glazer for “The Zone of Interest,” a movie about day-to-day life at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust; and Andrew Haigh for “All of Us Strangers,” an acclaimed British film about a lonely gay writer.Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in “All of Us Strangers,” directed by Andrew Haigh.Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press“Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster about the doll going on a journey of self-discovery, was not nominated in the best movie or best director categories, but Margot Robbie, its star, secured a nomination for best lead actress. Robbie will compete for that prize alongside the stars of other high-profile movies including Emma Stone (“Poor Things”), Carey Mulligan (“Maestro”) and Fantasia Barrino (“The Color Purple”). Sandra Hüller was also nominated for “Anatomy of a Fall,” as was Vivian Oparah for her role in the British rom-com “Rye Lane,” set in a diverse part of south London.Lily Gladstone, who earlier this month became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress for her performance in “Killers of The Flower Moon,” was not nominated for a BAFTA.Leonardo DiCaprio, Gladstone’s co-star, was also snubbed in the best actor category. That category’s nominees instead included Cillian Murphy for “Oppenheimer,” Cooper for “Maestro” and Barry Keoghan for “Saltburn.” They will compete against Paul Giamatti for his lead role in “The Holdovers,” Colman Domingo for “Rustin” and Teo Yoo for “Past Lives,” Celine Song’s wistful movie about two childhood friends who keep reuniting in later life.In 2020, the BAFTAs’ organizers overhauled the awards’ nomination processes in an attempt to improve the diversity of nominees. The changes included assigning voters 15 movies to watch each before making their selections. Sara Putt, the chair of BAFTA, said in an interview that the inclusion of Oparah among the leading actress nominees showed that the changes were helping to highlight smaller films, but she added that there was “still more to do” to increase diversity in the industry.The winners of this year’s BAFTAs are scheduled to be announced on Feb. 18 in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London, hosted by David Tennant. The ceremony will be broadcast on BritBox in the United States. More

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      ‘The Breaking Ice’ Review: Desire on the Border of China and North Korea

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      A love triangle takes shape among three 20-somethings in this melancholy film by Anthony Chen.In “The Breaking Ice,” a new film written and directed by Anthony Chen, three lost 20-somethings find one another in a liminal world. The movie takes place in Yanji, a Chinese city bordering North Korea, where two languages and cultures mix in the shadows of snow-blanketed mountains.In this icy town, Nana (Zhou Dongyu), a tour guide, crosses paths with Haofeng (Liu Haoran), a financier from Shanghai who is visiting for a wedding. She recognizes in him a melancholy that rhymes with her own, and invites him along to dinner with Xiao (Qu Chuxiao), a friend who works at a restaurant and pines after Nana.As the three down copious drinks, ride about on Xiao’s motorcycle and engage in youthful adventures, a love triangle takes shape — though it never results in predictable conflicts. It’s as if the cold, otherworldly solitude of Yanji sublimates the characters’ unrequited desires into a deeper yearning for connection. They are grateful to have each other, even if not in the ways they really want.The setting is rife with metaphoric potential, and it is here that Chen falters as a director. Haofeng’s depression is signaled by his habit of chewing on ice cubes and balancing dangerously on snowy cliffs; Nana repeatedly encounters reminders of her thwarted ice-skating career; and news reports of a North Korean defector appear throughout the film, provoking something in the restless Xiao.Deployed without subtlety, these motifs weigh down a film that, in its best moments, feels as light and refreshing as a cool breeze.The Breaking IceNot rated. In Mandarin and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Which Brings Me to You’ Review: Out With the Old?

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      This rom-com boasts a clever conceit that at times feels a little cluttered.When Will stops midway through a makeout session with Jane in the romantic comedy “Which Brings Me to You,” it signals a kind of maturity on his part. And he’s met with surprise. Jane (Lucy Hale) was cool with a purely carnal interlude. Will (Nat Wolff) wants them to connect on a deeper level.Hale and Wolff make likable their romantically messy characters, a freelance journalist and an art photographer, in this movie directed by Peter Hutchings. After rethinking their coat-closet tryst — at a Jersey Shore wedding — the two reset and begin recounting their romantic histories over the next 24 hours.Her history tilts toward kind, deeply wounded men. His leans toward creative, vibrant women. The memories of these former romances unfold as visual vignettes, with each commenting on the other’s paramours. “Oh come on. … She’s really hot,” Jane says of Eve (Genevieve Angelson), the slightly older woman who spirited Will away from his college campus. “Oooh, Elton,” Wills says, hearing about the live wire (Alexander Hodge) who swept Jane off her feet before their relationship was upended by mental illness.Another Hutchings rom-com, “The Hating Game,” also starred Hale. And like that workplace comedy, this too features locations that may stir some nostalgia: Bahr’s Landing restaurant, Keansburg Amusement Park and the Asbury Park music venue the Saint.Based on the novel of the same name (by Julianna Baggott and Steve Almond, adapted by Keith Bunin), “Which Brings Me to You” is cleverly structured but often feels too crowded with the ghosts of lovers past. Then again, isn’t that the way with some of the most promising love affairs?Which Brings Me to YouNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The End We Start From’ Review: A Watery Apocalypse and a New Beginning

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      Jodie Comer stars in a lethargic adaptation of Megan Hunter’s best-selling novel.Flooding is among the extreme weather disasters on offer on a planet with a changing climate, and that’s both catastrophic and, in a literary sense, poetic. The first apocalypse recorded in more than one ancient text is, after all, a deluge.But there is such a thing as too much symbolism, and “The End We Start From,” adapted from Megan Hunter’s acclaimed best-selling novel, is drowning. The action starts in a bathtub that’s slowly filling for a woman (played by Jodie Comer and identified in the credits only as “Woman”). She is heavily pregnant, and the bath is soothing, a weightless relief for her strained vessel of a body.As the water fills the bathtub inside, the world is filling up with water outside. Woman and her partner, R (Joel Fry), live in London, which is rapidly coming to resemble Venice without the bridges and islands. Woman goes into labor, and by the time the baby is born, she and R cannot return home. R, looking at the television, jokes about naming the baby Noah. They leave the hospital and head, like everyone else in England, for a village on higher ground. But they’re only permitted to enter because R’s parents live there, and because they have a two-day-old baby in the car.From here it’s a survival movie, a story in which Woman must protect her child through a series of shelters and journeys and fearsome encounters of a sort familiar in postapocalyptic tales. Separated from R, she yearns for him, wondering if the world will ever have a place for their little family again. She meets a friend, O (Katherine Waterston), whose baby is two months older than Woman’s and whose partner is not worth yearning for. They form a kind of connection through the wilderness, a friendship that might keep them both alive.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?  More

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      ‘Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest’ Review: A Barrier-Breaking Ascent

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      This documentary tells the story of Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, the first Nepali woman to summit Earth’s highest mountain.Summiting Everest would be the feat of a lifetime for almost anyone. For Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, the first Nepali woman to reach the peak, it also meant challenging traditional gender norms in Nepal. And it required transcending a role that Nepali mountain guides have historically played — namely, helping tourist mountaineers rather than taking the lead.The documentary “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest,” directed by Nancy Svendsen (whose brother-in-law was a brother of Sherpa’s), explains how its title subject became a famed figure in Nepal. Opening with footage of a memorial procession in Kathmandu in 1993, it makes clear at the outset that her record requires a sad asterisk: Although she reached the summit on April 22 of that year, she died on descent.“I wasn’t born a mountaineer,” Sherpa says in an interview excerpted at the film’s start. “I’m just a housewife.” According to the documentary, the first mountain she climbed to its peak was not in Nepal, but Mont Blanc in Europe. What she learned there served as inspiration for an ascent closer to home.Drawing on interviews with family members and fellow climbers, “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest” describes the various social, national and financial obstacles that Sherpa encountered. Jan Arnold, a New Zealand doctor and climber who was on Everest contemporaneously, vividly explains the physical toll that acclimating to the mountain can take.While the interviewees speak of Sherpa with sincerity and affection, “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest” never locates a satisfying big-picture idea or formal approach that would make it more than a straightforward tribute.Pasang: In the Shadow of EverestNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’ Review: A Wanderer on a Spiritual Quest

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      An uncommonly strong debut from the Vietnamese director Pham Thien An asks existential questions without answers.The complex dance of doubt and religious faith is frequently cast in terms of a quest. One might be “on a faith journey,” or be “a lost soul,” or be “searching” for meaning and the divine — all images derived from the idea of starting at one place, keeping your eyes open, and ending up, ultimately, in some final destination. Small wonder that many human cultures imagine a wander in the wilderness, literal or metaphorical, as pivotal to one’s initiation into maturity. Some fresh wisdom and revelation comes from walking around in circles for a while.This spiraling, meandering trek is the underlying structure of “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” an uncommonly strong feature debut from the Vietnamese director Pham Thien An. The protagonist, Thien (Le Phong Vu), is dragged into a voyage of his own. Having grown up in a rural village, he now lives in Saigon, where he works and hangs out with his friends. It seems that any faith or belief in the soul or the transcendent has disappeared completely into his hard, cold urban exterior.But one day, sitting at a roadside cafe discussing faith with two buddies — one of whom is selling his possessions and moving to the countryside to seek a life of communion with the divine — he observes a terrible motorcycle crash.Initially he thinks little of the crash. You get the sense he’s seen a lot of this sort of thing before. But soon after, while he lies on a table in the early stages of an erotic massage, his phone rings. “God is calling,” he tells the masseuse. “God?” she asks. “It’s my client,” he replies.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?  More

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      ‘I.S.S.’ Review: Ariana DeBose’s Turn as a Space Warrior

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      The actress stars in this low-wattage thriller about Russian and American astronauts facing off aboard the International Space Station.Three Americans, three Russians and one exceedingly cramped office hovering 250 miles above Earth — what could possibly go wrong? Given the typical genre coordinates, the 95 minute running time and historic hostilities between Russia and the United States, the more relevant questions here are when and how quickly and entertainingly things will go kablooey in “I.S.S.,” an enjoyable, low-wattage thriller set on the International Space Station.There are nothing but bilateral hugs and smiles when the space newbie Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) arrives on the station, having been shot into the story on a Russian Soyuz rocket. She and another American astronaut, a smiley family man, Christian (John Gallagher Jr.), have caught a ride to the station, where she’ll be studying mice or “my little guys,” as she cooingly calls them. Like a character’s early reference to the station’s life-support system (if it stops humming, uh-oh), these helpless creatures — soon seen floating tails-up in a container — are early warning signs that something will be disturbing the relative peace very soon.The movie — written by Nick Shafir and directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite — flashes its wailing red alarms early and often. The space station itself — a cluttered warren with tangles of wires, claustrophobic chambers and eerily weightless bodies — makes a convincing pressure cooker. And Cowperthwaite, who’s worked in nonfiction and fiction (she’s best known for her doc “Blackfish”), clearly maps the tight quarters straightaway, which adds to the ominous atmosphere. By the time a Russian colleague, Alexey (Pilou Asbaek), gruffly tells Kira that “it does not end well,” all this foreshadowing has certainly piqued expectations.What follows is consistently watchable and sometimes tense but, despite some twists, largely unsurprising. After the introductions — Chris Messina plays the third American, Gordon — and the assorted personalities and relationships have been sketched in, the movie gets down to genre business with some worrisome red-orange flashes on Earth. Communication failures ensue, as do the progressively more fretful faces and soundtrack music. The two crews close ranks, with the Americans retreating to one corner to sneak worried looks at the similarly alarmed Russians, who include Weronika (Masha Mashkova) and Nicholai (Costa Ronin).As things go bad and then seriously bad, Cowperthwaite keeps the pieces efficiently shuffling to and fro. She plays with constricted spaces, adds surveillance imagery to amp the disquiet and routinely folds in shots of both outer space and of the orbiting station. This reminds you of the setting’s exoticism and complements the slow-boiling sense of peril, including the obvious unease building in the characters’ head space. (The cosmic imagery also reminds you of how routine persuasive digital special effects are now.) Even so, despite the far-out milieu, the unfolding drama could have easily been set in a submarine — or any other constrained place in which characters have been assembled to prove the best and worst about humanity.DeBose, who’s best known for her powerhouse turn as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” makes a convincing narrative axis. The performer’s warmth and charisma nicely offset Kira’s guardedness and outsider status, and that combination makes the character seem more complicated than the bit of back story she’s been given. It’s clear from the get go, from all the close-ups and hovering camerawork, that Kira is the hero of this adventure. In the end, the biggest mystery here is precisely what type of space warrior — a Sigourney Weaver in “Alien” or a Sandra Bullock in “Gravity” — she must become in order to get the job done.I.S.S.Rated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More