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      The Point of ‘Saltburn’ Isn’t What You Think It Is

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      The streaming hit has generated much chatter for its transgressive scenes. But those are diversions, camouflaging what the director is really doing.I had a grand old time watching Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” at a critics’ screening before the general public got to it, which means I was mostly unspoiled by discourse. This enjoyment came as a surprise: I did not much like “Promising Young Woman,” the writer-director’s previous, Oscar-winning outing, which aimed too high and landed with a thud. A critic should enter every movie with as blank a slate of expectations as possible. Still, for “Saltburn,” my internal eyebrow came pre-cocked.But it was sumptuous. It was silly. “No, Barry, no,” I murmured, giggling, when Barry Keoghan’s Oliver stood over that grave, contemplating the unspeakable. It was a movie about a middle-class kid who went home with his posh friend for summer vacation, slowly revealing himself to be a monster, and it was blatantly ridiculous. I loved watching it, feeling the sort of glee usually set off by a Skittles binge. As a devotee of two weird genres in particular — gothic campus yarns and “great house” tales — I just lapped it up. (So to speak.)In the intervening months, “Saltburn” has received an outsized amount of attention. It did respectably in its theatrical release, buoyed by a younger demographic in love with Jacob Elordi, a star of “Euphoria.” Critics compared it, unfavorably, with “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” citing its mishandling of class anxiety, its failure to adequately excoriate the rich and, perhaps most of all, the feeling that it was trying too hard to be shocking.Then, just before Christmas, “Saltburn” dropped on Amazon Prime Video. It became a bona fide viral hit, with word of mouth making it one of the streamer’s biggest debuts. TikTok users turned it into memes, (sort of) recreating the final scene scored to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dance Floor,” which, in turn, shot up to No. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 100 chart. Keoghan and Elordi flirted their way through the press tour, fanning the internet’s flames. You could even buy a Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater candle. (To borrow internet slang, IYKYK.)Keoghan in that notorious tub. The film has given rise to products like a Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater candle.Amazon StudiosPeople keep talking about it, so I keep thinking about why I enjoy it so much, even though many of the criticisms leveled at it (as in my colleague Wesley Morris’s review) are not, strictly speaking, 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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      Young Filmmaker Lives His ‘Fairy Tale’ at Sundance

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      “I feel like I’m in a fairy tale,” Sean Wang said to the sold-out crowd gathered at the Ray Theater in Park City, Utah, last month for his Sundance Film Festival debut.Mr. Wang, a 29-year-old filmmaker, was dressed in a black suit and white Vans (a nod to his skateboarding roots). He grabbed his chest in a show of how fast his heart was beating as he introduced his film, “Didi.” It is a coming-of-age story about an angsty, insecure 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy trying to find his place in the world.“I’m just going to take a few seconds to take this all in,” he said before snapping a photograph of the audience. The warm crowd included Mr. Wang’s family and friends, the film’s cast and crew, and a handful of potential buyers who have the power to transform his station in life from aspiring filmmaker to bona fide Hollywood director.It has happened before. Luminaries like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Damien Chazelle, Ava DuVernay and Lulu Wang all went from hopeful dreamers to actual filmmakers in part thanks to the Sundance Film Festival, which just concluded its 40th year.Mr. Wang made a series of short films while working on and off for Google Creative Labs.Mr. Wang has mined aspects of his childhood in much of his work.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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      Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in February: ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ ‘Shogun,’ More

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      “Genius:MLK/X,” a “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” series, a remake of “Shogun” and “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” are among the new arrivals.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of February’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Season 1Starts streaming: Feb. 2Based on the 2005 blockbuster film of the same name, the spy thriller series “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” stars Donald Glover (who also cocreated the show with Francesca Sloane) as a spy code-named John who gets paired with a spy code-named Jane (Maya Erskine) in an operation that has them posing as a married couple. While trying to get a handle on their assignment, the fake spouses also have to get to know each other, and to figure out whether it’s helpful or detrimental to their mission to have actual romantic chemistry. Though there are chase scenes and explosions sprinkled throughout, this take on the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” premise is more grounded. It’s about two attractive single people in New York City, balancing a relationship and a very, very strange job.Also arriving:Feb. 8“The Silent Service”Feb. 9“Upgraded”Feb. 13“Five Blind Dates”Feb. 16“This Is Me … Now: A Love Story”Feb. 19“Giannis: The Marvelous Journey”Feb. 23“Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional”“Poacher”“The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy” Season 1Feb. 29“Red Queen”Dario Argento in the documentary “Dario Argento Panico.”ShudderNew to AMC+‘Dario Argento Panico’Starts streaming: Feb. 2The Italian filmmaker Dario Argento has been a favorite of genre fans and cinephiles since the 1970s, when his stylish, blood-soaked thrillers like “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” and “Suspiria” introduced a unique cinematic language, halfway between Hitchcockian suspense and Grand Guignol theater. In the Shudder documentary “Dario Argento Panico,” Argento and some of his collaborators and admirers (including the directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn) look back across his long career, discussing his unique vision as well as the controversies surrounding the violence in his movies and the intensity of his working methods. The film is a comprehensive introduction to an artist whose work and personality can come off as aloof and demanding, but who has long appealed to people who don’t mind a challenge.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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      Looking to Watch Movies and Make Friends? Join the Club.

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      Around New York City, there’s a robust circle of film enthusiasts showing offbeat movies in bars and shops, where lingering afterward is welcomed.At Heart of Gold, a cozy bar in Queens, a mad scientist recently brought to life a corpse that went on a blood-drenched rampage. But the people nursing their beers there didn’t call the authorities. They cheered.That’s because the undead were marauding on a screen, set up at the front of the bar, that was illuminated by “Re-Animator,” Stuart Gordon’s 1985 horror-science fiction splatterfest. The occasion was a Monday night gathering of the Astoria Horror Club, which meets regularly to watch scary movies over hot dogs, mulled wine and other anything-but-popcorn concessions.Before the film, Tom Herrmann and Madeleine Koestner, the club’s co-founders, introduced “Re-Animator” with a trigger warning about a sexual assault scene and a reminder to generously tip the staff. About 35 people watched the movie seated, but others stood, complementing the onscreen mayhem with shrieking, gasping and, as a decapitated head got tossed around, an explosion of applause.The Astoria Horror Club is just one of many film clubs that, while not new in concept, are quietly thriving in and around New York City. At many of these events, movies are shown not in traditional theaters but in bars, shops and other makeshift spaces, for small groups of people, many of whom arrive early for good seats and stay afterward to gush and vent.The screenings are open to the public, but mostly it’s Gen Zers and millennials who are joining strangers to watch movies that, in many cases, are for niche tastes and were made before streaming was a thing.These kinds of films are programmed regularly at the city’s revival houses, like Film Forum and Metrograph. But what these film clubs offer is ample space and time, where debate and friendships can blossom without leaving your seat. For cheap, too: At chain theaters, tickets can be more than $20 apiece, not including food and drinks. Many of these film clubs are free to attend, although patrons are asked to pony up for beer or bites.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 Promised Land’ Review: Coaxing Crops From a Wild Land

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      Mads Mikkelsen stars as a soldier with little money but big ideas who gets royal approval to try to conquer a vast shrubby expanse.The Danish drama “The Promised Land” takes its old-fashioned remit with enjoyable seriousness. Set in the mid-18th century, it is a classic tale of haves and have-nots filled with gristle and grit, limitless horizons, scenes of suffering, reversals of fortune and cathartic recognition. It has sweep, romance, violence and spectacle, but what makes it finally work as well as it does is that it largely avoids the ennobling clichés that turn characters into ideals and movies into exercises in spurious nostalgia — well, that and Mads Mikkelsen.Mikkelsen stars as Capt. Ludvig Kahlen, a war veteran with little more than a frayed uniform and a well-polished medal on his chest, who sets out to cultivate the heath in Jutland, the peninsula that makes up most of Denmark. There, on a vast shrubby expanse thought untamable yet beloved by the Danish monarch, Kahlen hopes to work the land and establish a settlement for king, country and himself. Over time, as seasons change and visitors come and go, he does just that, building a new world and cultivating the ground in a laborious, engrossing process that the director Nikolaj Arcel charts with ease and gripping drama.Written by Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen, the well-paced story briskly takes Kahlen from the poorhouse to the royal palace minutes after opening, establishing the reach of his ambition. (The movie is based on the novel “The Captain and Ann Barbara” from the Danish writer Ida Jessen.) There, he seeks permission to build on the heath from the king’s advisers, a collection of imperial rotters in wigs and satin breeches who agree to his request only after he pledges to pay for the endeavor with his military pension. In return, Kahlen wants a title, a manor and servants; effectively, he wants to become one of them.Mikkelsen is excellent, and inexorably watchable. He almost always is, whether he’s infusing life into a cardboard Hollywood villain (“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”) or having a palpably rollicking time playing a rampaging hero (as in the entertaining action romp “Riders of Justice,” written and directed by Jensen). Mikkelsen’s severe good looks are a crucial part of his appeal, as is the sense of menace and intrigue that certain beauty brings with it. Mikkelsen knows how to complicate his looks and he’s particularly adept at amplifying its menace by withholding readable emotion, a technique that turns his face into a mask you anxiously wait for him to drop.Kahlen soon reaches Jutland alone on horseback, and the story begins to take flight, as does the camera. With boundless aerial views that establish a sense of place both geographic and emotional, Arcel at once conveys the land’s immensity (and harsh grandeur) and emphasizes the titanic effort of Kahlen’s enterprise (and its loneliness). In both sun and rain, he repeatedly bores into the ground with a hand-held auger to gauge the quality of the soil, feeling, smelling and all but tasting the dirt. With every twist of the auger, he steadily underscores his will. By the time he finds what he needs it’s as if the heath had finally surrendered to him.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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      Jack Jennings, P.OW. Who Helped Build Burma Railway, Dies at 104

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      He was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and was one of thousands of prisoners whose hardships were the basis for the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and the Oscar-winning film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died this month in St. Marychurch, England. He was 104.His daughters Carol Barrett and Hazel Heath told the BBC on Jan. 22 that he had died in a nursing facility, though the exact date of death was unclear.They said they believed their father was the last survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian solders who were captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.A private in the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the next three-and-half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).To build bridges, Mr. Jennings and at least 60,000 P.O.W.s — and thousands more local prisoners — were forced to cut down and debark trees, saw them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to build embankments, and drive piles into the ground.In his 2011 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” Mr. Jennings described the dangerous process of driving the piles, using a heavy weight raised by the men to the top of a timber frame.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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      ‘Argylle’ Review: A Cat Cannot Save It

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      A simulacrum of a spy movie offers few pleasures and plenty of headaches.Last year, while Hollywood’s actors and writers were on strike, people often asked me why the unions had such a bee in their collective bonnet about artificial intelligence. A.I. could never write a screenplay as well as a human, they said. Wouldn’t that ultimately spell doom for any studio that tried to replace their writers, and the whole thing would right itself on its own?My answer, then and now, was that it wouldn’t matter if the screenplay was good. Audiences have become so accustomed to watching movies and TV shows — excuse me, content, half-watched from behind a phone screen — that resembles something they liked once that A.I.’s regurgitations will not feel out of place. It doesn’t have to be better, I said. It just has to be adequate.“Argylle” was not, to my knowledge, written by A.I. (It was written by Jason Fuchs.) But it perfectly embodies the soulless, human-free feel that I worry about. It is ostensibly a tribute to spy movies of an earlier age, not clever enough to be a spoof and certainly not satire. But a homage shows affection for, understanding of and respect toward the thing it is honoring. “Argylle” feels pasted together by a robot manipulating some kind of spy Magnetic Poetry.What pleasure is extractable in “Argylle,” directed by Matthew Vaughn, lies in its mild surprises. Let’s just say the protagonist, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard, very wide-eyed), is a best-selling spy novelist and, despite her protestations, the very epitome of a cat lady. (Her Scottish fold cat, Alfie, appears entirely computer generated even when I think they surely were using a real cat, and his presence seems calculated to add some whimsy to the plot. It does not.) She lives alone in a nicely appointed cabin nestled between mountains in Colorado, and she is afraid of dating and of flying. Instead she taps away at her novels, which have legions of fans.But stuck on the ending of the latest installment, she hops on a train to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara), and has the bad luck to find herself seated across from a grungy-looking guy named Aidan (Sam Rockwell). He is reading her latest novel, “Argylle,” named for the fictional spy she both writes about and sees everywhere (played by Henry Cavill, sporting an overemphasized widow’s peak). She tries not to let on who she is; she fails; and then, out of nowhere, things go haywire.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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      ‘Not a Pretty Picture’: A Director’s Unflinching Response to Trauma

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      Anthology Film Archives is screening a new 4K restoration of Martha Coolidge’s 1976 docudrama about date rape.Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.The subject is date rape, and it could not be more topical. In a rare theatrical run, a new 4K restoration of the movie opens on Friday at Anthology Film Archives.At 16 years old, in 1962, Coolidge was sexually assaulted by an older schoolmate. Her 1976 movie restages and analyzes the rape. In the film, it’s 1962 again and the actress playing Martha (Michele Manenti), innocently adventurous, takes a trip with three boys and another girl to New York City. No matter how self-possessed she believes herself to be, she winds up isolated in a loft, where she is cajoled, bullied and ultimately raped by a far more self-assured predator (Jim Carrington), who separates her from her friends.Coolidge interviews the performers onscreen as well as directing them and encouraging them to improvise. The assault is the movie’s central scene, but nearly as compelling as the long takes of Manenti wrestling with Carrington as he urges her to “just please relax …” is the sight of Coolidge watching the struggle, her hand over her mouth.The performances are multifaceted. Manenti herself was raped as a teenager and discusses this in the film. In critiquing his character, Carrington calls him “uneducated” (a polite substitute for jerk) and comes off nearly as glib, yet honest in his identification with the rapist. Anne Mundstuk, Coolidge’s boarding school roommate and confidante, is cast as her teenage self and recalls her own feelings at the time as well as her thoughts on re-enacting them.Coolidge frames “Not a Pretty Picture” with her own expressions of vulnerability. It begins with a school recital performance of the most achingly pure of folkie love-songs “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” sung by Coolidge and shown in long shot from the perspective of two smirking boys in the audience. It ends with the filmmaker acknowledging the shame she felt and the lasting damage that the rapist inflicted.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