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      ‘Strange Darling’ Review: Assume Nothing

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      In this cheeky, cunningly assembled thriller, a serial killer gets a satisfying and surprising comeuppance.A movie that’s best experienced stone cold, “Strange Darling” is so dependent on its surprises — one head-snapping twist, with several judiciously spaced lesser shocks — that to reveal any one of them would be critical malpractice.A crawling onscreen text, read by Jason Patric, informs us that what we are about to see is the dramatization of a spree killer’s final, vicious acts. Thus primed, we’re thrown into the middle of a frantic car chase as a terrified young woman in scarlet scrubs races to escape a shotgun-wielding man in a pickup truck. She is known only as The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), and she is bleeding from a head wound; he is The Demon (Kyle Gallner), his sleazy mustache and snorts of cocaine familiar bad-guy signifiers. We’ve got this, we think, settling in for some serial-killer comfort viewing. We could not be more wrong.Playing out in six, ingeniously scrambled chapters, this headlong thriller transforms a simple cat-and-mouse premise — and maybe even a toxic love story — into an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions. Flexing back and forth in time, the writer and director, JT Mollner, bets the house on a mechanism that repeatedly asks us to reassess what has gone before. Cunning as it is, structure is not the movie’s sole strength. Both Z Berg’s haunting, otherworldly pop songs and Giovanni Ribisi’s eloquent photography (it’s the actor’s first stint as a feature cinematographer) bathe the film’s violence in an unexpected dreaminess. In one pivotal scene, shot with shadowy intensity, flirtation and threat alternate so frequently that the flickering power dynamics are completely destabilizing.Less complicated by far are Ed Begley, Jr. and Barbara Hershey as a pair of doomsday preppers who think the bleeding woman at their door has been attacked by a Sasquatch. They will soon learn that there are some problems even bear spray can’t solve.Strange DarlingRated R for cutting, ketamine and lots of killing. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ Review: A Mourning Journey

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      This visually elegant indie follows a soft-spoken Swiss widow visiting Japan.A visually elegant drama by the writer-director Bradley Rust Gray, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” spins a gossamer-fine story about grief — about the struggle to live fully again when the tragedies of the past still exist in your bones.Chloe (Carla Juri) is a soft-spoken Swiss widow visiting Japan for work, though we first learn about her husband’s passing indirectly. She can’t speak Japanese, which gives her an excuse to keep her feelings private and remain trapped in her own head. In the beginning of the film, against a breezy pastoral backdrop, a Japanese friend, Toshi (Takashi Ueno), discusses Chloe’s misfortune in front of her with his grandmother. Chloe smiles, unaware.The moment encapsulates the film’s delicate dynamics, shifting between Chloe’s unspoken hurt (there are occasional flashbacks to her husband that bleed into the main narrative) and the concerned friends orbiting around her, both wary of upsetting her but also, because of the language barrier, naturally at a remove.The static camerawork by the cinematographer Eric Lin gives Chloe’s stilted but openly vulnerable encounters a fluttering poignancy; particularly lovely is a ferry-ride conversation with an older man, Yatsuro (Issey Ogata).The meandering nature of the film creates a special kind of intimacy with Chloe, one that relies almost entirely on Juri’s subtly heartbreaking performance. Chloe’s mourning isn’t always legible, and we often see her engaging in banal activities like shopping, eating and playing with Toshi’s young daughter, Futaba (Futaba Okazaki); her awkward banter with friends is endearing though it also grows rather dull, and the constant obliqueness draws some power and believability away from the developing romance with Toshi. There’s an implication that repressed emotions are simmering beneath the mundane, but that doesn’t always come across.I’ll Be Your MirrorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Mountains’ Review: Razing Houses, Building a Future

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      This feature debut from Monica Sorelle observes the tensions in an immigrant family in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami.“Mountains,” the feature debut from Monica Sorelle, opens by observing the demolition of a house. In one sense, Sorelle is simply setting the scene. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), the father in the central family in the film, has a job razing buildings, a role he fulfills without much complaint (although at a crucial moment he sticks up for a co-worker).Xavier is not overtly bothered by how his work might contribute to gentrification. “They give me an address, I come to demolish it,” he says, when confronted with the fact that he is slated to clear a 50-year-old church. But the tension at the movie’s heart involves the difficulty of leaving homes and finding new ones, as experienced by immigrants and their children in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.Xavier, who worked as a cabdriver after arriving from Haiti, can’t stop looking to advance; he has his eye on a house he and his wife, Esperance (Sheila Anozier), a school crossing guard who moonlights as a dressmaker, may not be able to afford. Their son, Junior (Chris Renois), is a college dropout who still lives with them. He wants to make it as a standup comedian and weighs how much of his upbringing to incorporate in his routine. To Xavier, Junior isn’t living up to his potential.As a drama, “Mountains,” whose characters move fluidly between English and Haitian Creole, is too low-key to leave much of an impression. But as a portrait of intergenerational tensions in an immigrant family, it is poignant, and it captures an area of Miami that is rarely seen onscreen.MountainsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      1999 Was a Great Year for Movies. It Was the Best Year to Write About Them.

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      At the box office 25 years ago, hits like “Runaway Bride,” “The Sixth Sense” and “Bowfinger” hint at the abundance that overwhelmed a young critic.One thing to love about time is how liberating it can be. I, for instance, am at liberty to look at the Top 10 movies for the weekend of Aug. 20, 1999 — when “The Sixth Sense,” in its third week out, began its monopoly of the chart — and declare “The Thomas Crown Affair” the best of the lot.What could be going on here? Am I actually saying that a Pierce Brosnan-Rene Russo remake of the old Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway love heist, from 1968, was always superior to M. Night Shyamalan’s where’d-that-come-from supernatural smash? Or have 25 years ripened one and grayed the other? Hadn’t “The Blair Witch Project” opened in July yet was still very much a thing? (It had, yet it was, down at No. 5.) Only one of the 10 movies was a sequel. In the mix were Julia Roberts, at her commercial peak, in “Runaway Bride” (No. 4, after opening in July) and Steve Martin and a gonzo Eddie Murphy, holding at second, in “Bowfinger.” More

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      ‘Querelle’: Fassbinder’s Defiant Swan Song

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      Anthology Film Archives is screening Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 film, based on Jean Genet’s novel, about a young sailor’s criminal and erotic escapades.Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film, “Querelle,” released posthumously in 1982, was the most lavish and artificial of the 40-odd movies the prolific filmmaker directed over the course of a 13-year career.A film that recapitulates even as it embalms many of Fassbinder’s concerns, “Querelle” screens in a new digital version for a week starting Friday at Anthology Film Archives.At once lurid and static, a funerary frieze of power plays, treachery and weaponized sex, “Querelle” is faithful to Jean Genet’s sensuous prose-poem novel in tracking the criminal and erotic escapades of the title character, a charismatic young sailor (Brad Davis).Universally desired, Querelle is a killer, a masochist, a smuggler, a stool pigeon, and a participant in a convoluted daisy chain. His brother Robert (Hanno Pöschl) is sleeping with Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), the madam of a waterfront bordello; Querelle, who allows himself to be sexually used by Lysiane’s husband, Nono (the Fassbinder regular Günther Kaufmann), has sex with her as well. He also seduces (or at least vamps) and frames a good-hearted Polish sailor (Pöschl again) and, throughout the movie, is cruised by his ship’s repressed lieutenant (Franco Nero).This tawdry rondo is frequently accompanied by a celestial chorus and bathed in a golden light, with Davis individually glorified. (Beautiful and inert, he might be a stand-in for Rock Hudson, who was not only closeted but the favorite actor of Fassbinder’s favorite director, Douglas Sirk.) Moreau, virtually the only woman in the film, comments on the turgid delirium by twice singing a ditty taken from Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” in which the phrase “each man kills the thing he loves” is followed by a jaunty “dadada-dadada.”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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      ‘Close Your Eyes’ Review: The Case of the Unfinished Film

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      For his latest, the Spanish director Victor Erice, known for the classic “The Spirit of the Beehive,” weaves a meta tale of a director looking for an absent actor.A mystery wends through “Close Your Eyes,” a drama in which the past, present and cinema converge. It’s the latest from the Spanish director Victor Erice, who’s best known for the art-cinema paragon “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), a dream of a movie about a girl who is deeply troubled by the original “Frankenstein” film. Set around 1940 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, “Beehive” elliptically focuses on a traumatized child and country that, when Erice made this classic, was in the waning years of Franco’s fascist dictatorship.“Close Your Eyes” is the fourth feature-length movie from Erice, who, it’s worth noting, was born in 1940; it’s also his first since “Dream of Light” (1992). The story in “Close Your Eyes” turns on Miguel (Manolo Solo), a melancholic filmmaker who hasn’t directed a movie in several decades and now scratches out a marginal living as a translator. Miguel’s last film, “The Farewell Gaze,” came to an aborted, ignoble finish when his lead actor, Julio (José Coronado), enigmatically disappeared. Without his star, Miguel was unable to finish the movie, which brought his film career to an end and, effectively, caused him to vanish as well.The repressed have a way of returning, as it were. And so it is in “Close Your Eyes,” which follows Miguel as he confronts his old life, his unfinished film and his absent actor, all of whom come back to some kind of attenuated life courtesy of a TV program, “Unsolved Cases.” Miguel agrees to participate in the show, which will revisit his movie’s puzzling history. He sits down for an interview and lets the program present some of the few sequences that he managed to salvage; soon enough, he also tries to find out what happened to Julio, an inquiry that begins practically enough, though it gradually accrues destabilizing existential weight.Written by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, “Close Your Eyes” quickly takes the shape of an investigation, one riddled with doubles, cinematic and otherwise. Much like Julio’s character in the unfinished film — a long, chatty section from it opens the movie — Miguel assumes the role of a detective who’s charged with finding a missing person and even begins wearing the trench coat that Julio wore in the film. These two former compatriots once shared an artistic calling and other interests, including an ex-lover. As the main story unfolds, Miguel’s exploration of the past reveals as much about the investigator as the investigated, and the men progressively seem like doppelgängers. Each has been lost; each will be also be found.Erice extends this doubling motif to the intimate one-on-one conversations that anchor “Close My Eyes,” and which incrementally, and at times almost begrudgingly, propel Miguel’s story forward. Erice tends to shoot the conversations in the earlier part of the movie as face-to-face encounters, with Miguel — an earnest, worried-looking soul — seated directly opposite another equally serious character. Later in the movie, after Miguel meets a stranger called Gardel (also played by Coronado), who helps solve the case of the missing actor, Erice often frames the two men side-by-side, as if twinning them. This visual shift underscores their connections without commensurately deepening either character or the overall movie.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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      ‘Blink Twice’ Review: Zoë Kravitz and Channing Tatum’s Horror Mystery

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      The director Zoë Kravitz creates an uneasy atmosphere in her abduction horror flick, starring Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum.For a film like “Blink Twice” to land its horror-stained commentary on sexual assault and cancel culture as well as class and race, it would need a director capable of pushing beyond basic social politics. In her debut feature, Zoë Kravitz is not that director.Rather her film, for which she also wrote the screenplay with E.T. Feigenbaum, exists more as a concept than a complete idea. The same could be said of the film’s protagonist, Frida (Naomi Ackie). She pines for the lifestyle of the disgraced tech mogul Slater King, played by Channing Tatum, Kravitz’s partner.Frida and her roommate, Jess (Alia Shawkat), work as servers at a gala — which allows the two women to switch into eye-catching dresses to mingle with the rich. When Frida snaps her heel, it’s Slater who helps her up, leading to a night of reverie culminating in an invite to his private island, where he has retreated after issuing a public apology for actions the film leaves relatively unknown.For the tech mogul’s entourage, Kravitz has assembled an impressive cast: Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment and Levon Hawke. These men are meant to elicit dread, with an appetizing drink in hand. But only Slater King’s therapist, Rich (Kyle MacLachlan), knows how to play pleasantness as threatening.Kravitz crafts an uneasy atmosphere. Days and nights blend into one for an endless summer filled with perfume and parties, producing a double-edged pace that has snap even while it lulls viewers into malaise. The cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra uses shadows to carve Ackie’s face, foretelling the angst she’ll feel when friends begin to disappear, gaps in her memory occur and an exoticized Indigenous woman calls her by another name.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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      ‘Megalopolis’ Trailer Pulled for Featuring Fake Movie Critic Quotes

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      To promote Francis Ford Coppola’s epic, the spot used supposed lines from The Times, The New Yorker and others to suggest critics were wrong about him.A new trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” featuring fake negative quotes from film critics has been pulled by the movie’s distributor, Lionsgate, a spokesman for the company said Wednesday.The trailer, which was posted in the morning, featured quotes from well-known film critics of the past including Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, Vincent Canby of The New York Times and Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times panning previous Coppola films like “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”However, as the critic Bilge Ebiri first reported in Vulture, the quotes are not real. The trailer has now been pulled from YouTube, after amassing more than 1.3 million views in the single day it was online.“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for ‘Megalopolis,’” a spokesman for the company said in a statement. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”“Megalopolis,” which was self-financed by Coppola and is due in theaters Sept. 27, was initially unable to find a buyer until Lionsgate stepped in. The epic fantasy premiered to a decidedly mixed reception at the Cannes Film Festival. On Rotten Tomatoes, it stands at just 53 percent fresh among critics. The trailer seemed to be an effort to show that reviews don’t always get it right when it comes to Coppola’s work.The spot quoted Kael as saying “The Godfather” was “diminished by its artsiness,” when in reality she wrote about it glowingly. While Canby, who served as senior film critic at The New York Times from 1969 to 1993, wasn’t a fan of “Apocalypse Now,” calling it an “intellectual muddle,” he didn’t use the phrase “hollow at the core” as the trailer indicates.The trailer also featured fake quotes from Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice, Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, and Rex Reed in The New York Observer and The New York Daily News, according to the Vulture report.John Simon of National Review is also included in the spot, and a writer for the magazine posted on X that the staff was checking the archive but believed it to be false.It is unclear how the faked quotes were created. Some on social media, speculating that artificial intelligence tools were used, started feeding prompts to ChatGPT looking for similar results.Lionsgate would not comment on whether ChatGPT or other tools powered by artificial intelligence were used for the trailer.The pulled trailer was not the first controversy surrounding the film. A report in The Guardian in May quoted anonymous sources accusing Coppola of trying to kiss female extras on the set of a nightclub scene. An executive co-producer, Darren Demetre, has said he was unaware of any harassment complaints made during the production, and Coppola later told The Times, “I’m not touchy-feely,” Coppola said. “I’m too shy.” More