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      Leonardo DiCaprio Plays Dim in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest is unlike any Scorsese protagonist because, well, he’s dumb as rocks. And that changes the film in a fundamental way.The demimondes depicted by the American master Martin Scorsese vary widely — his New York stories alone span three centuries — but they have one common requirement: It takes intelligence, of one kind or another, to navigate them. His protagonists are smart, street smart, shrewd, skillful or some combination of those qualities as a rule.That rule is broken in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Normally, a character like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a World War I veteran turned henchman in a plot to murder Osage people for their oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma — would either rise to the top of his uncle Bill Hale’s organization, or wise up and fight to stop it on his own. Ernest does neither, precisely because he lacks the qualities Scorsese has spent a lifetime depicting.Henry Hill (Ray Liotta with Lorraine Bracco) serves as our guide to the Mafia in “Goodfellas.”Warner Bros.The quintessential Scorsese protagonist, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) also serves as the narrator of “Goodfellas.” It’s not just that he is a canny operator who helps plan a fictional version of the most lucrative heist in American history — his voice and his street smarts guide us through the Mafia’s underground society. It’s difficult to imagine Ernest having the know-how to pull off either task.DiCaprio in “Gangs of New York.” To survive, his character has to think fast.Ernest is not the first DiCaprio character to live a double life in Scorsese’s world. Amsterdam Vallon and Billy Costigan, his characters in “Gangs of New York” and “The Departed,” are undercover agents embedded in sophisticated crime organizations. They must think on their feet much faster than a man whose only task is to swindle a sick woman.DiCaprio in “The Aviator” as Howard Hughes, a leader more typical of a Scorsese protagonist.Miramax FilmsIn his more antiheroic roles for Scorsese, DiCaprio has played leaders like the tycoon Howard Hughes (“The Aviator”) and the stock scammer Jordan Belfort (“The Wolf of Wall Street”), rather than stooges like Ernest.“Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro with Sharon Stone) dealt with various risks in “Casino.”Universal PicturesSam Rothstein, a.k.a. Ace (Robert De Niro), the mob-associated gambling executive in “Casino,” and Jesus of Nazareth (Willem Dafoe) in “The Last Temptation of Christ” are also leaders, ones who operate under great personal physical risk at that. Their very different lives routinely present them with challenges the likes of Ernest could never surmount.Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple figuring out their position in a stratified society.Philip Caruso/Columbia PicturesThe same goes for Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) from “The Age of Innocence.” Their doomed romance forces them to navigate the societal mores of wealth and status, with no all-powerful figure like King Hale (De Niro) to back them up.De Niro as Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” He was expert with weapons, if not social cues.Sony PicturesNo one would mistake Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta, the iconic De Niro characters from “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” for geniuses, but each was brilliant in his own way at the application of violence.As a comedian, Rupert Pupkin (De Niro, with Jerry Lewis) isn’t too sharp but he has other skills.20th Century FoxUnlike Bickle or LaMotta, Rupert Pupkin, the painfully unfunny would-be comedian played by De Niro in “The King of Comedy,” is no good at all at his chosen field. However, he successfully carries out a plan to kidnap the talk-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) and ransom him for a turn in the spotlight.Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) has seen better days in “After Hours.”Warner BrosPerhaps the closest a Scorsese character gets to Ernest is Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) in the black comedy “After Hours.” Like Ernest, Paul is a man in over his head (Hackett can’t hack it). But he’s an otherwise normal and competent person having one crazy night in downtown Manhattan, not a murderer.Ernest is not an average Joe suffering a series of mishaps, like Hackett. Nor is he able to serve as a Henry Hill-esque narrator-navigator for the criminality of King Hale. He barely seems aware of what’s happening with his own small stake in the wider conspiracy, much less able to explain the entire thing to others. With even the mean success of a normal Scorsese criminal out of reach, Ernest is good for little more than relaying messages about murdering unarmed sick people — a task at which he fails as often as he succeeds — and occasionally chipping in by poisoning his own wife.Indeed, Ernest is too thick — intellectually, emotionally morally — to do much of anything but allow his hand to be forced, first by King, then by the federal agents tasked with taking him down. He never really learns, never really comes clean, never really grasps the monstrousness of what’s happening until it’s too late. He’s just not sharp enough to see it, or to allow himself to be shown. The man is a zero — the mental and moral void into which King Hale’s Osage targets and their allies disappear.The Scorsese movie we get out of him is very different as a result. A sharper character would have implied that it takes some canniness, cunning or charisma to plunder a land and its people. Instead, Ernest shows us that the bigotry and greed that fueled the genocidal campaign against the Osage are ultimately stupid, and the resulting tragedy all the sadder for it. More

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      ‘What Happens Later’ Review: Meg Ryan Revisits the Meet-Cute

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      The rom-com queen directs and stars opposite David Duchovny in this two-hander about former lovers who reconnect after 25 years.Few can compete with Meg Ryan’s rom-com résumé. As the star of three classics penned by Nora Ephron — “When Harry Met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” — she may as well be the mascot of the genre’s late 1980s and ’90s golden era. “What Happens Later,” which she both directs and stars in, is an appropriate homecoming for a seasoned pro.Ryan and her co-star, David Duchovny, portray Willa and Bill, former lovers who stumble across each other at a tiny regional airport while the two are waiting out a snowstorm. (They share the name “W. Davis,” and the identity confusion is part of what leads to their reunion meet-cute.) With their connecting flights delayed indefinitely, the exes quickly catch up on what’s happened in the 25 years since they last crossed paths. Bill has a steady job and a family in Boston; Willa is a massage therapist and chakra healer in Austin. Clashing personalities lead to petty bickering and some harsh words, but their banter confirms the chemistry is still there.“What Happens Later,” which Ryan wrote with Kirk Lynn and Steven Dietz (based on Dietz’s play “Shooting Star”), feels purposely lost in time. Its story is bottled within the liminal space of the airport — its exact location remains a mystery — which puts the focus on the two leads trying to reconcile their pasts with their present. Ryan adds a dash of magical realism, turning the airport intercom into a cheeky voice-over that responds to Willa and Bill. These fantasy elements are mostly played for laughs, but the dreaminess and isolation of the darkened airport offer an excuse for Willa and Bill to open up to each other and consider whether their reunion really was determined by fate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ Review: Smoke on the Water

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      Neil Burger’s thriller aims to capture a mother pushed to protect her family from her past.In the director Neil Burger’s harrowing yet thin thriller “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” adapted from Karen Dionne’s same-titled novel, a young Helena (Brooklynn Prince) learns how her fairy tale is actually a nightmare. She lives in a woodland cabin with her stern mother, Beth (Caren Pistorius) and her huntsman father, Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn). Jacob often brands Beth’s white skin with Indigenous inspired tattoos and instructs her how to track and hunt.When a lost wanderer on a four-wheeler comes looking for directions, however, Beth flees with Helena on the vehicle to the police, leading to Jacob’s arrest. Unbeknown to the young Helena, twelve years prior, her supposedly loving father kidnapped Beth to be his bride.As an adult, Helena (Daisy Ridley) shares a daughter with her husband, Stephen (Garrett Hedlund). But Stephen is clueless to Helena’s past. That changes when Jacob escapes from prison. Helena opts to hunt Jacob before he steals her daughter (Joey Carson).This is a film superficially about trauma. Rather than mining the emotional and psychological complexities of Helena’s devastation, potentially ripe subjects, Burger hastily pushes ill-fitting thriller tropes onto a character study frame.While Mendelsohn is often adept at portraying villains, his potential to deliver menace is restricted by a one-note script. Putrid hues of greenish-yellow lighting, meant to signify jumps into the past, also underwhelm the suspense. Still, a game Ridley, along with a brief cameo by a soulful Gil Birmingham, provides the necessary stakes for Burger’s film not to idle in narrative mud.The Marsh King’s DaughterRated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Subject’ Review: A Question of Ethics

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      Filmmaking principles come under scrutiny in “Subject,” a documentary about the making of documentaries.Many of the most compelling documentaries of the past several years, from Nathan Fielder’s HBO mini-series “The Rehearsal” to Kirsten Johnson’s self-reflexive feature “Cameraperson,” actively engage with the ethics of documentary filmmaking, posing difficult questions about participation, consent and the responsibility of the artist to the subjects of their art. These projects differ from “Subject,” Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s film about documentary ethics, in that their questions are posed by the filmmaking itself, threaded artfully into the documentary form. “Subject” just speaks the questions out loud, turning them into reductive fodder for talking heads.Tiexiera and Hall have assembled a kind of “Avengers” of nonfiction cinema here, as the participants in several high-profile docs reflect on the process of having had their lives laid bare on film. Their experiences range from a kind of wistful pride (Arthur Agee, of “Hoop Dreams,” looks back on the memory fondly) to clearly painful disillusionment (Margaret Ratliff, of “The Staircase,” makes a persuasive case that the movie practically ruined her life), and their testimony usually underscores a broader dilemma around the principles of storytelling and the nature of truth. Producers and critics are also on hand to expound on these topics in a cursory, surface-level way.“Subject” is at its clearest when interrogating the material conditions of documentary filmmaking, as during a segment about whether the subjects of nonfiction films have the right to be paid for their participation; it feels slipperier when glossing issues of diversity and representation, using buzzy phrases like “decolonize documentaries” in place of intellectual heavy lifting. And at no point do Tiexiera or Hall deal with their own complicity in any of this: They are, after all, making a documentary, and we get no sense of how they might answer the questions they pose to other documentarians. Perhaps we need another documentary to explore the making of this one.SubjectNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Quiz Lady’ Review: Dog in Jeopardy

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      Sandra Oh shines in this road trip buddy comedy about a pair of sisters getting on a TV quiz show to pay the ransom for their stolen dog.Jenny (Sandra Oh), a 40-something ball of chaos, is introduced in “Quiz Lady” the way you might expect of someone whose life savings are contingent on a hazardous fish bone-related lawsuit against a chain restaurant called Choochie’s: off in the distance, skittering heedlessly across the street before she’s suddenly struck by a car. Naturally, she pops right back up before having a meltdown over the mechanical entrance to the senior home where her younger sister, Anne (Awkwafina), is frustratingly watching from inside.It’s often said that comedic roles are deceptively trickier to play than dramatic ones, and Jenny is the type of character that would seem rife with potential pitfalls for an actor like Oh: an over-the-top eccentric whose humor can easily fall into caricature. Yet, “Quiz Lady,” a mostly winning comedy directed by Jessica Yu, is elevated most of all on the shoulders of Oh’s delightful and nuanced performance.When Jenny shows up at the senior home, Anne is already fed up. Their mother has run off to Macau to escape an $80,000 debt she owes Ken (Jon Park), a doggy daycare-owning gangster, and Anne naturally will be the one to take care of things. It’s the way things have been ever since Jenny, who has always lived a more free-spirited, if erratic and unstable, life, exited from their lives and left Anne to take care of their mother.Isolated and working as an office drone, Anne’s only form of solace is a Jeopardy-esque quiz show she’s watched religiously since childhood. When Ken steals Anne’s dog as collateral, Jenny, feeling the surge of her latest pipe dream of becoming a life coach, kidnaps Anne and drives her to an audition for the show in the hopes she’ll win the money to pay off the debt.Like so many road trip buddy comedies, the effectiveness of the enterprise rests, arguably more than the writing or direction itself, on the balance and chemistry between the central duo. And “Quiz Lady” in particular is predicated upon a role-reversing gamble: Typically a dramatic actress, Oh is playing the freewheeling Jenny, while her co-star, Awkwafina, who aside from her role in “The Farewell” has mostly made her name as the often cartoonish comic relief (“Crazy Rich Asians,” “The Little Mermaid”), is the serious and high-strung Anne.But the pair finds an easy harmony together, even as Oh does most of the heavy lifting. While Awkwafina’s little-sister turn often falls into uptight, one-note outbursts, Oh is a charismatic and natural counterbalance as the outsize Jenny. She knows when to reel her choices in and, most important, imbues Jenny’s kookiness with an emotional depth bubbling just underneath the surface.The funniest scene comes toward the end, when Jenny and Anne play a high-stakes game of charades on the quiz show. As they hit their stride, the sequence, punctuated by a strikingly tender moment that would have rung forced in lesser hands, floats off the comedic brilliance of Oh, at once natural and ridiculous, as her answers burst out of her via an intuition that could only exist through a lifetime of sisterhood.Quiz LadyRated R for some drug use and language. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Nyad’ Review: Neptune’s (Estranged) Daughter

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      Annette Bening plays the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad as a woman who doesn’t pity herself. Neither does the film.“Nyad” is about an athlete creating her own lore. Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) is proud that her last name stems from the naiads of Greek mythology. “My ancestors! The nymphs that swam in the lakes and the rivers and the ocean,” Diana trumpets to everyone in earshot. A record-breaking long-distance swimmer, she’s got the lung capacity of a real blowhard. Her ever-patient best friend, Bonnie (Jodie Foster), spends this exuberant and enervating biopic cutting Diana off mid-crow. Braggadocio takes you far in politics or business; jocks, however, have to prove it in sweat. And so, at 60, Diana vows to conquer the challenge that bested her at age 28. She’ll swim nonstop from Cuba to Florida — over two days of sharks, storms, stinging jellyfish and hallucinatory exhaustion. For most of this riveting crowd-pleaser, she fails.“I’m either a stubborn fool,” the real Diana Nyad wrote in “Find a Way,” her 2015 memoir, “or I’m a valiant warrior.” The film, in its first minutes, prefers the latter, opening with a rat-a-tat montage of her many successes: author, linguist, Phi Beta Kappa scholar. I groaned. Please, not an inspirational advertorial about women and aging and grit — the artificial saccharine Diana had to use to peddle her story to corporations who might sponsor her repeated attempts.To my relief, the directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, working with the screenwriter Julia Cox, trace Diana’s mythic roots not just to the naiads, but to zealots like Captain Ahab. Vasarhelyi and Chin specialize in documentaries (“Free Solo, “Meru”) about extreme outdoorsmen whose feats require a misery threshold, and a self-centered monomania, that few can understand. Chin, a mountaineer himself, gets that mind-set — and Vasarhelyi, his longtime filmmaking partner and wife, also knows the strain these adventurers put on the loved ones providing emotional support. Cheerleading can tip over into feeling complicit in their potential death.Bening, who has a convincing sidestroke, shows us a woman willing to endure Hell. I’ve never seen a performance with this little vanity in service of a character drowning in her own ego. “Everyone should have a superiority complex,” Diana says, but the line comes at a point in the film where her superiority looks a lot like martyrdom. We’ve already witnessed her skin blistered by sunburn, her eyes and lips swollen into monstrous bulges, her face and neck lashed with tentacle burns, and her body, coiled on the floor, vomiting — or worse, still in the surf, but so weak and semiconscious and sleep-deprived that she’s paddling in place, suffering agonies without an inch of progress. Hubris keeps her afloat. But it also forces her to jump back into the water.Diana doesn’t pity herself, so neither does the film. Instead, the audience’s empathy is rerouted to Diana’s support team, particularly her weary navigator, John (Rhys Ifans), forever crouched over a map of sea currents, and the film’s second lead, Bonnie, her head coach who is, in essence, a temperature-controlled Jacuzzi overlooking Hurricane Diana. A former racquetball champion and, briefly, Diana’s ex, Bonnie has long since forgiven her friend’s flaws. Their scenes together capture decades of camaraderie in effortless shorthand. Though this is Vasarhelyi and Chin’s first narrative feature, they’re good with actors — although, in fairness, casting Bening and Foster (and their four Oscar nominations each) is like arriving at the poker table with a pair of aces. You get everything about the pair in an early scene when Bonnie throws her best pal the surprise birthday party that she swears she doesn’t want (but, of course, does) only to be ratted out at the door when Diana squints, “Did you blow-dry your hair?”The film switches tones choppily. There’s a scene where a character coughs once and immediately announces that they’re terminally ill. When the swimming is rough, the editing froths into a horror movie with Diana haunted by visions of her sexually abusive childhood coach, Jack Nelson (Eric T. Miller); later, in a halcyon stretch, the film becomes a semi-animated phantasmagoria with Diana posing under the waves like Esther Williams above an imaginary Taj Mahal, colorful fish swirling about her ankles. Diana wants our respect — and by the end of the movie, she’s earned it. While she’s one of the prickliest protagonists you’ll see this year, she’s so raw and earnest and apologetically herself that you adore her anyway — from the safe distance of the screen. But weep for her neighbors, who she wakes up every day at dawn with a bugle blast of “Reveille.”NyadRated PG-13 for salty language and references to childhood sexual abuse. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ Review: 50 Years of Off-Kilter Rock

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      Toby Amies’s documentary dives into the history of the British progressive rock band King Crimson and its chief disciplinarian, Robert Fripp.The director Toby Amies’s documentary “In the Court of the Crimson King” is part road chronicle and part retrospective, and captures King Crimson, the adventurous British rock ensemble, at what may be the end of its existence. Robert Fripp, for years the band’s sole original member, has strongly suggested that its 2021 tour would be its last. (It hasn’t toured since.)One of the originators of the subgenre called progressive rock or art rock, King Crimson is, depending on whom you ask, either impossibly pretentious or startlingly adventurous. Fripp, an endlessly thoughtful and meticulously articulate guitarist, is the group’s most tireless and paradoxical explainer in the film. He’s fond of pronouncements like, “For silence to become audible, it requires a vehicle. And that vehicle is music.”At one point Fripp describes his experience in the band from 1969 to 2016 as “wretched.” What changed in 2016? He put together a group of stellar musicians who did as he requested. The film features their thoughts along with interviews with past members who had strong differences with Fripp.While the YouTube videos Fripp and his wife, the singer Toyah Willcox, began making during the pandemic reveal the guitarist as a mild-mannered, eccentric, uxorious madcap, he can come off like an egghead martinet in the context of the band he has helmed for half a century. But he is as hard on himself as he is on anyone else, practicing the guitar four to five hours a day and subjecting himself to other forms of discipline such as taking a cold shower in the morning: “Your body doesn’t want to go under a cold shower,” he says in the film. “So you’re saying to your body, ‘Do as you’re told.’”Bill Rieflin offers another perspective on the band, as a musician who chose to spend his last years alive touring with Crimson. He died of cancer in 2020. His devotion renders Fripp’s adages about the sacred nature of music-making palpable.In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sly’ Review: No More Mr. Tough Guy

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      This documentary from Thom Zimny tracks Sylvester Stallone’s life and career, though focuses too much on “Rocky” and “Rambo.”“An actor is what he looks like,” Sylvester Stallone told The New York Times in 1976, and more than most stars, Stallone has been viewed as an action figure come to life. In “Sly,” the director Thom Zimny excavates the acts of self-creation behind a career that minted two indelible titular characters in “Rocky” and “Rambo” — whose underdog narratives proved highly influential.“Sly” kicks off with Stallone, now 77, lamenting how life whizzes by, followed by a montage set to Gang of Four’s sizzling “To Hell with Poverty.” Made in collaboration with Stallone’s production company, Balboa Productions, the film doesn’t go on to become an exposé. But it does dwell on his being the son of a violently abusive father, growing up in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan before a series of moves.His resulting desire for approval is par for the course among star biographies, but that hurt and his father’s vicious jealousy become the most poignant aspects in the film’s increasingly predictable path. Stymied in the 1970s by stereotypes about his looks and voice, Stallone essentially became his own hero by writing screenplays, soon manifesting success when “Rocky” (1976), which he wrote, won the best picture Oscar over “Taxi Driver,” “All the President’s Men,” “Network” and “Bound for Glory.”What ensues in this documentary is largely a pop-psychologized tour through the “Rambo” and “Rocky” sequels, with the odd outlier. Quentin Tarantino, a Stallone superfan; Frank Stallone, Sylvester’s brother; Talia Shire (Adrian herself); and Wesley Morris, a Times culture critic, offer commentary — with Arnold Schwarzenegger (who also recently got the Netflix documentary treatment) playing hype man.But Stallone’s flair for words — and his references to Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” and the 1968 dynastic drama “The Lion in Winter” — make one wish he’d talked about much more than his greatest hits and misses.SlyRated R for tough talk. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More