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      ‘I Used to Be Funny’ Review: Bruising Punchlines

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      The film, which stars Rachel Sennott as a stand-up comedian, looks at the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield.The perceptive dramedy “I Used to Be Funny” features a mic-drop performance by Rachel Sennott as a rising stand-up comedian derailed by a vague, internet-viral crime. What happened to Sam (Sennott) is no laughing matter. But she and her fellow comics crack oblique jokes about it, anyway. Making her first feature, the writer-director Ally Pankiw lets most zingers land. Comedy is just how these strivers communicate — it’s how they break awkwardness, bond, fight, forgive and heal.Pankiw warms up the audience with Sam’s roommates Paige and Philip (Sabrina Jalees and Caleb Hearon, both terrific) poking fun at a 14-year-old runaway, Brooke (Olga Petsa), last seen smashing in their front door. “She’s probably loving the missing person posters,” Paige drolls. “They used a selfie, she looks great.”Before she was a recluse, Sam was the lost girl’s nanny. The film is peppered with happier flashbacks to when Sam and Brooke were best pals, a team-up that annoyed Brooke’s humorless dad (Jason Jones). We track time through the perkiness of Sam’s posture and ponytail. Depression films can be a drag. Fortunately, Sennott is entertaining even as a mope.The script takes an annoyingly long time revealing what went wrong (and then rushes the resolution). Pankiw is more focused on the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield. A former stand-up herself, Sennott holds a stage with command. Off-duty, unshowered and unable to move on, Sam is self-aware enough to know that she is exhausting her friends — and the film keeps tabs on how often she and her gang must claim they’re just kidding around.I Used to Be FunnyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Francis Ford Coppola: ‘You Can’t Be an Artist and Be Safe’

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      The filmmaker talks about the inspirations for the characters in “Megalopolis” and “The Godfather,” and responds to recent allegations.The first time that Francis Ford Coppola had a movie in competition at the Cannes Film Festival was in 1967. He was 28 and the movie was “You’re a Big Boy Now,” a neo-screwball studio comedy about a young guy trying to cut loose from his parents. Coppola made it while he was in film school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and it became his master’s thesis project. A month after the festival, he began directing his first big-budget studio film, “Finian’s Rainbow.” It flopped. He then poured some of his savings into a low-budget studio movie, “The Rain People.” It flopped. The next film he directed was “The Godfather.”Coppola, now 85, was back again at Cannes last month with the epic fantasy “Megalopolis,” a big-screen dream that he has nurtured for more than 40 years. It’s his first movie since “Twixt” (2011), a little-seen horror tale about a genre novelist who says he wants to make something personal. It’s a plaintive refrain that Coppola has voiced repeatedly throughout his career. However celebrated he remains for the studio films that he has directed, Coppola is and has always been an unequivocally personal filmmaker, one whose love for the art of film has recurrently put him at odds with the industry and its media mouthpieces.Given Coppola’s history of independence and specifically his record of great financial risks (as with “Apocalypse Now”) and sometimes staggering losses (“One From the Heart”), it was no surprise that much of the initial chatter about “Megalopolis” wasn’t about the movie per se or the sprawling ensemble headed by Adam Driver. Rather, much of the pre-festival talk was about how Coppola had helped bankroll it with “$120 million of his own money,” a phrase that was reflexively repeated in news reports. Even at Cannes, where the word “art” is used without embarrassment, money keeps an iron grip on both minds and movies.By the time the festival opened on May 14, though, the talk about “Megalopolis” had changed course dramatically. That day, The Guardian published a long article on it. Much of the story was based on anonymous sources and was dedicated to gripes from crew members about Coppola’s methods — “‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’” the headline read — echoing complaints that have dogged the filmmaker throughout his career. More alarming were the allegations that Coppola had tried to kiss female extras during production. In response, one of the executive producers, Darren Demetre, said he “was never aware of any complaints of harassment or ill behavior during the course of the project.”Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in “Megalopolis.”American Zoetrope/Mihai Malaimare Jr.A FEW DAYS AFTER “Megalopolis” had its premiere at Cannes, I walked under a canopy of clouds to a ship docked near the festival’s headquarters, to speak with Coppola. The yacht belonged to an Italian-Tunisian distributor and Coppola was, as he put it, “mooching” as assorted relatives, friends, colleagues and support staff buzzed around him. He looked tired, and while that’s normal for many attendees at the world’s largest film festival, it was hard not to think that grief had taken its toll, too. On April 12, Eleanor Coppola, his wife of more than six decades, died. On May 18, his longtime collaborator Fred Roos — a producer on numerous Coppola family films, “Megalopolis” included — also died.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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      ‘Tuesday’ Review: Expiration Point

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      Julia Louis-Dreyfus journeys from denial to acceptance in this imaginative fantasy-drama about grief and motherhood.Before a word of dialogue is spoken in “Tuesday,” a series of magical images introduce Death in the form of a greasy-looking bird as it visits the dying. The beast’s head clamors with their suffering, their terror and bargaining, the sick and the simply worn out. Young and old, human and animal, they call to him before breathing their last beneath the shadow of his gently raised wing.In this fantastical first feature from the Croatian filmmaker Daina O. Pusic, striking special effects and a richly textured sound design lend a cosmic chill to a simple story of maternal grief. The mother in question is Zora (a very fine Julia Louis-Dreyfus), so deep in denial about her daughter Tuesday’s terminal illness that she can’t handle being alone with her. Creeping out of the house each morning, pretending to go to work, Zora wanders from coffee shop to park bench, ignoring Tuesday’s calls.Yet Tuesday (beautifully played by Lola Petticrew) understands. Unable to walk and struggling to breathe, she’s a bright teenager who seems ready when Death appears. Out of sight of her pragmatic nurse (Leah Harvey), Tuesday bonds with Death, requesting time to prepare her mother, and these scenes have a lightness that prevents the film from becoming an extended moan of unrelieved sadness. Like many of us, Death, it turns out, enjoys a joke and the music of Ice Cube. It seems fitting that his taste is vintage.As voiced, quite wonderfully, by Arinzé Kene, the bird — not the expected raven, but a macaw — is a digital star that the human actors must constantly negotiate with for visual and narrative space. Swelling and shrinking in size, he switches in an instant from cute to monstrous, amusing to terrifying, the voices in his head briefly silenced as he confesses that he hasn’t spoken in 200 years.“I am filthy,” he growls, coughing up words like hairballs and flapping his blackened wings, as if the darkness of his mission has stained his once-bright feathers with the dirt of the grave. Yet while Tuesday seems perfectly at ease with her grim visitor, Zora responds with an increasingly hysterical campaign to — literally — swallow her greatest fear.Without much to distract from the three central characters, “Tuesday” can feel overlong and a little claustrophobic. Yet this compassionate fairy tale works because the actors are so in sync and the imagery — as in one shot of the bird curled like an apostrophe in a dead woman’s tear duct — is often magical. Alexis Zabé’s cinematography is both intimate and expansive, reaching beyond the characters’ emotional struggles to show the apocalyptic consequences if Death should be vanquished. The sum is a highly imaginative picture that, while considering one family’s pain, also asks us to ponder the possibility that a life without end means nothing less than a world without a future.TuesdayRated R for pejorative language. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Am I OK?’ Review: When It’s Time to Grow Up

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      Dakota Johnson stars in an expansive friendship comedy about coming out in your 30s and finding yourself.The appeal of the late bloomer movie is rooted in its parent genre: the coming-of-age story. Our heroine begins a little naïve and learns some hard but good lessons, maybe falls in love. Sometimes a mentor provides wisdom before leaving her to stand on her own two feet. In a traditional coming-of-age story, the protagonist is usually very young, so that world is full of possibility. Anything could happen next.But with a late bloomer, the world’s possibilities have been shut down a little, and that shifts the tone. Decisions about career, friendships and family have already been made; the stakes of change are higher. That means a late bloomer story could be a comedy, or it could feel more melancholy, even like a tragedy. There’s an inherent realism in a film like “All of Us Strangers” or “Her” or “20th Century Women” that’s bracing and invigorating.Depending on your age, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who is 32, may not feel old enough to be termed a late bloomer. But she certainly feels like she is. The protagonist of “Am I OK?” has settled into a quiet, unchallenging Los Angeles life. She’s the kind of person who stares at a diner menu full of options and then orders the same meal — veggie burger, sweet potato fries, black iced coffee — every time. She spends most of her free time with Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), her childhood best friend, and keeps her life ripple-free. She’s never been in love. At the end of dinners with Ben (Whitmer Thomas), the guy she’s ostensibly dating, she shakes his hand.By her own admission, Lucy is nervous all the time, “scared of everything.” Worse, she says, she’s not sure if she’s ever been happy, or what even makes her happy. She has built herself a comfortable box to live in, as long as nothing changes.Her box is about to cave in. One day, Jane announces that she’s moving to London for work, and Lucy suddenly feels unmoored. A feeling that’s been growing inside her is now too strong to ignore: Lucy knows she’s attracted to women. And she’s especially attracted to Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), the peppy new masseuse at the spa where she works as a receptionist.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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      Diane von Furstenberg, a Fashion Lioness in Winter

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      Diane von Furstenberg’s friends like to tease that, had she been on the cinematic Titanic, she would have found a way to hoist up Jack from the freezing water and onto that wooden door. Three days later, Jack in tow, she would have sashayed into a soignée New York dinner party wearing that 56-carat blue diamond necklace.The woman has a strong will.I realized that the first time I met her in 1975, when I was a cub reporter at The Washington Star. At 28, Ms. von Furstenberg was already a sensation with the phenomenally successful $86 wrap dress; she had conjured it after seeing Julie Nixon Eisenhower on TV defending her father during Watergate, wearing a DVF wrap top and skirt.The tycooness, on a visit to D.C. to promote her brand, was in a rush to get to the airport and asked if I could come down to her car for the interview.I felt like I was climbing into a cage with a panther. I got into the back of a black limo and there she was in a dark mink coat, her long dark hair with a henna sheen spilling over her shoulders, her legs sheathed in black fishnets. She was nibbling from a box of dark chocolates on her lap. In her sultry Belgian accent, she offered me one. Her voice, as her late friend, Vogue’s André Leon Talley, said, “wraps itself around you like a cozy, warm cashmere muffler.”That half-hour in her limo was a revelation. In an era when we were instructed by male “experts” to dress and act like men to get ahead, Ms. von Furstenberg insisted on living a man’s life in a woman’s body. Her message was bracing: Meet men as equals but don’t imitate them. Ambition and stilettos can coexist.I immediately tossed out all my hideous dress-for-success floppy ties.I caught up with Ms. von Furstenberg recently to talk about a new Hulu documentary, “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge,” on her vertiginous, glamorous life, a life darkened by the Holocaust, AIDS, her bout with tongue cancer and her periodic business woes.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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      With ‘The Watchers’ and ‘Trap,’ the Shyamalan Family Scares Together

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      Saleka and Ishana Night Shyamalan are collaborating with their father, M. Night Shyamalan, on the thrillers “The Watchers” and “Trap.” The release dates are a happy coincidence.The Shyamalan family is very close. How close? During a video interview with the sisters Saleka, 27, and Ishana Night Shyamalan, 24, their dad, the “Sixth Sense” director M. Night Shyamalan, called Ishana on the phone. The sound interrupted Ishana speaking about the differences between her and her father’s filmmaking process.“I’m like, you know we’re on this call right now,” she said with a laugh, ignoring the ring.Given this familial bond, it makes sense that the Shyamalan siblings are both on the cusp of major career moments this summer made in collaboration with their father. Ishana’s feature directing debut “The Watchers,” with Night as one of the producers, releases June 7, while Saleka, a musician, portrays a pop star in and wrote original songs for Night’s latest, “Trap,” due Aug. 9. The fact that both projects are emerging around the same time is coincidental, Ishana and Saleka said, but they are happy to share in the celebration.“I feel like in some ways we’ve always done that, since we were growing up, experience things together,” Saleka said. “So it feels right even though it was unplanned.”Dakota Fanning, who stars in “The Watchers,” with Ishana on set.Jonathan Hession/Warner Bros.In an era where discourse over nepotism in Hollywood runs hot, the Shyamalans wear their name proudly. (Their mom, Bhavna Shyamalan, is the owner of a fitness studio and the vice president of the M. Night Shyamalan Foundation.) Fans noticed that there was a poster for “The Watchers” in the “Trap” trailer. The sisters did acknowledge the advantages that come with their lineage, but they have tried to make up for that with discipline. “It’s really about meeting that privilege and honoring that with as hard a work ethic as we can, by being as kind people as we can and holding ourselves to the highest standard possible,” Ishana said.But no matter what they chose as professions, Saleka said, their dad was probably going to be nearby. “He’s just a super involved parent,” she 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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      At the Tribeca Festival, Vision and Vibe

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      The festival favors abundance, which can make it easy for cinema fans (and critics) to miss the loveliest trees for the sheer breadth of forest.Early in the animated film “Boys Go to Jupiter,” premiering at this year’s Tribeca Festival, an indie electronic beat kicks in. Like a music video rendered on Kid Pix, the sequence that follows finds the mulleted Rozebud (voiced by the singer Miya Folick) tending to neon citrus trees while crooning a melody as catchy as it is ethereal. The film, from the artist Julian Glander, belongs to a subset of Tribeca movies that use music in startling and adventurous ways. Their soundscapes conjure vision and feeling, as well as that ineffable thing sometimes called vibe.Running from Wednesday through June 16, the Tribeca Festival — it dropped “film” from its name in 2021 — is big on vibe, for better and for worse. This is an event that embraces virtual reality, artificial intelligence and immersive installations, that pairs its screenings with concerts and its concerts with visuals, that touts buzzword-friendly panels about brands, innovation or brand innovation. Spilling across downtown Manhattan and a little into Williamsburg, Tribeca favors multimedia abundance, which can make it easy for cinema fans (and critics) to miss the loveliest trees for the sheer breadth of forest.My favorite Tribeca selection also ranks in my top films of the year so far: Nathan Silver’s fidgety and finely tuned “Between the Temples,” a sensational Jewish love comedy about a dispirited cantor (Jason Schwartzman) and his adult bat mitzvah student (Carol Kane). I caught it at Sundance, and feel a sacred duty to spread the word. But I primarily dedicate my Tribeca time to sampling world premieres — movies that haven’t played at other festivals and need a nudge to break out.A scene from “Boys Go to Jupiter,” directed by Julian Glander.Julian GlanderIn my hunt for gems, I often have luck in the Viewpoints section, designed to house films that push the boundaries of form and perspective. It was there that I made contact with the otherworldly “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a memorable standout, and not only because of Rozebud’s earworm. Following a cast of slackers and crackpots in suburban Florida, the video game-like musical comedy marries gummy 3-D graphics and stoned-guy humor with sly commentary on hustle culture and the gig economy. The ensemble of avatars is voiced by a corps d’elite of quirky comedians like Cole Escola and Julio Torres.Glander’s film would pair nicely with “Eternal Playground,” a Parisian drama that follows Gaspard (Andranic Manet), a middle school music teacher. Shot in sumptuous 16 mm, this labor of love from the filmmakers Pablo Cotten and Joseph Rozé opens just before the bell rings for summer break, although Gaspard won’t be leaving the premises: He and five childhood pals have resolved to secretly camp out in the vacant school while classes are out for summer. A French New Wave-inflected love letter to the schoolyard, “Eternal Playground” accompanies the crew as they sing, romp, reminisce and memorialize a late friend.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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      ‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’ Review: Older, but Never Wiser

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      In their latest buddy cop movie, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are still speeding through Miami. The franchise has rarely felt so assured, relaxed and knowingly funny.Two years after Will Smith slapped the comedian Chris Rock on the Academy Awards stage, it feels bizarre that he needs a franchise called “Bad Boys” to rekindle his star power. Smith and his co-star, Martin Lawrence, are two producers of “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the stylishly chaotic lark by the directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, suggesting outsize roles as star-auteurs and the importance for this installment to be a hit. In their hands, “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” throws everything at the wall, and much of it sticks.Though the third “Bad Boys” installment was released in early 2020, a few months before the George Floyd murder spurred Black Lives Matter protests, that film could be seen in some ways as apologizing for its Michael Bay past and its “copaganda” roots. But this is something else — a silly buddy comedy that opens poignantly with the wedding of Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Christine (Melanie Liburd). There, Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) has a heart attack, a near-death experience that soon makes him feel invincible; Lowrey, however, is rendered vulnerable by debilitating panic attacks. It’s clear that these two hypermasculine men, still speeding through Miami in fast, slick cars, are aging.Their friend Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) has been framed — after his death — in a cartel’s money laundering scheme, by corrupt government officials and the brooding mercenary James McGrath (Eric Dane). Lowrey and Burnett work to clear Captain Howard’s name, and in the process this film somehow becomes a prison-break movie, involving Lowrey’s incarcerated son, Armando (Jacob Scipio), and a revenge subplot involving Howard’s daughter Judy (Rhea Seehorn). Along the way there are nods to fan favorites, a cameo by Tiffany Haddish, and Miami gangsters hunting a wanted Lowrey and Burnett.The lurid lighting and grandiose filmmaking mirror the extravagant plotting. A frantic shootout in a club is viciously edited. In other major set pieces, the camera, sometimes taking a first-person-shooter perspective, zips, darts and spins past falling bodies toward Smith and Lawrence, who banter playfully. 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