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      ‘An Unfinished Film’ Review: When Reality Interrupts Art

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      A drama full of unconventional touches recalls a time when all we had were our screens.It’s a little hard to get a grasp on what “An Unfinished Film” is at first. This semifictional drama opens with a film crew booting up a 10-year-old computer, hoping their footage will still be there. And after a little finagling, the screen springs to life. Director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui) watches, rapt, as a younger version of himself appears onscreen.This is a film he tried to make 10 years ago, but abandoned for reasons that start to become clear as he explains the plot to others. Director Xiaorui watches as his aborted film’s star, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), appears onscreen as well, and starts to get some ideas. Jiang is now a big movie star, married and with a baby on the way, but when the director calls and asks him if they might try to finish the film, he’s intrigued. Why not?This is a straightforward enough start to a movie, but it’s all a little meta. For instance, Mao, the actor who plays the director, has served as assistant director to Lou Ye, the actual director of “An Unfinished Film.” And Qin, who plays Jiang Cheng, is another frequent Lou collaborator. The footage that they’re watching is in fact outtakes and B-roll from others of Lou’s films, including “Suzhou River,” “Mystery,” “Spring Fever” and “The Shadow Play.” And Lou has some experience with filmmaking stops and starts; his movies have repeatedly been banned in China for running afoul of censors, and he has been put under several-year prohibitions from filmmaking several times as well — dictates he has at times ignored.So this feels personal for Lou, and it keeps getting more personal, in ways that global audiences will easily understand. Director Xiaorui, Jiang and the crew decide to shoot the rest of the film just before the Chinese New Year — but it’s January 2020, and they’re shooting in a hotel located near Wuhan. News of a virus spreads. By the time they decide to shut down production and head to their homes to wait it out, it’s too late. After some confusion and panic that feels ripped straight from zombie films, things become eerily quiet. Everyone must quarantine, alone, in their rooms. They don’t know when they’ll get out.Now reality narrows down to what they can see on their phones and computer screens, including for Jiang, whose wife, Sang Qi (Qi Xi), is increasingly panicked about Jiang ever making it home. Alone in his room, trying to retain his sanity, he watches the world coping with quarantine, observing videos of people dancing and recording his own videos for his child.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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      ‘Black Bag’ Review: Blanchett v. Fassbender

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      The actors play a glamorous couple of spies in this latest sleek collaboration from the director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp.“Black Bag” is the third movie written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh that’s been released since 2022, and it’s a banger. It’s also sleek, witty and lean to the bone, a fizzy, engaging puzzler about beautiful spies doing the sort of extraordinary things that the rest of us only read about in novels and — if we’re lucky — watch onscreen. It’s nonsense, but the kind of glorious grown-up nonsense that critics like to say they (as in Hollywood) no longer make. That’s true to a great extent despite exceptions like Koepp and Soderbergh, even if they’re too playfully unorthodox to be prototypically Hollywood.The filmmakers’ latest duet stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as Kathryn and George. Cozily and happily married, the couple lives in austere luxury in a townhouse in London, where they keep long, eventful hours working for a British intelligence agency, the (real) Government Communications Headquarters. As spies go, the two certainly look and speak their roles, or at least the fictional versions of them: They’re cunning, suave and as enigmatic as the title suggests. Unlike their famed counterpart James Bond (he’s at MI6), though, they put in serious face time at the office. Inside a glass tower, they watch and are watched in turn, tracking enemies and sometimes eliminating them.The setup involves an explosively dangerous threat in the form of malware called Severus, presumably named after the despotic Roman emperor. There appears to be a mole in the agency, and George is among a select few trying to identify the culprit. He has a list of five possible candidates, all of whom work in the agency’s power ranks. Among the suspects is — ta-da! — Kathryn. Because this isn’t a problem that George can take to a marriage counselor — even if one of the main characters is an agency shrink — he does what he’s trained to do: He spies on her. It gets tricky. It also gets funny and predictably violent, with some of the sharpest, nastiest scenes unfolding across a family dining-room table.Koepp and Soderbergh are virtuosos of genre, and “Black Bag” is right in their wheelhouse. Each has made a range of films (Koepp also directs), and they last collaborated on the ghost story “Presence,” which came out earlier this year. If the two excel at thrillers, it’s partly because, I imagine, high-stakes intrigues give filmmakers room to push norms to extremes and even ditch them. Koepp and Soderbergh’s “KIMI” (2022) is another tight genre piece that embraces and detonates conventions. Its myriad influences include films about trapped women as well as claustrophobic paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like “The Conversation” and “Three Days of the Condor,” reference points that also inform “Black Bag.”To judge from George’s chic glasses and turtlenecks, the filmmakers revisited some older Michael Caine movies, too. Fassbender doesn’t have Caine’s charms, and he’s less persuasive as a romantic foil. “Black Bag” has its share of intentionally outlandish moments, some giddily funny (there are more ticklish moments than thrills), but among the less convincing plot points is George and Kathryn’s oft-stated devotion to each other. Onscreen, Fassbender and especially Blanchett have an otherworldly quality that makes them reliably interesting to watch, but it’s one that can feel like a membrane separating them from more ordinary souls. They both draw you to them, but, unlike, say, Brad Pitt, they don’t necessarily invite you in.Whether these nagging doubts about George and Kathryn’s relationship are intentional, they work in a movie that teases you with secrets and weapons, border-crossing and misdirection, and is filled out with a note-perfect supporting cast that includes Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke and Marisa Abela. Even as the story heats up and starts to get crowded, George remains the intrigue’s central question mark. He prowls into the movie like Henry Hill strolling into the nightclub in the famously long take in “Goodfellas,” a scene that slyly suggests that George isn’t to be trusted. He may be hot for Kathryn, but there’s something “bloodless and inhuman” about him, too, as Le Carré wrote of his famous spy, George Smiley.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 Parenting’ Review: Meet the Poltergeist

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      A family getaway turns ghastly when a demon is awakened in this juvenile, meanspirited horror-comedy.“The Parenting,” a raunchy, gross-out horror-comedy directed by Craig Johnson, has plenty of toilet humor and gay jokes stuffed into its tedious running time, few of them clever or funny. Its best bit is in the setup: After a family is killed at home in the early 1980s, the house sits empty until the present day, when it is converted into an Airbnb that the young couple Josh (Brandon Flynn) and Rohan (Nik Dodani) rent for a weekend getaway. “This place is a mansion,” Rohan enthuses, about what in the ’80s was an ordinary suburban household. The punchline is that in this economy, no one can afford to buy even a haunted house anymore. Yes, there’s a 400-year-old poltergeist terrorizing inhabitants. But it would sure beat renting.The boys have secured this spacious if malevolent abode as an occasion to introduce each other to their parents, who are played by television royalty: Lisa Kudrow, Dean Norris, Edie Falco and Brian Cox. Some early water-and-oil mingling feels like a tepid riff on “Meet the Parents,” but when the demonic intrigue ramps up, the tone shifts to full-blown slapstick lunacy, with heads spinning “Exorcist”-style, family members projectile vomiting, and in a meanspirited fashion, more than one Pomeranian getting brutally butchered. The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”The ParentingRated R Rated R for crude humor, strong language, violence and some mild drug use. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘The Actor’ Review: No Direction Home

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      André Holland plays an actor with amnesia in this wonderfully surreal and poignant mystery.As a teenager, I had a recurring dream of visiting my grandmother, only to find her gone, and everything — her street, her rowhouse — looking just a little bit off. Confused, I would sit down on her front step and think, “This is just a dream. I’ll sit here until I wake up.”That sense of being trapped in a dimension partway between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the strange, is the disorienting force of Duke Johnson’s “The Actor.” Adapting the Donald E. Westlake novel, “Memory” — written in the 1960s and published posthumously in 2010 — Johnson and Stephen Cooney have shaped an unsettling, sorrowful journey from damage to a kind of deliverance. However, the man taking that journey, a theater actor named Paul Cole (André Holland), might disagree.A “Twilight Zone”-style voice-over sets a spooky tone and underscores the movie’s committed theatricality. After being caught in flagrante by a furious husband, Paul lands in the hospital with a head injury and without the ability to remember. Stranded in small-town Ohio in the 1950s, knowing only that he has an apartment in New York City, Paul finds a job in a local tannery, a room in a boardinghouse and begins to save for a bus ticket home. Before he can do that, he meets the lovely Edna (a wonderful Gemma Chan) and begins to fall in love — if that’s even possible when your meetings can vanish like missing frames on a roll of film.The notion of life being edited without your knowledge or consent lends “The Actor” a sadness and surreality that the cinematographer, Joe Passarelli, takes to heart. His smudged, smoky images cast a veil of nostalgia over Paul’s plight as he returns to Manhattan and learns from friends that he may not have been a very nice person. Yet, if you can’t remember, does it matter? Do you cobble together a self from others’ memories of you, or do you ditch the past and start over?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 ‘Él,’ Buñuel Turns His Gaze to Male Pathology

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      Luis Buñuel’s Mexican melodrama about a jealous husband who makes his young wife’s life a living hell opens at Film Forum.A blasphemous black comedy, part noir, part case history, Luis Buñuel’s 1953 Mexican melodrama “Él” amply justifies its inadvertently self-reflexive American release title, “This Strange Passion.”One of the rediscoveries of last year’s Buñuel retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “Él” opens for a week at Film Forum in a fine new 4K restoration.The initial sequence, filmed in the nave of a 16th-century Mexico City cathedral, is a well-attended Holy Thursday Mass. As the camera lavishes attention on ritual foot-washing, so does the suavely aristocratic Francisco Galván (Arturo de Córdova). Then his gaze strays from the row of bare feet waiting to be washed and kissed by attending priests to a well-shod foot belonging to a well-bred señorita, Gloria (Delia Garcés) — and thus, a mad love is born.Francisco, a wealthy, middle-aged virgin, obsessed with regaining ownership of once-upon-a-time family property, turns the force of his pathology on Gloria. He successfully woos her away from her fiancé and, starting on their wedding night, makes her life a living hell. Oscillating between insane jealousy and abject apologies (but ever aroused by the sight of her feet), he becomes increasingly abusive, mentally and physically. At one point, anticipating the climax of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” he finagles her to the top of a mission bell tower and, suddenly enraged, tries to throw her off.Throughout, the madman is protected by his wealth, defended by the Catholic Church and even by Gloria’s mother. “Él” has been taken as a parody of machismo, but it is more pointedly an attack on social class, male privilege and the notion of bourgeois respectability. Behind the stone facade of Francisco’s colonial mansion lies a clutter of chandeliers, tchotchkes and Jugendstil-patterned portals. Adapted from a quasi-autobiographical novel by the Spanish writer Mercedes Pinto, “Él” was further informed by the antics of Buñuel’s brother-in-law and, he’s suggested, his own dreams.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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      Eric Bauza Voices Bugs Bunny and More Looney Tunes Greats

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      “We all want to be like Bugs, but we’re all really Daffy,” said the voice actor Eric Bauza with a hearty laugh during a recent interview in Los Angeles.For the past five years, the Canadian performer, 45, has played both the clever rabbit and the hyperactive duck. He has won two Children’s & Family Emmy Awards for voicing these pair, as well as other characters, in the series “Looney Tunes Cartoons” and “Bugs Bunny Builders.”“Eh … What’s up, doc?”Over the years he’s also summoned Sylvester, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn and Elmer Fudd.In the director Peter Browngardt’s “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” (in theaters March 14), Bauza voices both Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. Distributed by Ketchup Entertainment, the first fully-animated original feature starring these characters to get a theatrical release is a zany, hand drawn, sci-fi romp in which buddies Daffy and Porky must defeat a malicious alien invader.Sitting in a meeting room at the Garland Hotel in North Hollywood, and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Wilma Flintstone (Hanna-Barbera’s “The Flintstones” is among his favorite classic cartoons), Bauza recalled first watching “Looney Tunes” on Saturday mornings growing up in Scarborough, Ontario. The wacky violence and daring humor of those cartoons enticed a young Bauza.As he recounted one of his favorite “Looney Tunes” shorts, “Long-Haired Hare,” in which Bugs Bunny torments an opera singer, Bauza seamlessly shifted into singing in the voice of the famed animated wise guy, “Music hater and a rabbit hater too, apparently,” he recited.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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      Stanley R. Jaffe, 84, Oscar-Winning Producer and Hollywood Power, Dies

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      His “Kramer vs. Kramer” won for best picture in 1980, one of many high points in a career that saw him in top jobs, twice, at Paramount.Stanley R. Jaffe, a former Hollywood wunderkind who became president of Paramount at 29, then left after just a few years to become an Oscar-winning producer of films like “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Fatal Attraction” and “The Accused,” died on Monday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 84.His daughter Betsy Jaffe confirmed the death.Mr. Jaffe was known as a hands-on producer, and his work on “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), a searing divorce drama, showed why.The movie was based on a 1977 novel of the same name by Avery Corman, and he bought the rights immediately after it was published. He persuaded a reluctant Dustin Hoffman to play the father, Ted, and cast the relatively unknown Meryl Streep to play his wife, Joanna.The film was a commercial and critical success. Along with the Oscar for best picture, it won for best actor (Mr. Hoffman); best supporting actress (Ms. Streep); and best director and best adapted screenplay (both for Robert Benton).Mr. Jaffe backstage with his best picture Oscar, for “Kramer vs. Kramer,” at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1980.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesIn addition to winning the best picture award, “Kramer vs. Kramer” also won for best actor (Dustin Hoffman) and best supporting actress (Meryl Streep).Stanley Jaffe Productions/Columbia PicturesMr. Jaffe was not quite 40 when he won the Academy Award, but he was already a veteran heavyweight in Hollywood.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