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      ‘In the Lost Lands’ Review: A Postapocalyptic Romance

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      Dave Bautista and Milla Jovovich lack chemistry in this action film, based on a short story by George R.R. Martin.The dystopian action movie “In the Lost Lands,” based on a short story by George R.R. Martin, is a threadbare film that barely resembles an idea.Dave Bautista plays Boyce, a taciturn body hunter hired by a sorceress named Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) to pursue a shape-shifter for their kingdom’s young queen (Amara Okereke). Boyce and Alys are pursued by a zealous soldier known as Ash (Arly Jover), a leader of a religious royal guard dressed like Knights Templar intent on killing Alys.This lackluster script struggles to build a captivating story to match the allure of its expansive desert setting. Instead, Boyce’s tragic origins are kept hidden by the director Paul W.S. Anderson in order to spring a hokey third-act twist. Another issue is that Alys seems to exist solely as Boyce’s lovesick romantic interest. Neither Bautista nor Jovovich can cobble together anything resembling chemistry, and this isn’t helped by Bautista consistently overacting.After making the equally garish “Monster Hunter” in 2020, somehow “In the Lost Lands” is Anderson’s least imaginative film. Though Anderson and his trusted cinematographer Glen MacPherson remain capable of framing and lighting engrossing shots, the cheap effects used for the film’s many firefights and explosions look like a flurry of pixels. The editing attempts to hide these shortcomings, cutting around the action to the point of being incomprehensible. And maybe that’s for the best.In the Lost LandsRated R for violence and being an eye sore. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Empire’ Review: Star Tangled

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      In Bruno Dumont’s sci-fi farce, an alien conflict disrupts a sleepy French village.Reveling in galactic absurdity, “The Empire,” the latest from the fiercely unconventional French filmmaker Bruno Dumont, plunks us down in a fishing village in Northern France to witness an extraterrestrial war for control of humankind.What that looks like, however, is less a space opera than a banal, metaphysical farce — a “Star Wars” parody of increasing daftness and diminishing fun. As two alien races known as One and Zero vie for mastery over a handful of unexceptional locals, Dumont’s screenplay stirs simplistic notions of good and evil into a plot that goes nowhere except — literally — down its own black hole.Until then, we are distracted by two minimally clothed young women: Line (Lyna Khoudri), part demon and all pout, who prefers to sunbathe in the nude; and Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei) a beautiful, bikini-clad alien princess. (One gets the impression Dumont is not unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Russ Meyer.) Both women are inexplicably turned on by the perpetually surly Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), an evil Zero and father to a satanic toddler who must be killed before puberty — a stage that, parents will agree, can turn even human offspring demonic.This sci-fi twaddle, soothingly framed by rolling sand dunes and a slash of crystal coastline (dreamily photographed by David Chambille), eventually tests our patience. Lightsaber tomfoolery and Lynchian interludes — like a bizarre musical scene featuring a clownish alien leader (Fabrice Luchini) and a writhing, callipygian dancer — embellish Dumont’s awkward merger of the terrestrial and the star-bound. The church-versus-state symbolism in the design of the rival mother ships, however, is a cool touch.With a little tweaking, “The Empire” could have been an amusing interspecies love triangle, as the Zero attempt to weaponize our “natural turpitudes.” Though, given the quantities of tongue involved in each libidinous encounter, I’d expect dehydration to be a far greater threat than an alien invasion.The EmpireNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Mickey 17’ Review: Bong Joon Ho’s Latest Dystopian Romp

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      In Bong Joon Ho’s latest dystopian romp, Robert Pattinson plays a hapless underdog whose work aboard a spaceship requires him to die, over and over.The world is at once scarily familiar and thoroughly, enjoyably loony tunes in “Mickey 17,” the latest Bong Joon Ho freakout. Bong is the South Korean filmmaker best known for “Parasite,” a ferocious 2019 comedy about class relations that spares no one, including viewers whose laughs eventually turn into gasps of visceral horror. Few filmmakers can shift moods and tones as smoothly as Bong, or have such a commensurately supple way with genre. You never know what to expect in one of his movies other than the unexpected, although it’s a good guess that, at one point, something monstrous will show up.Opening in 2054, “Mickey 17” takes place in an uneasily recognizable future that holds a cracked mirror to the present. It’s a very funny yet utterly serious story about ostensible winners and losers and about how, when money-grubbing push comes to power-hungry shove, heroes have it tough. That is the case with the title schlimazel, Mickey, a guy with a confused smile and a kick-me sign on his back. Played with soulful haplessness by Robert Pattinson, Mickey is a nice, not especially sharp guy who, having signed up with a space expedition, is in the wrong place at the wrong time for foolish reasons. He’s to blame, sort of.Bong wrote the screenplay, adapting it from Edward Ashton’s 2022 science-fiction novel “Mickey7.” The science in the movie is fairly minimal as such futuristic stories go; it includes a souped-up printer that Mickey becomes intimately familiar with during his wiggy adventures in inner and outer space. Following a disastrous business venture, he and his feckless friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), have fled Earth to work on a spaceship run by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a congressman turned megalomaniacal cult leader whose acolytes like red hats. Marshall and his wife, a scary slinkstress, Ylfa (Toni Collette), plan on colonizing what he believes is an uninhabited new world, a snowy white “planet of purity.”By the time you have entirely grasped what Marshall and Ylfa are up to, who and what they are, the ship is on the planet, and Mickey has died — 16 times, to be exact — in his role as the ship’s “Expendable.” Used to test viruses and other threats, Mickey undergoes brutal trials, and ends up dying on the job only to be reprinted in externally identical form. As with any software update, there are bugs, along with routine mishaps. When the movie opens, Mickey 17 has just plunged into a planet crevasse. Timo, who’s zipping nearby, isn’t interested in rescuing Mickey, who is, after all, disposable. All Timo wants to know is, What’s it like to die?It’s a question that others on the ship like to ask Mickey, which adds to the melancholia that hangs over this movie even during its bounciest, most carnivalesque moments. As he does, Bong takes a while to fully show his hand. Instead, working swiftly, he introduces this future with characteristic visual flair, flashes of beauty, spasms of comically couched violence and a palpable warmth that attenuates the more abject turns. He also gives Mickey a shipboard romance with Nasha (a lovely Naomi Ackie), a security agent who becomes his protector, an affair that heats up the story. Nasha is normal, just and true, and she helps humanize Mickey. Bong often plays Mickey’s deaths for laughs, but he wants you to feel them.And you do feel them, at times deeply, amid the flashbacks, pratfalls, peppy edits, roving camerawork and the images of one after another Mickey being dumped like garbage. These scenes can be rightly grim, yet they have a queasily amusing kick because of Bong’s lightness of touch and Mickey’s deadpan fatalism. One of Bong’s undersung strengths is that he’s great with actors, and the work that he and Pattinson do with the character’s voice and silent-clown physicality is crucial to pulling off the movie’s tonal expansiveness. Mickeys come and go, but the one you come to know best is No. 17. He has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler) that, as humor gives way to anguish, becomes a clarion call for decency.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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      ‘Eephus’ Review: One Last Game

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      The final day on a small town baseball field is the setting for a funny, elegiac feature directorial debut.This is by no means a rule, but anecdotally, there’s something about the sport of baseball that seems to attract hardcore cinephiles. Perhaps it’s because watching baseball, like watching a movie, is more or less the act of observing time pass. (And eating popcorn, or hot dogs.) Perhaps it’s because the sweeping arc of the baseball season, cut nearly into daily chunks by virtue of the number of games in a regular season, lends itself to slow-developing drama, a gradual tension build that echoes across eras and can twist itself into new shapes at any time. Also, a baseball player can have a longer career than athletes playing many other major American sports; with the greats, it’s easy to start writing some kind of epic biopic in your head.I was raised a Red Sox fan (which I now bravely admit in the hometown New York paper, and pray for mercy). I came of age just as the team finally beat the so-called Curse of the Bambino. In those moments, it felt as if we’d reached the peak of some majestically rising action — that we were all players, somehow, in the grand story.All this to say: “Eephus,” the feature directorial debut from Carson Lund, is a movie made just for me, and maybe for you as well. It’s set in the small town of Douglas, Mass., about half an hour’s drive south of Worcester and an hour from central Boston. It’s October, some time in the 1990s. The trees are hitting their peak colorful beauty, and baseball season is coming to an end.But this is not a film about the Sox, nor is it, at least on its face, about anything epic at all. In fact, that MLB team barely comes up at all, though Bill Lee, a.k.a. “Spaceman,” the famous left-handed pitcher who played for Boston in the 1970s, portrays a minor character in the movie. Instead, the drama centers on two recreational baseball teams who’ve met up at Soldier’s Field for the very last game this diamond will see.In a sly twist on genre convention — the small town folk trying to save a beloved public space because some terrible mean rich guy is going to build a mall on it, or something — the reason Soldier’s Field is going away is that they’re building a school on it. A public school. Its proximity to people’s homes will make life easier for every parent in this town. How dare they, right?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 Stylish Celebrities Who Ruled the Red Carpet This Awards Season: Cynthia Erivo, Timothée Chalamet and More

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      If fashion is a game, they were playing to win.The ultimate honor during awards season is to take home a statue. But the glut of ceremonies and related events between January and March has long offered celebrities another way to distinguish themselves: by their clothing choices.For A-listers, red carpets are as much a venue for self expression as they are an arena for landing brand deals, invitations to fashion weeks and the covers of not-yet-extinct print magazines. For viewers, they can offer a peek at the trends of tomorrow. And for many people, whether they are walking or watching, red carpets are also just a lot of fun.The eight stars on this list seemed to have a firm grasp of all of those points, based on the ways they navigated the many red carpets that they graced. Some used the carpets to play muse to particular designers, while others used them to challenge beauty stigmas. All, needless to say, turned countless heads while doing it.Zoe SaldañaMore looks →In Saint Laurent at the Academy Awards in March.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesIn Saint Laurent at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in March.Danny Moloshok/ReutersIn Saint Laurent at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in February.Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Saint Laurent at the EE British Academy Film Awards in February.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockIn Saint Laurent at the Golden Globes in January.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockThe “Emilia Pérez” actress received a staggering amount of trophies, winning best supporting actress awards at the the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards, the British Academy Film Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Academy Awards. She had an equally strong style showing: Ms. Saldaña, who has worked with the stylist Petra Flannery, wore a number of layered, ruffled and sculptural creations by Saint Laurent, whose top designer, Anthony Vaccarello, was among the “Emilia Pérez” producers.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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      Joan Didion Knew the Stories We’d Tell About the Manson Murders

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      Didion’s influential account of the era, “The White Album,” captures the ripples of terror provoked by the 1969 murders.Few true crime villains dominate American imaginations as fiercely as Charles Manson and his “family” of lost youths. The story has everything: a wild-eyed mastermind who was also a failed rocker; a coterie of emaciated, beautiful women; the death of a gorgeous pregnant actress and her friends; strange links to the Beatles; a feeling that this murder was either random, or an indication that hell had broken loose on earth.Plus, the public has always had the nagging sense that there was more to the story than anyone was letting on. It was just too Satanic-seeming. Too weird.So no wonder the 1969 murders have been an ongoing source of fascination. In just the past few years, Quentin Tarantino’s film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story: Cult” and Emma Cline’s novel “The Girls” have become bona fide hits by reimagining the murders. Manson has turned up as a character in shows like “Aquarius,” “Mindhunter” and “Charlie Says.” The journalist Tom O’Neill’s gobsmacking book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the C.I.A. and the Secret History of the Sixties,” from 2019, chronicled the author’s decades-long investigation into the case, with results that upend most of what we think we know. And now it’s a Netflix documentary from the director Errol Morris.A still from “Chaos: The Manson Murders,” a Netflix documentary by Errol Morris.NetflixSomehow, this case keeps surprising us. But one person who regarded it without shock — as if it was the inevitable conclusion of a panicked era — was Joan Didion, who was living and working in Hollywood when the murders occurred. In her 1978 essay “The White Album,” regarded as a seminal account of the era, she writes about the ripples of terror the murders provoked. “These early reports were garbled and contradictory,” with differ­ent numbers of victims and explanations of what happened, Didion writes. “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”Reality was barely tangible in the summer of 1969, with its highs and lows, its muddled impressions and half-understood head­lines. Cause and effect seemed to be breaking apart. In some respects this was simply the inevitable result of a country becoming saturated in images because they had a screen at home. A movie theater was a place to go if you wanted to see a whole story, beginning to end. But a TV you could turn on and off, and you never knew what would be there when you turned it on again. You might see images from My Lai, the funeral of a slain politician, pop versions of cowboys on “Gunsmoke” or “Bonanza,” smil­ing tap dancers on a variety show, some comedian or singer from your youth in a different setting than you remembered. It mirrored the neurons of a disturbed mind, firing at random.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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      For Stars at the Oscars, a Night of Celebration and Selfies

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      The Academy Awards can be a fraught affair. When many of the world’s biggest stars gather to be validated for their artistry, the tension of parsing the winners from non-winners (not losers!) threatens to stultify the whole thing. But at Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony — where “Anora” (and Sean Baker) won big, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande belted big-hearted songs, and Adrien Brody kissed and was kissed — our photographer caught the stars in unguarded moments of joyful support and celebration throughout the night.Cynthia Erivo, whose rousing duet with Ariana Grande, “Defying Gravity,” opened the ceremony, waved to a familiar face in the Dolby Theater.Rumer Willis and Demi Moore, in the foreground, and Penélope Cruz and Lupita Nyong’o, middle, chatting as Isabella Rossellini looks on.Colman Domingo, with his husband, Raul Domingo, taking a selfie. Ariana Grande, left, enjoyed a moment with her “Wicked” co-star Bowen Yang, center, and Matt Rogers, who co-hosts “Las Culturistas,” a podcast, with Yang.Jeremy Strong, nominated for best supporting actor for his role in “The Apprentice,” was saluted in a speech by his “Succession” co-star Kieran Culkin, who won the award.Mikey Madison celebrated winning the award for best actress for her role in “Anora.” “This is a dream come true,” she said. “I’m probably going to wake up tomorrow.”The nominees for best actor — from left: Timothée Chalamet, Colman Domingo, Adrien Brody, Ralph Fiennes and Sebastian Stan — huddled for an impromptu photo shoot.Emma Stone, last year’s best actress winner for “Poor Things,” poked her tongue at a neighbor.Margaret Qualley embraced her husband, the music producer Jack Antonoff, during a break in the show.Adrien Brody kissed Daniel Blumberg for winning best original score for “The Brutalist.” On the red carpet before the show, Brody had been surprised by a kiss from Halle Berry, who recreated their smooch at the 2003 Oscars.Sean Baker made history Sunday night, tying Walt Disney for most individual Oscars collected in one night, with four. His film “Anora” won five, including best picture.Fernanda Torres, a best actress nominee for “I’m Still Here,” connected with Colman Domingo. She was the second Brazilian to ever receive a best acting nod. Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, nominated in 1999, was the first.Jeff Goldblum, left, compared cellphones with his wife Emilie Livingston.Cynthia Erivo with Ralph Fiennes, who starred in “Conclave,” a film about the intrigue behind the selection of a new pope that received eight nominations.After his best actor win for “The Brutalist” was announced, Adrien Brody soaked in the moment. He then tossed his gum from the stage to his girlfriend Georgina Chapman.Ariana Grande with Ethan Slater, her co-star in “Wicked,” which was up for 10 Oscars.Demi Moore, left, reached across Margaret Qualley, her co-star in “The Substance,” to greet Qualley’s husband, Jack Antonoff. Moore, a nominee in the best actress category, lost to Mikey Madison. More

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      Why Is Hollywood Obsessed With Architects? ‘The Brutalist’ Gives Us a Hint.

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      The trope of the embattled auteur exerting their will is too tempting for filmmakers to ignore.Now that the White House has decreed that all new government structures be made in a classical style, let’s cue up the original film of buildings and hubris — King Vidor’s “The Fountainhead” (1949), based on the 1943 novel by Ayn Rand.In the film’s final shot, the architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) stands squinting atop his latest skyscraper, the tallest in the world, with the wind popping his shirt. Inspired in part by Rand’s admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, Roark has battled decades of herd mentality and bland neoclassical buildings in order to assert his vision of a gleaming, geometric Modernism upon America’s skyline. He has behaved ruthlessly, even sexually assaulting his eventual wife (Patricia Neal) in her mansion on the outskirts of a quarry. As he surveys Manhattan from his new perch, Roark seems a terrible demigod of will.What he doesn’t seem is an actual designer. Like the novel, Vidor’s film (which Rand wrote the screenplay for) spun an influential but misleading myth of architects as solitary artists. In the interwar period, conceptual-minded architects — from Wright in America to the Bauhaus school in Germany — turned the formerly public language of pediments and arches into a canvas for non sequiturs of personal expression. For decades that evolution helped turn the profession into a shorthand for greatness. The Museum of Modern Art began exhibiting models and plans in 1932: Buildings had become sculptures. Paul Simon was able to write a convincing (and spine-tingling) paean to Frank Lloyd Wright without any deep knowledge of his work. Time magazine put Philip Johnson, a Roark incarnate, on a 1979 cover, looking like a Batman villain.Lately that world seems to want reappraisal. A housing crisis, an epidemic of cheap development and luxury glass, red tape and a postpandemic “return to office” movement have called into question the use and feasibility of new construction. A recent play, opera and exhibition on New York’s most influential master builder, Robert Moses, decry the toll bridges and expressways he erected at the expense of the people they were meant to serve. In various outlets, the debate has resurged over the human effects of brutalism, the imposing concrete style that possessed architects from the early 1950s to the late 1970s but alienated more of its users than perhaps any modern style. (See: the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in D.C., by Marcel Breuer, or Boston’s City Hall.)In a world where building seems difficult at best and oppressive at worst, what’s the point of being an architect at all? That question unites two of last year’s most talked-about movies: Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.” To be sure, both films peddle the trope of the embattled auteur. In “Megalopolis,” the gloomy genius Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) battles philistines in his quest to renovate New Rome, a thinly-veiled Manhattan. (There is even a skyscraper scene to match Vidor’s.) Corbet’s tortured architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), too, a Jewish-Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust based roughly on Breuer, obsesses over a bunkerlike civic chapel that will brood over 1950s Pennsylvania in reinforced concrete, again recalling Roark, who in Rand’s “The Fountainhead” (the book, but not the film) builds a secular Temple of the Human Spirit for a rich financier. When Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), finds his blueprints and tells him, “I’m just looking at you,” she’s voicing the old belief: Buildings are extensions of their authors.But these movies flip that formula, as if to explain how we’ve changed our minds about it — one bleakly, the other romantically.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