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      At 50, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Still Cuts Deep

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      Eli Roth, Paul Feig and other directors with movies out this month explain how this gory horror classic has inspired their work.The movies never recovered after “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” hit theaters in 1974. Focused on a family of cannibalistic, butcherous crazies living in a rural house of horrors, Tobe Hooper’s sleaze-oozing film rattled audiences and was banned in some places. It also inspired filmmakers to take horror in new, more brutal directions.Fede Álvarez, director of the forthcoming “Alien: Romulus,” said that the “unapologetic savagery” of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” influenced his work.“It’s a humbling reminder of how a hard dose of unsolicited anarchy onscreen is a key ingredient for any horror movie that hopes to endure the test of time,” he said.Beginning Aug. 8, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will offer a weeklong run of the film timed to its 50th anniversary, and will follow that with a retrospective (Aug. 13-20) of Hooper’s other less shocking but still daring genre films from the 1980s, including “Poltergeist” (1982) and “Invaders From Mars” (1986).MoMA didn’t dawdle in taking “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” seriously: It added the film to its collection two years after the movie came out.“Its power hasn’t dimmed,” said Ron Magliozzi, a curator in MoMA’s film department and the organizing curator for the series. “It has matured.”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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      Food Porn Gets Dark

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      Shots of extravagantly composed dishes have become cliché. “The Bear” and two other summer releases use well-plated food to convey darker themes.We love sexy food: the dressed-up dishes on cooking shows, a camera zooming in on an angelically lit plate. The influencer’s video that’s less about food than vibes. The ambrosial spreads in ads. Food porn titillates the senses to sell an idea, a product or an experience: the memorable opulent meal, the communion of sharing food as a sacred rite. But three recent releases have perverted this approach, offering extravagantly composed plates that traumatize, not tantalize.In “The Bear,” the meaning of the beautiful food that Chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) creates now that he is finally running his own upscale establishment has changed. It represents old grievances, lingering fears and simmering power struggles. Season 3 opens with an expressionist self-portrait: no plot, just scenes of Carmy working, interspersed with flashbacks of him in kitchens run by chefs he’s idolized.Some of the memories evoke a visceral joy: Carmy wistfully strolling among fields of veggies and making vibrantly detailed illustrations of menu ideas. He admires a photo of one successful creation that could be a salad, arranged like a bouquet. A sunburst of something orange lies petaled and sectioned like a flower, resting on a bed of wild greens. Carmy texts a picture of the arrangement to his brother, Mikey, who is baffled. The message is clear to the audience, though. It’s not just sustenance we’re admiring; it’s art.When Carmy shares an artfully curated dish, Mikey isn’t sure what to make of it.FXScenes of present-day Carmy lack this brightness, literally and figuratively. Kitchen shots are harshly lit to match his clinical approach to the work. Instead of loving glances of plated dishes, we get unsatisfying teases of food that fly by in succession. When Carmy’s frustration mounts and his expectations become impossible for anyone — even him — to meet, mouthwatering meals are swept aside. Two juicy-looking strips of Wagyu beef are flung into the trash, the metal kitchenware clanging violently against the lid, because, Carmy says curtly, “the cook is off.”Carmy’s diminishing relationship with food provides the closest thing “The Bear” has to an enticing conflict. As he settles into the early weeks of running a fine-dining hot spot, he’s increasingly haunted by memories of his tutelage under the sadistic David Fields (Joel McHale). In flashbacks we see Chef David craning over Carmy predatorily, ready with a bitter rebuke or challenge. By season’s end, food is no longer a comfort for Carmy; producing the requisite artful plate of food is necessary to his restaurant’s survival.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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      ‘Good One’ Review: Revelation in the Woods

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      Lily Collias delivers an extraordinary lead performance in this exquisite debut feature about a camping trip and a moment of self-realization.“Good One” is a drama about human relationships, but it starts with close-up shots of plants and insects, setting the scene in more ways than one. Yes, the characters will spend most of the movie in the woods, and high summer in upstate New York is quite literally full of dirt, bugs and leafy canopies. But contemplating the rich greens and earthy red-browns, I found myself pondering life cycles, the mutating forms and constant shifts of the natural world — and of human life, too. I don’t think that’s an accident.The “good one” of the title is Sam (Lily Collias), who is 17 and on a camping trip with her high-strung father, Chris (James Le Gros), and one of his oldest friends, an underemployed actor named Matt (Danny McCarthy). Matt’s son was supposed to come too, but bailed in a fit of pique, still bitter about his parents’ divorce. So it’s just Sam and the men.Sam is exactly the type to get called the “good one” — not because she’s a prim Goody Two-shoes, but because she’s the sort of teenage girl that adults, especially adult men, feel comfortable around. She’s levelheaded and knows how to snark when necessary. In the woods, she pulls more than her own weight — she can pitch a tent, load up a day pack, filter water, build a fire and cook steaming bowls of ramen. She’ll take advice, but she’s equally good at giving it, an independent thinker with whom any grown-up could talk.And boy, do Chris and Matt talk. Their relationship is rife with old rivalries and structured by all the selves they once were, all the way back to nearly Sam’s age. You can see them fall into an old script, Matt the hapless mess who packs all the wrong stuff and Chris the organized leader who gets mad when the energy bars aren’t in the right place.Sam observes her father’s digs at Matt as they trek across the forest for three days, often silently, only her eyes betraying her thoughts. She has seen this dynamic her whole life. It unnerves her a little, the realization that these guys in their 50s, a couple of life stages ahead of her, are as immature as the boys she knows from home.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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      ‘Cuckoo’ Review: Never Has a Movie Been More Aptly Named

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      Dan Stevens and Hunter Schafer face off in this unexpectedly fun and undeniably nutty horror-comedy about cross-species pollination.“Is this normal?” a bewildered hotel guest in “Cuckoo” inquires after witnessing a fellow guest stagger, vomiting, into the lobby. Viewers might be wondering the same thing about a movie whose title could reveal as much about the sensibility of its director as the nature of its plot.Possessed of a singular, at times inexplicable vision, the German filmmaker Tilman Singer proves once again — after his experimental debut, “Luz” (2019) — that he’s more drawn to sensation than sense. Liberated from logic, his pictures dance on the border between bewitching and baffling, exciting and irksome. Sidling several steps closer to an identifiable plot, “Cuckoo” flaps around Gretchen (an excellent Hunter Schafer), a grieving, unsettled 17-year-old whose mother has died and whose father (Marton Csokas) has brought her to live with his new family in a resort in the Bavarian Alps.From the moment she arrives, nothing seems quite right. Missing her mother and her life in America, Gretchen is slow to connect with her brisk stepmother (Jessica Henwick) and her much younger half sister, Alma (Mila Lieu), who is mute and suffers from unexplained seizures. Adding to Gretchen’s uneasiness is the resort’s touchy-feely owner, Herr König (Dan Stevens), who seems weirdly fixated on Alma. Strange screechings fill the woods, and a frightening figure in white appears to be stalking Gretchen as she walks home from her job at the resort’s reception desk. Maybe that switchblade we saw her unpack will come in handy, after all.A tale of human-avian experimentation with phantasmagoric flourishes, “Cuckoo” is unsubtle and frequently unhinged. The narrative may be blurred, but the mood is pure freak show, and Stevens, bless him, immediately grasps the comic possibilities of the movie’s themes and the nuttiness of his character. Reprising his flawless German accent from the charming 2021 sci-fi romance “I’m Your Man,” he gives König a seductive creepiness that’s less mad scientist than horny ornithologist. Obsessed with replicating — in unspeakable ways — the breeding behaviors of the titular bird, König requires the cooperation of willing young women. Gretchen is not eager to become one of them.Shooting on 35-millimeter film, Paul Faltz, backed by Simon Waskow’s whining, fidgety score, leans into the surreality of Gretchen’s predicament with bizarre close-ups. Ears jerk and twitch in response to mysterious calls; throats flutter with a rapid, stuttering pulse; slimy secretions are passed from one woman to another. And as the resort’s dangers escalate and Gretchen’s injuries multiply, the film’s bonkers, body-horror ambitions become the means by which she will overcome her grief and heal her emotional dislocation.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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      ‘Borderlands’ Review: Shoot First, Ask Questions Never

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      In Eli Roth’s caper movie, based on the best-selling video game franchise, Cate Blanchett plays a bounty hunter who is tasked with finding a tycoon’s daughter.In Eli Roth’s “Borderlands,” a cluttered caper flick based on the best-selling video game series of the same name, Cate Blanchett plays a trigger-happy bounty hunter who keeps killing the other characters midsentence before they can fill in the plot. Shoot first, ask questions never — even though the audience has questions of its own: What caused the delay that’s taken this big-budget movie three years to get released? And is it possible that Roth’s credited co-writer, Joe Crombie, who otherwise has no other screenplays or online presence, might be a pseudonym for someone who doesn’t want their real name on this haphazard script?Like the original first-person shooter game, “Borderlands” is set on a junkyard planet named Pandora that was once a home base for an advanced alien species, but has since been overrun by violent marauders and women with formidable push-up bras. Blanchett’s Lilith was born here and begrudgingly returns under the employ of a tycoon (Edgar Ramírez) who’s hired her to track down his daughter, an unhinged teenager named Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). To Lilith’s annoyance, her one-woman squad swells with new members: a sassy robot (voiced by Jack Black), an autistic xeno-archaeologist (Jamie Lee Curtis), a mostly mute meathead (Florian Munteanu) and a noble soldier (Kevin Hart). When Hart is playing the straight man, you know you’re watching a film that’s throwing everything at the screen.The style is Chernobyl chic. Anything that can have spikes does have spikes — even the terrain. The scrapheap aesthetic is so maximalist that, at one point, our leads take a joyride in a dumpster. The film itself feels salvaged from the properties it aspires to bowdlerize, chief among them “Star Wars.” Key messages are transmitted as Princess Leia-esque holograms; Black’s robot spouts pessimistic survival statistics; Hart barges onscreen in a gothy Stormtrooper get-up that he immediately discards, sneering, “What a stupid helmet.”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 Blair Witch Project’ Brings Up a Riddle That Looms 25 Years Later

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      Twenty-five years ago, the indie horror blockbuster compelled audiences to ask, “Was that real?” The question now permeates our age of misinformation.“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”Audiences packed elbow-to-elbow into theaters in the summer of 1999 saw that shaky white text on a black background during the first moments of “The Blair Witch Project.” What followed was 80 or so minutes of growing dread as three 20-somethings — Josh, Heather and Mike — tried to uncover the truth behind the legend of a supernatural entity called the Blair Witch. It does not end well for the trio.Initially shot for just $35,000, “The Blair Witch Project” grossed almost $250 million, then a record for an indie film. It became a pop culture phenomenon, one that foretold the found-footage horror boom and left one uneasy question hovering over moviegoers: “Is this real?” It’s an existential riddle that looms larger than ever 25 years later, compelling us to apply that exact question to nearly every image, sound or nugget of information we encounter.Back then, creating that air of uncertainty took some strategic work by the directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Marketed as a documentary, promotional materials included missing posters for its largely unknown lead actors — Joshua Leonard; Heather Donahue, now known as Rei Hance; and Michael C. Williams — who had to keep ultralow profiles in the lead-up to the film’s release.A separate faux documentary called “The Curse of the Blair Witch,” which aired on cable TV shortly before the film’s premiere, had an eerily convincing true-crime approach: It incorporated candid-seeming photos of the characters including childhood snapshots, as well as fake newspaper articles and interviews with actors posing as Heather’s film professor and Josh’s girlfriend, among others, to round out the alternate reality.Joshua Leonard and his “Blair Witch” co-stars filmed all the footage used in the movie.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How ‘Inside Out’ and Its Sequel Became a Tool for Therapists and Schools

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      Mental health professionals and educators say the movies are remarkably helpful in providing a common language they can use with children and parents.In 2012, when Olivia Carter was just starting out as a school counselor, she employed all sorts of strategies to help her elementary-age students understand and communicate their feelings — drawing, charades, color association, role playing. After 2015, though, starting those conversations became a lot easier, she said. It took just one question: “Who has seen the movie ‘Inside Out’?”That Pixar hit, about core emotions like joy and sadness, and this summer’s blockbuster sequel, which focuses on anxiety, have been embraced by educators, counselors, therapists and caregivers as an unparalleled tool to help people understand themselves. The story of the moods steering the “control panel” in the head of a girl named Riley has been transformational, many experts said, in day-to-day treatment, in schools and even at home, where the films have given parents a new perspective on how to manage the turmoil of growing up.“As therapeutic practice, it has become a go-to,” said David A. Langer, president of the American Board of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. In his household, too: “I have 9-year-old twins — we speak about it regularly,” said Langer, who’s also a professor of psychology at Suffolk University. “Inside Out” finger puppets were in frequent rotation when his children were younger, a playful way to examine the family dynamic. “The art of ‘Inside Out’ is explicitly helping us understand our internal worlds,” Langer said.And it’s not just schoolchildren that it applies to. “I’ve been stealing lines from the movie and quoting them to adults, not telling them that I’m quoting,” said Regine Galanti, a psychologist and author in private practice on Long Island, speaking of the new film.Audiences have lapped it up: “Inside Out 2” has now grossed more than $1.5 billion globally, shattering box office records for animation along the way. Therapists say the movie’s focus on the character of Anxiety, center, takes experiences that young viewers could find isolating and makes them more relatable.Disney/PixarWe 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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      Festival Winners Crowd New York Film Festival Main Slate Lineup

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      Top titles from Cannes and Berlin, like Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” join new work by Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.Ross’s film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.Two festival mainstays, the filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a Seoul suburb. (Hong also showed two films last year.)The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” More