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      Will Children Save Us at the End of the World?

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      A wave of recent and forthcoming TV series, books and movies meditate on how young people might fare during an apocalyptic event — with varying degrees of optimism.The noxious orange smoke that descended over New York this month reminded me of a parlor game I used to play with my husband: Would we have what it takes to survive the apocalypse? We abruptly stopped enjoying this thought experiment in March 2020 and when I had a child the next year, I became even less tolerant of blithely considering the end of the world. But now, suddenly, versions of our game are everywhere, in a new and near-unavoidable genre: stories that revisit our pandemic trauma via even worse — but plausible! — scenarios. Making these works doubly poignant, many of them have children at their center.Mackenzie Davis in the series “Station Eleven” (2021-22).Ian Watson/HBO MaxThere’s “Station Eleven,” the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel about the aftermath of a swine flu, which was turned into a much-discussed 2021 HBO Max series, in which an 8-year-old girl manages to survive with the help of a stranger turned surrogate parent. “The Last of Us,” HBO’s video game adaptation, which debuted in January, features a zombie-fungus pandemic; a seemingly immune teenage girl is humanity’s one hope. “Leave the World Behind,” Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel — soon to be a movie — about a bourgeois family vacation gone very bad, features a vague but menacing threat of apocalypse. Also loosely belonging to this category are the shows “Yellowjackets” (2021-present) — a girls’ soccer team turns to cannibalism after a plane crash — and “Class of ’07” (2023) — a school reunion coincides with a climate apocalypse — and the new-to-Netflix 2019 Icelandic movie “Woman at War” (a renegade activist tries to stop the destruction of the environment and adopt a child).These stories are, in various ways, about how and whether our children can survive the mess that we’ve left them — and what it will cost them to do so. In “Station Eleven,” post-pans (children who were born after the pandemic) are both beacons of optimism and conscripted killers deployed by a self-styled prophet who hopes to erase anyone who holds on to the trauma of the past. And in “The Last of Us,” Ellie, the young girl with possible immunity (played by the actor Bella Ramsey), is forced to kill to survive, and to grapple with whether it’s worth sacrificing her own life in the search for a cure.The anxieties that these works explore — about planetary destruction and what we did to enable it — are, evidence suggests, affecting the desire of some to have children at all, either because of fear for their future or a belief that not procreating will help stave off the worst. But following the children in these fictions, who didn’t create the conditions of their suffering, isn’t just a devastating guilt trip. Almost all these stories also frame children as our best hope, as we so often do in real life. Children, we need to believe, are resilient and ingenious in ways that adults aren’t. In these stories, when the phones stop working and Amazon stops delivering, it’s children, less set in their ways, who can rebuild and imagine something different. They’re our victims but also our saviors.W. W. Norton & Company, via Associated PressNowhere is this more explicit than in Lydia Millet’s 2020 novel, “A Children’s Bible,” in which a group of middle-aged college friends rent an old mansion for a summer reunion. When a superstorm sets off a chain of events that erodes society, the parents drink and take ecstasy but the kids — teens — remain clearheaded. They care for a baby, grow food and plan for an unrecognizable future. This fantasy of a youth-led solution is both hopeful, Millet implies, and a deplorable shirking of responsibility. (It recalls somewhat Greta Thunberg’s rebuke of grown-ups: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”) Its price, these works suggest, is a childhood robbed of innocence. In the rare moments when kids are allowed to be kids in these narratives, there is always a sense of foreboding; for every romp through an abandoned shopping mall, there’s a zombie lying in wait in a Halloween store. “Is this really all they had to worry about?” Ellie asks Joel, her companion in “The Last of Us” (played by Pedro Pascal), about the teenage girls who lived before the fungus hit. “Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt.”Mahershala Ali, Myha’la Herrold, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in the forthcoming movie “Leave the World Behind.”JoJo Whilden/NetflixThis current crop of postapocalyptic stories isn’t the first to feature children prominently. Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” published in 2006, early in the so-called war on terror, followed a father and son after civilization had been leveled by an unnamed flash from the sky. (“Are we still the good guys?” the son asks the father as they ignore others’ pain in their struggle to survive.) The movie “Children of Men,” released the same year, imagines a world so destroyed that most humans have lost the ability to reproduce — and hope lies with the only pregnant woman. Of course, one reason these fictions foreground children is that a world without them is the most doomed world of all. It’s no accident that some of the earliest near-apocalypse stories — the biblical flood, the one in the ancient Mesopotamian poem “The Epic of Gilgamesh” — imagined that the world was saved by bringing the “seed of all living creatures,” as the latter work puts it, onto a boat.But maybe more than any particular fear of a civilization-ending calamity, these fictions are most useful for helping us work through an unavoidable, terrifying truth on an individual level. That the world, in whatever state it descends to or remains in, will go on without us after our death, and unless tragedy strikes, our children will live in it without us. It’s not comforting to imagine, but it can be illuminating. They will navigate things we can’t imagine, but — just maybe — they’ll do better than we did, even without our help. More

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      ‘Millie Lies Low’ Review: An Unexpected Staycation

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      After botching a trip to New York, an aspiring architect in New Zealand pretends to be there anyway.In “Millie Lies Low,” Millie (Ana Scotney), an aspiring architect from Wellington, New Zealand, experiences a panic attack moments before her plane takes off. After disembarking, she realizes that it will now be impossible for her to afford to travel to New York City, where she was about to take an internship at a top firm.No matter: Millie is already a seasoned fraud — she got her scholarship by stealing ideas from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen) — and so she uses technology to maintain the illusion that she crossed the international date line as planned. She places a video call to friends (forgetting to account for the flight lengths or the time difference) and fakes pictures of herself standing in Times Square and near the Empire State Building.Wellington, with its steep hillsides, private cable cars and ringed natural harbor, could not pass for New York if you photographed it upside down and backward, and Millie’s act turns into even more of a stretch once she stakes out a spot by her mother’s home to poach the Wi-Fi and pitches a tent. In her first feature, the director, Michelle Savill, presents Millie’s motivations as self-destructive but understandable. Scotney, never quite mugging for sympathy, plays her well.But given that Millie starts as an architectural plagiarist and moves into buffoonery as the film proceeds (stealing her boyfriend’s passport, kidnapping her own pet bunny), the screenplay’s efforts to redeem her face a difficult uphill climb. In the end, the movie far too easily waves away the potential interpersonal damage Millie has caused.Millie Lies LowNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘As Far as I Can Walk’ Review: A Search That Won’t End

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      Taking place against the backdrop of the Syrian refugee crisis, this well-crafted adaptation of a medieval Serbian poem leaves the viewer with a certain queasy ambivalence.Sitting in the cafeteria of a Serbian refugee camp, Strahinya (Ibrahim Koma), a Ghanaian soccer player who helps run the camp, tells a pair of Syrian refugees that he and his wife, Ababuo (Nancy Mensah-Offei), are economic migrants. “You from war zones have the priority,” he says dismissively about the process of asylum. Ababuo, an actress who then adds more disrespect toward the Syrians a moment later with her own dig, subtly chafes at her husband’s claims that, while they made it to Germany but were deported to Serbia two years ago, they are now content to stay.It’s a scene full of foreshadowing in “As Far as I Can Walk,” the Serbian director and co-writer Stefan Arsenijevic’s second film. Soon enough, Ababuo will disappear suddenly with the Syrian couple, and we’ll follow Strahinya as he travels far and wide in search of her (the film is a loose adaptation of a Serbian medieval epic poem). But the exchange also gestures toward a certain queasy ambivalence the film engenders about the relationship of the characters to the larger political context.Exceptionally well-crafted and anchored by moving performances from Koma and Mensah-Offei, the film is, in one sense, a great work about that basic human desire to long for something better, and the heartbreak that often comes with it. And yet, even as Arsenijevic thankfully does not fetishize suffering nor turn his characters into political props, the film unintentionally aligns with Strahinya and Ababuo’s crass attitude in the cafeteria; as this Serbian parable about African migrants is set against the backdrop of the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, the crisis ultimately becomes just that — simply a dramatic backdrop.For some, like Strahinya and Ababuo, that is indeed what some political crises are as they try to find their way to a better life. At the end of the film, Strahinya sits on a bus, his heart and will broken. We feel it for him, too. Yet as he looks out the window, scattered groups of Syrian refugees zoom past, rendered faceless as they trudge along the path in the cold.As Far as I Can WalkNot Rated. In English and Serbian, with subtitles. Running Time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Review: ‘In the Company of Rose’ Is a Pleasant Portrait

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      When the theater and film director James Lapine first met Rose Styron, he knew her as William Styron’s widow. He learned there was a lot more to her.In 2014, the film and theater director James Lapine was invited to a Martha’s Vineyard lunch with the writer Rose Styron, the widow of the novelist William Styron (“The Confessions of Nat Turner,” “Sophie’s Choice”). At the lunch, Lapine proceeded to record an impromptu interview with Rose. Unlike lesser mortals, Lapine (a protean force in American arts who wrote the book for and directed Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” among other things) has the means to spin a feature film out of such an encounter.Composed of archival footage and interviews done with more polished equipment over the years, “In the Company of Rose” is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to. As Lapine, who narrates the film, admits, “I’ve often jumped into projects without really knowing what I was doing.” In her account of her life, Rose, too, seems to have moved forward without too much calculation. She recalls being unimpressed by Styron at a reading for his first novel, “Lie Down In Darkness,” they only clicked later, in Rome, where Rose was studying and William was living on a fellowship.Rose is kind, cheerful, frank, and she has a knack for telling stories laden with famous figures without sounding as if she’s name-dropping. She typed Styron’s work for nearly a decade. On becoming interested in human rights, she traveled for Amnesty International. She says that she and her husband resembled a stereotypically 1950s American couple, and that they managed their marriage “mainly by not talking about things, instead of talking about them.” But when Styron had depression in the 1980s she was a stalwart helpmate in his recovery, and encouraged him to write “Darkness Visible,” the memoir that has become one of his best known works. As existences in rarefied worlds go, this one plays as well-lived.In the Company of RoseNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Prisoner’s Daughter’ Review: A Family Drama Tale as Old as Time

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      Catherine Hardwicke’s latest film is a compelling, but conventional redemption story.Several moments within the director Catherine Hardwicke’s latest film “Prisoner’s Daughter” contain glimmers of promise, each one regrettably smothered by a pedestrian script from Mark Bacci. Fresh from his epochal stint as Logan Roy on the series “Succession,” Brian Cox stars as Max, a former boxer and criminal enforcer who has spent the last 12 years in prison. When Max receives a terminal cancer prognosis, the warden offers him compassionate release, provided he can reside with his estranged daughter, Maxine (Kate Beckinsale) and her son, Ezra (Christopher Convery).Maxine grudgingly accepts the arrangement — under the condition that Max pays rent — given her dire financial situation. Between inconsistent work and little help (if not outright sabotage) from Ezra’s unstable father, Tyler (The All-American Rejects frontman Tyson Ritter), Maxine struggles to afford Ezra’s epilepsy medication. But inevitably she begins to repair her relationship with Max, who also becomes a devoted father figure to Ezra, much to Tyler’s chagrin.Of course, we’ve seen this tale many times before, and far better executed. Despite committed performances from its cast (particularly Cox, arguably miscast for all his best efforts), the writing resists exploring what makes this story worth telling. The script denies its characters depth beyond their circumstances — struggling single mother, repentant father — and thus, their relationship, too, remains hollow and archetypal. More frustrating still, the film forgoes any critique of the prison system, in all its stifling bureaucracy; and what allows Max to survive outside of it — especially as an older man who has spent so many years incarcerated — goes largely unquestioned.Prisoner’s DaughterRated R for language and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Anthem’ Review: Flying High

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      In this naïve, nostalgic documentary, a pair of musicians go on a road trip with the ambitious mission of creating a new national anthem.“Anthem” opens with a series of archival scenes from American history: from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 address championing space travel to Barack Obama speaking about the necessity of dissent; from members of the Ku Klux Klan waving the American flag to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol; from the Black Power protest at the 1968 Olympics to Colin Kaepernick taking a knee on a football field. The montage strikingly illustrates the idea that nationalism can take wildly different forms that have little to do with national symbols.Yet the film that follows seems to miss this point. Peter Nicks’s documentary follows two Black artists, the film and television composer Kris Bowers and the record producer Dahi, as they embark on a road trip with the goal of creating a new anthem that — unlike “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which borrows from a British tune — feels homegrown and representative of America today. Their naïve belief that a song can make people of all stripes, even those persecuted by the country, feel included reminded me of the celebrity “Imagine” music video from March 2020. It feels like lip service that doesn’t confront the real issues.Bowers and Dahi’s journey is fascinating: they explore blues in Mississippi, country music in Tennessee and Native drum circles in Oklahoma, accumulating a melting-pot portrait of American music. Yet their conversations are gratingly anodyne, invoking platitudes like “truth,” while the visuals insipidly jump between screens, close-ups of faces and slow motion shots of the two on the road. Any thorny moments, as when a singer from a military family clashes with an immigrant vocalist over questions of national pride, are brushed aside too quickly. Where the film’s archival footage demonstrates the limits of respectability politics, “Anthem” ends up being overly respectable — and inevitably reductive.AnthemRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Barbenheimer’: Fans Plan to See ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ Back to Back on July 21

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      The “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” movies look very different. But some fans are planning a double feature for their release on July 21.Barbie is everything. He’s just … Robert Oppenheimer.That’s right. The main character competing with Barbie for attention right now isn’t Ken, her plastic significant other. It’s the man who designed the atomic bomb.Fans have been waiting for this summer’s release of two movies — “Barbie,” from Warner Bros. and directed by Greta Gerwig, and “Oppenheimer,” from Universal Pictures and directed by Christopher Nolan — which are both coming out on July 21, and they have been poking fun at the stark contrast in the movies’ themes, moods and color schemes.The result of the release schedule is a mash-up many people may not have seen coming: Barbenheimer. Or Boppenheimer, if you will.Only one month left. pic.twitter.com/n6PKQBtTcc— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) June 20, 2023
      “Oppenheimer” is Nolan’s prestige movie based on “American Prometheus,” a biography of Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the Manhattan Project, which during World War II produced the first atomic bombs. The trailers for that film, with intense music and suspenseful scenes starring a pensive-looking Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, are in stark contrast with the pink and sparkly trailers for “Barbie,” which show Margot Robbie as the doll living in Barbieland before setting off on an adventure into the real world.The two characters could hardly be more different (does this Venn diagram even have a middle?). And yet, Robbie and Murphy are appearing on T-shirts and sweaters together.Memes, videos and online chatter have flooded social media, and some people are making plans to see the two movies on the same day. A debate about which order to see them in — “Barbie” first to start the day off light, or “Oppenheimer” first, to end on a more cheerful note — hasn’t been settled.The curious crossover is also giving rise to real-life merchandise. A Google search for “Barbenheimer T-shirt” brings tens of thousands of results, and sellers on Etsy have designed their own versions. Some feature Robbie and Murphy, while others combine Barbie’s pink font with a pink drawing of an atomic cloud.One such T-shirt, and an early entry in the crowded field, is a simple split-screen combination of the two movie logos, spelling out “Barbenheimer” with the release date of the films.Hunter Hudson, 23, a filmmaker in San Antonio, said he originally designed and created the shirts for him and his friends to “roll up to the Barbenheimer double feature” on July 21. But when he posted pictures of the shirt on his Twitter feed, he said, it took off beyond his expectations.“I normally get about three or four likes on anything I post,” Hudson said. But after sharing a few mock-ups of the shirt, he woke up one morning to hundreds of messages from people asking him if they could buy it.Hudson makes the shirts himself, with a friend, and charges $40. So far he said he had made about 150 shirts, with a second batch of about 70 more on the way. It takes him about 45 minutes to an hour to make one T-shirt, which he does by cutting two shirts in half, pinning them together and sewing and pressing them.“I had a couple of movie theaters reach out to me privately to do bulk orders for employees,” he said. “It’s been overwhelmingly positive.”This kind of organic marketing is probably good for both films, said Robert Mitchell, the director of theatrical insights at Gower Street, a company that does predictive analysis for the film industry.Not that the studios’ marketing has been lacking: There are life-size cardboard Barbie boxes in theaters for people to take pictures and a selfie generator. There have been collaborations with multiple brands: The frozen yogurt chain Pinkberry is offering a Barbie flavor, Gap has a line of Barbie-themed clothes, and Airbnb is offering a real-life Barbie Dream House in Malibu. Warner Bros. declined to comment on the movie’s marketing efforts.What all this hype means for box office results for either film is unclear, and awareness doesn’t always translate into attendance, Mitchell said. Predictions for opening weekends are tricky and a lot can still happen before July 21, said David Gross, a movie consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. Some conservative industry estimates, he said, have “Barbie” opening between $55 million and $65 million in the United States and Canada, and “Oppenheimer” between $40 million and $50 million. Both of those estimates would be strong for a fantasy comedy and a historical drama, neither of which are sequels. Superhero, big action and big animation movies usually open higher, Mr. Gross said.Still, the hype around the films could be beneficial to the numbers. “Every time ‘Barbie’ released a trailer, ‘Oppenheimer’ would start trending,” Mitchell said.“They’re so vastly different,” he said, “that they allow for the narrative that popped up organically: This would be strangest double bill ever.” That online conversation, he said, “is pretty much a gift for distributors.”While social media is full of people showing off their tickets to see the double feature, it’s unclear how many really will. “But it shouldn’t matter,” Gross said. “Audiences are going to find them, and both films are going to do extremely well.” More

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      ‘Run Rabbit Run’ Review: No Child of Mine

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      A splendid Sarah Snook battles weak plotting in this atmospheric, derivative ghost story.Buried trauma and resurrected guilt get quite the workout in Daina Reid’s “Run Rabbit Run,” a ludicrous Australian psychodrama that forces the fabulous Sarah Snook to interact with a creepy bunny.Snook plays Sarah, a fertility doctor with a small daughter, Mia (a remarkable Lily LaTorre), and a genial ex-husband, Pete (Damon Herriman). From the start, Sarah appears fraught, coping poorly with the recent death of her father. When Pete confides that he and his new wife are planning to have a child, Sarah’s distress only increases: There is a reason she doesn’t want Mia to have a sibling.While we wait for that to be revealed, we watch Mia transform into a stranger and Sarah photogenically fall apart. Demanding to visit the grandmother she has never met, Mia begins experiencing tantrums and panic attacks, mysterious bruising and nosebleeds. Rather than consult a doctor, Sarah accedes to the child’s wishes, with predictably disastrous results. In movies like this, rational adult behavior is counter to requirements; instead, we have a lolloping white rabbit, which materializes on Sarah’s porch and violently resists expulsion.Gloomy and vague, “Run Rabbit Run” is a moody, noncommittal tease replete with the usual spectral signifiers: clammy dreams, scary drawings, unsettling masks. Snook does everything but rend her garments in a performance that only emphasizes the busy vapidity of Hannah Kent’s script. At times, though — when Bonnie Elliott’s uneasy camera creeps into a dank shed filled with gruesome tools, crawls through a forbidding tunnel of twisted vines, or flinches from a shocking incident with scissors — a more vital, more incisive movie peeks out. At the very least, I’d like to have learned more about that darned bunny.Run Rabbit RunNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More