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      ‘Centurion: The Dancing Stallion’ Review: Romance on the Ranch

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      A young woman training for a horse dancing competition confronts a medical crisis in this conventional family melodrama.The art of Mexican horse dancing becomes the backdrop for a formulaic family melodrama in “Centurion: The Dancing Stallion,” which stars a stable of equine and human performers gamely mounting a Nicholas Sparks-like story line complete with romance across social classes, a conniving antagonist and grave health crises.The movie begins as the breezy Ellissia (Amber Midthunder), the daughter of a ranch owner (Billy Zane), is training to compete in a local horse dancing competition. The event may sound like fun and games — the animals are clomping crowd-pleasers — but there are also stakes: Ellissia’s family insists a top prize will put their ranch “on the map.” She finds a staunch supporter in Danny (Aramis Knight), a hunky stable hand tasked with caring for Ellissia’s newest mount: the finicky white beauty Centurion.The director, Dana Gonzales, seems at times to embrace an atmosphere of camp. A near-constant stream of slow-motion montages amplifies bouts of action or histrionics, and establishing shots of the homestead, the barn or the outlying fields seem to appear every few scenes, even if the characters have barely moved locations.During its climax, “Centurion: The Dancing Stallion” rather ambitiously aligns the fates of Ellissia and Centurion, intercutting their struggles as they confront parallel medical emergencies. The sequence briefly gestures at the intriguing idea of a psychic alliance between the pair, similar to the one in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” But then the moment passes, and any challenging questions are pushed aside in favor of third-act mechanics.Centurion: The Dancing StallionRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Harry Belafonte on His Artistic Values and His Activism

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      In interviews and articles in The New York Times, Mr. Belafonte, who died on Tuesday, spoke about the civil rights movement and his frustration with how Black life was depicted onscreen.Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and activist whose wide-ranging success blazed a trail for other Black artists in the 1950s, died on Tuesday at age 96.A child of Harlem, Mr. Belafonte used his platform at the height of the entertainment world to speak out frequently on his music, how Black life was depicted onscreen and, most important to him, the civil rights movement. Here are some of the insights Mr. Belafonte provided to The New York Times during his many decades in the public spotlight, as they appeared at the time:His musicMr. Belafonte’s string of hits, including “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” helped create an American obsession with Caribbean music that led his record company to promote him as the “King of Calypso.”But Mr. Belafonte never embraced that sort of monarchical title, rejecting “purism” as a “cover-up for mediocrity” and explaining that he saw his work as a mash-up of musical styles.He told The New York Times Magazine in 1959 that folk music had “hidden within it a great dramatic sense, and a powerful lyrical sense.” He also plainly conceded: “I don’t have a great voice.”In 1993, he told The Times that he used his songs “to describe the human condition and to give people some insights into what may be going on globally, from what I’ve experienced.”He said that “Day-O,” for instance, was a way of life.“It’s a song about my father, my mother, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica,” he said. “It’s a classic work song.”His views on film and televisionMr. Belafonte’s success in music helped him become a Hollywood leading man. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Belafonte and his friend Sidney Poitier landed more substantive and nuanced roles than Black actors had previously received.Nonetheless, Mr. Belafonte was left largely unsatisfied.Writing for The Times in 1968, he complained that “the real beauty, the soul, the integrity of the black community is rarely reflected” on television.“The medium is dominated by white-supremacy concepts and racist attitudes,” he wrote. “TV excludes the reality of Negro life, with all its grievances, passions and aspirations, because to depict that life would be to indict (or perhaps enrich?) much of what is now white America and its institutions. And neither networks nor sponsors want that.”Mr. Belafonte emphasized that his 10-year-old son saw few Black heroes on television.“The nobility in his heritage and the values that could complement his positive growth and sense of manhood are denied him,” he wrote. “Instead, there is everything to tear him down and give him an inferiority complex. He will see the Negro only as a rioter and a social problem, never as a whole human being.”Roughly 25 years later, Mr. Belafonte was circumspect, suggesting in an interview with The Times that little had changed.“Even today, on the big screen, the pictures that are always successful are pictures where blacks appear in the way white America buys it,” he said in 1993. “And we’re told that what we really want to express is not profitable and is not commercially viable.”His politics and activismEven as Mr. Belafonte was in the prime of his entertainment career, he was intently focused on activism and civil rights.“Back in 1959,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in 1981, “I fully believed in the civil-rights movement. I had a personal commitment to it, and I had my personal breakthroughs — I produced the first black TV special; I was the first black to perform at the Waldorf Astoria. I felt if we could just turn the nation around, things would fall into place.”But Mr. Belafonte lamented that by the middle of the 1970s, the movement had ended.“When the doors of Hollywood shut on minorities and blacks at the end of the 70’s,” he said, “a lot of black artists had been enjoying the exploitation for 10 years. But one day they found the shop had closed down.”Mr. Belafonte remained outspoken about politics in his later years. In 2002 he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master”; he called President George W. Bush a “terrorist” in 2006, and lamented in 2012 that modern celebrities had “turned their back on social responsibility.”“There’s no evidence that artists are of the same passion and of the same kind of commitment of the artists of my time,” he told The Times in 2016. “The absence of black artists is felt very strongly because the most visible oppression is in the black community.”In 2016 and again in 2020, he visited the opinion pages of The Times to urge voters to reject Donald J. Trump.“The vote is perhaps the single most important weapon in our arsenal,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in the 2016 article. “The same things needed now are the same things needed before,” he added. “Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die. ” More

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      Richard Lewis, Diagnosed With Parkinson’s, Will Retire From Stand-Up Comedy

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      Mr. Lewis, whose roles include a long-running appearance on the HBO hit “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” said that he was diagnosed two years ago, and that he would continue to write and act.The comedian Richard Lewis is retiring from stand-up after having privately dealt with Parkinson’s disease, which he was diagnosed with two years ago, he said in a video posted on Twitter.Mr. Lewis, 75, said that he was diagnosed after he noticed stiffness in his walking and that he was shuffling his feet. Parkinson’s disease is an incurable disorder that affects the part of the brain that controls movement.“The last three and a half years, I’ve had sort of a rocky time, and people say, ‘You know, I haven’t heard from you, are you still touring?’” he said in a video post Sunday night to his nearly 240,000 Twitter followers. He described his diagnosis and said: “I’m finished with stand-up. I’m just focused on writing and acting.”pic.twitter.com/ngqm6TmC3x— Richard Lewis (@TheRichardLewis) April 24, 2023
      Mr. Lewis, who recently finished filming Season 12 of the HBO hit show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” with the comedian Larry David, said that he was lucky he did not get Parkinson’s disease until late in life and that the disease had progressed slowly, if at all.In addition to the Parkinson’s diagnosis, he has had four surgeries on his shoulder, back and hip in the past few years. “It was bad luck, but it’s life,” he said.Born in Brooklyn in 1947, Mr. Lewis started performing his own stand-up routines in 1971 at New York’s Improvisation and Pips, according to IMDB, the entertainment website. After appearing on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in 1974, he had a four-year run on the hit ABC series “Anything but Love,” co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Comedy Central included Mr. Lewis in the top 50 of its list of the top 100 comedians of all time.Mr. Lewis has also had a number of film roles, including as Prince John in the 1993 adventure comedy film “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.” In his memoir, “The Other Great Depression,” he described his recovery from addiction and finding spirituality.Mr. Lewis, who has performed on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” since its debut in 2000, has known Mr. David since they met at summer camp at age 12, Mr. Lewis said in a 2010 interview with Howard Stern.“Hated him, never saw him again until I became a comic, became best friends,” he said. “When I became a comic, he loved my work, and I loved his work.” More

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      ‘Baby J’ Review: John Mulaney Punctures His Persona

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      In his highly anticipated new Netflix special, the comic changes his pace to deliver bristlingly funny material about addiction, rehab and what it means to be likable.In his new special, “Baby J,” we hear John Mulaney before we see him.“In the past couple years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself,” says one of the most distinctive voices in comedy, as a black screen transitions into an empty backdrop of a stage. “And I’ve realized that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.”Then in a glamorous, swirling shot orchestrated by the theater director Alex Timbers, the camera gives the comic what he needs. It retreats to reveal Mulaney, 40, in a maroon suit, before circling to give us a picture of the commanding power of stardom. Shot from behind, we see his perspective: a hazy mass of people underneath chandeliers in between an ominous series of statues inside the Symphony Hall in Boston.It’s a striking image setting up a series of bristling comic vignettes that dig into Mulaney’s drug addiction, intervention by friends and stint in rehab. One is tempted to say this is his most personal work, but that isn’t quite right. That first shot tips us off to a theme: You can be invisible in front of a crowd. Mulaney’s comedy, however, has become spikier, pricklier, sometimes slower while remaining as funny as ever, like he’s a pitcher who learned to mix up speeds. He has performed versions of this material throughout the last two years, and this special arrives on Netflix so meticulously honed that the polish doesn’t even show.At some point in the last decade, John Mulaney stopped being merely a very successful comedian and transformed into something larger in the culture: the boyish sweetheart in a scene full of creeps, the wife guy who doesn’t need children to be happy, the aspirational theater kid. I didn’t grasp this shift until, in a short period of time, he checked into rehab, got a very public divorce, and had a child with the actress Olivia Munn. Judging by the reaction online, not to mention the texts on my phone, people had feelings about this — lots of them. Mulaney made the word “parasocial” go mainstream.For comics, being in the news like this can be tricky terrain, both a problem and an opportunity. “Likability is a jail,” Mulaney says at one point in “Baby J,” and his self-deprecating punch lines about his own vanity could be viewed as a prison break. He recalls that when he was young, he would feel jealousy toward the kid who had suddenly become the focus of his classmates’ sympathies when his grandfather died. “Did you ever, like me, hope …” he says, abruptly pausing his cadence to let the audience anticipate his embarrassing thoughts about the possible benefits of the death of grandparents.Mulaney has always spoken at a rapid if precise clip, heavily influenced by Spalding Gray, the pioneering confessional monologuist. (“If story rhythms were legally protected like song hooks, I would be in prison,” Mulaney once tweeted about Gray.) Mulaney’s rat-a-tat-tat delivery demanded you keep up with his thought process. It still does, but his cadence has become more intricate, and the biggest laughs in this new special come from making the audience think they are ahead of him, placing an idea in their head, then slowing down to a pause or stammer to let it percolate.This tactic requires patience and deft timing but can produce an intense response, the comedy equivalent of letting you hear the scratching under the bed while postponing the reveal of the monster long enough to let your imagination run amok.Some of Mulaney’s biggest laughs in “Baby J” come from making the audience think they are ahead of him, placing an idea in their head, then slowing down to a pause or stammer to let it percolate.Marcus Russell Price/NetflixThe stories he tells here present a desperate man, including one about a very sketchy doctor who gives him prescription drugs in exchange for some low-level deception and the removal of his shirt. Mulaney has such a chipper affect that he can put across grim material without weighing the show down, a superpower these days when ambitious comics are often expected to do more than tell jokes.His description of his intervention is a comic highlight, with act-outs of Nick Kroll and Fred Armisen. He’s hilariously flattered by the intervention’s star-studded attendance, “a ‘We Are the World’ of alternative comedians over the age of 40.” And when the woman running it says that she heard he was nice, he corrects her: “Don’t trust the persona.”The funniest part of the special, which at over an hour and 20 minutes is longer than most released by Netflix these days, is an elaborate description of a text he got in rehab from Pete Davidson that a nurse woke up him to read. “Some people suggested we did drugs together because he has tattoos and I am plain,” Mulaney says, a gentle poke at the shallowness of the media and public.This story takes off when we learn that Mulaney had put Davidson’s number in his phone under the name Al Pacino, which gives Mulaney a chance to perform the scene a second time from the nurse’s perspective, including an amazing impersonation of late-era Pacino. I can’t do this justice, except to say that the phrase “daddy khaki pants” made me laugh out loud.Silliness has long been central to Mulaney’s humor, and part of it comes from the incongruity of his seeming either younger than his age or much older (he favors archaic words like “nay” instead of “no”). The titles of his specials tell a Benjamin Button story: “New in Town,” followed by “The Comeback Kid” and “Kid Gorgeous,” followed by “Baby J.” The way it’s going, “Fetal Position” could be next.This is a highly anticipated special, and the modern stand-up event tends to be about something more messy than jokes. When Jerrod Carmichael came out of the closet, he ended his special abruptly, with loose ends; Chris Rock flashed raw emotion in his vengeful response to being slapped by Will Smith. Mulaney remains a tightly controlled performer. His special mostly avoids his divorce and new child, focusing instead on his drug addiction.That story has a happy ending, with him going to rehab and emerging not only sober, but also no longer needing the approval of others. It’s a dramatic, abrupt evolution. “What is someone going to do to me that’s worse than what I would do to myself?” he asks, hinting at his own self-destructive tendencies. “What, are you going to cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him.”That’s not the Mulaney his fans thought they knew. But it’s worth noting that if you revisit his first special from 2012, you’ll find a story about lying to a doctor to get drugs (Xanax in that case) as well as a confession that he had a drinking problem that started when he was 13 that he had since kicked.How much has changed with him is something we can never truly know. But we, the audience, can be naïve about our entertainers. We assume we understand them, and when they do something at odds with their persona, we feel betrayed, even angry. Yet no one ever asks us to take accountability for getting it wrong. You would think by now we would approach show business with a little more skepticism. But the truth is that we don’t want to, and great performers intuitively understand that. They’re gifted at creating intimacy with the viewer, at making us believe.John Mulaney appears to have become, as many veteran comics do, more cynical about this relationship, and speaks to it after relating an anecdote that makes him look bad. “As you process and digest how obnoxious, wasteful and unlikable that story is, just remember,” he says, eyes glassy, “that’s one I’m willing to tell you.”This suggests he has done even more unlikable things, but also that whatever you might think, you don’t really know him. An artist who respects his audience less would state this directly. John Mulaney lets the mind wander. More

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      ‘Evil Dead Rise’ Review: Mommy Issues

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      The matriarch of a family ends up demon-possessed in this blood-drenched entry in the long-running horror franchise.The horror movie, a genre known for sparsely populated locales like cabins in the woods and outer space, has been spending more time in the city.Some of the most creative scary movies of the past decade have taken place in an abandoned Detroit (“Barbarian,” “Don’t Breathe,” “It Follows”). In the recent “Scream,” Ghostface moved from the suburbs to the subway. And now the latest entry in the “Evil Dead” franchise spills swimming pools of blood mostly inside a dilapidated high-rise apartment in Los Angeles.One might explain the rise of urban horror as working on fears rooted in rising crime or the pandemic’s emptying out of downtowns, but that focuses more on content than form. And the pumping heart of the “Evil Dead” movies has never been ideas, but aesthetics. Sam Raimi’s original trilogy made stylish Grand Guignol gore that evoked Jean-Luc Godard’s response to a question about why he used so much blood. “Not blood,” he corrected. “Red.”Lee Cronin, who directed “Evil Dead Rise” with many more colors of bodily fluid, is a meticulous creator of stunning shots. His camera doesn’t move. It dances, shifting, spinning, occasionally knocked on its side like a running back in a collision. He avoids clichés like a face suddenly appearing in a mirror but finds new ways to scare with the reflection of an image. And the way he mixes the foreground and background is pleasingly disorienting. For him, clearly, the city offers a new palette. He does wonders with the warped view through a keyhole of an apartment. The trees that come alive and tie down victims in the original “Evil Dead” are replaced by rusty and aggressive wires from a rickety elevator.As for the plot, who cares? As with every “Evil Dead,” a creepy book is found and demonic hell breaks loose. That’s all that matters. This time, the characters are not a group of friends but a family, including a tattoo-artist mother, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), her kids (Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher) and their chain saw-wielding aunt (Lily Sullivan). But this shift also doesn’t make that much of a difference. There are so many horror movies these days that dig deeper into the anxieties and fears of family and motherhood; though still, bravo to whoever came up with the tagline: “Mommy loves you to death.”Character and story are secondary to an atmosphere of industrial gloom, clanking heaters, ambient neighbor noise and the clutter of families cramped together. There is a spectacular new monster at the end, and the most disturbing set pieces involve ordinary household objects like (gulp) a cheese grater.The previous “Evil Dead” movie from a decade ago was a more direct reboot, while this one pays homage to the past, but not too much. It opens with the signature shot of the franchise, a racing camera, low to the ground, but this sets up not a scare, but a joke — one I won’t ruin, but that pokes fun at the original, breaks the fourth wall and announces a new day. And yet, with a few exceptions, largely from the performance of Sutherland, who captures some of the borscht belt swagger of Freddy Krueger, it’s the last moment of arch comedy.With the original “Evil Dead” and particularly its sequel, Raimi didn’t just make splatter beautiful. He proved it could be hilarious. The two recent movies are far more grim. Even though there is an inherent absurdity to the excess on display, they seem less interested in the humor of horror. The absence of Bruce Campbell, the hammy protagonist of the original trilogy, is felt. Scary villains are a dime a dozen, but a funny hero? They’re hard to come by.Evil Dead RiseRated R for elevators of blood and sharp objects near eyeballs. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Benjamin Millepied Uses Movement to Reinvent ‘Carmen’ on Camera

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      The choreographer is trying his hand at filmmaking with an experiment that merges drama, dance and music.PARIS — Benjamin Millepied probably didn’t need to take on any new life challenges. A former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, the French-born Millepied has been an established, sought-after choreographer for almost two decades, has directed the Paris Opera Ballet, and runs the L.A. Dance Project, which he founded in 2012. And he recently moved back to Paris with his wife, the actress Natalie Portman, and their two young children.Now, Millepied, 45, has also directed his first feature film, “Carmen,” starring Paul Mescal, Melissa Barrera and Rossy de Palma, with an original score by Nicholas Britell (“Moonlight,” “Succession”). The movie is a hard-to-categorize blend of drama, dance and music that draws loosely on the narrative of Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, setting much of the action on the Mexico-U.S. border, with Mescal as a traumatized war veteran who saves Barrera’s Carmen, a Mexican immigrant fleeing from danger.Millepied had long been a keen amateur photographer and a cinephile, and had made a number of short dance films, when, through Portman, he met Britell. “We began to talk about movies and about collaborating,” Millepied said. “‘Carmen’ was the idea that stuck.”In a telephone conversation, Britell mentioned that he had recently found an email exchange with Millepied from more than 10 years ago in which they had discussed “Carmen” as “a touchstone for imagining an experimental dream world.” Britell added that although neither man was entirely sure what that meant at the time, “the wonderful thing about working with Ben is that he is open to following his instincts and to experimentation. He had such a strong sense of what he was looking for, but also left me to make my own discoveries about how the music would work.”The hybrid, idiosyncratic nature of the film was a draw for Mescal (“Normal People,” “Aftersun”). “It was so unconventional, outside of any genre I could firmly put my finger on, which was a challenge that really appealed to me,” he said.Mescal signed on because the concept “was so unconventional, outside of any genre I could firmly put my finger on, which was a challenge that really appealed to me.”Ben King/Goalpost Pictures/Sony Pictures ClassicsPart of that challenge, he added, was the dancing. “I am not a dancer, but Benjamin knows how people’s bodies work,” he said. “He knew what I could do, which was essentially to support Melissa.” Barrera (“In the Heights,” “Scream VI”) added that the experience of making the film had been “different from anything else I’ve done.”“I am a very rational actor, always overthinking things, wanting clarity,” she said. “Benjamin would say, ‘Trust me: Everything is communicated with body language and eyes.’”After the movie showed at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, critics were divided. For IndieWire, David Ehrlich wrote: “‘Carmen’ is stretched across a few too many borders to ever feel like it’s standing on solid ground. And yet, it’s undeniably exhilarating.” Other reviewers were less sure. “It’s an unsteady composition, a frenzied combination of willowy movement pieces, an ecstatic score and a too-loose narrative,” Lovia Gyarkye wrote in The Hollywood Reporter.Over coffee, Millepied discussed the critical reaction to the film, the allure of “Carmen” and working with actors. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you want to direct a film?I always had a personal hobby of taking photos, a need to really look at what I was interested in visually. And I have always loved film; I remember watching “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and Satyajit Ray’s “The Music Room,” when I was around 9 years old. When I was at the School of American Ballet in my teens, I went to movies all the time. I always had this dream at the back of my head about directing a film.What was the pull of “Carmen”?Early on, when I was starting to think about the story, I had dinner with [the director] Peter Sellars and mentioned I wanted to make a “Carmen” film. He got kind of passionate, and said, “You have to reinvent it, it’s a terrible story.” I thought he was right. It’s a 19th-century tale, where the woman gets punished for her sins by getting murdered, and can’t love or be loved. I was interested in her essence — her freedom, her fire.I wanted to tell this woman’s story. It definitely had something to do with my relationship with my mother, to a connection to family history and emotions.Did you think of your version as a musical?I was interested in how to tell a modern story, and use music and dance in a way that doesn’t pause the narrative, isn’t decorative but integral. In the end, the movie tells a lot of the story through movement.The collaboration with Nicholas was huge, and the part of making the film that was closest for me to making a ballet. We would sit at the piano and I would describe the scenes I had in mind, and he would write music and send it to me. It really influenced the mood and aesthetic — gave me visual ideas just as if I was creating a dance.What kind of preparation did you do?I have too much respect for the craft, effort and practice it takes to choreograph something not to be equally conscientious about directing. I watched and analyzed hundreds of films, read film histories and found amazing resources online. I fell in love with so many directors that I felt were choreographers, who moved people and the camera with such imagination and complexity. Elia Kazan, Kurosawa, Bresson, Antonioni, Sally Potter, Kubrick: I watched, I watched, I watched, and I learned.I also made a short narrative film, a “Romeo and Juliet,” with Margaret Qualley, which I never showed but was very helpful in showing me the process.Rossy de Palma with Barrera in the film. Barrera said Millepied asked her to communicate with her body language and eyes.Goalpost Pictures/Sony Pictures ClassicsTalking about the way you worked, Rossy de Palma said, “The camera becomes another dancer and dances with you.” Did your experience as a choreographer help as a film director?I think it helped with the physicality of the acting. We shot some of the movie in Australia, and while the actors were quarantining, I had them do Gaga classes, a technique for exploring every part of your body. It’s a great thing to do to make sure your expressiveness is not just cerebral. And it definitely helped with staging complex scenes. I think also, because of my background, I was unafraid of letting bodies speak: using physicality to tell the story.How did you approach directing actors?I had the benefit of listening to Natalie talk about her experiences and collaborations. It was daunting, definitely, and I had to rely on my instincts about what felt true to the story. Obviously you need to know the back story of your characters inside out, but you also have to let them surprise you. I was lucky to have great actors. We were playful, we were free with the dialogue, and we always tried to see if there were interesting places to go.The film had mixed reviews at Toronto, some quite negative. How did you feel about that?I have too much experience of being reviewed to think about that too much. When George Balanchine premiered Liebeslieder Walzer, a masterpiece of 20th-century ballet, someone said to him, “Look how many people are leaving.” He said, “Look how many people are staying.”I make my work with as much discipline as I can, and I am very lucky to be able to do that; it’s a great honor. The financial stakes for movies are very different to making a ballet. But, you know, if I can’t make films freely, I’ll make furniture. There are always ways to be creative. More

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      ‘A Tourist’s Guide to Love’ Review: A Wearyingly Familiar Trip

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      Rachael Leigh Cook stars in this bland rom-com as a travel executive exploring Vietnam and getting over a breakup.The first thing we learn about Amanda (Rachael Leigh Cook) in “A Tourist’s Guide to Love” is that she works for a high-end agency called Tourista World Travel. But nobody in this Netflix film even comments on the fact that “turista” is slang for vacation-wrecking diarrhea. That puzzling choice and its utter lack of consequences are the only surprise in Steven Tsuchida’s film, a rom-com that so scrupulously fulfills every cliché of the genre, it might as well have been devised by ChatGPT.Amanda is dispatched to Vietnam to check out a small tour company that Tourista is considering buying to develop its market in the area. The assignment is also a good distraction: She was recently dumped by her dull accountant boyfriend, John (Ben Feldman). Going undercover as a regular tourist, albeit an extremely well-prepared one, she’s immediately drawn to the floppy-haired guide, Sinh (Scott Ly). He is the kind of dreamboat who has both abs and sensitivity, and can show Amanda not just his country’s beauty, but how to enjoy life.Sinh eventually doffs his shirt at the beach and emerges from the water in resplendent slow motion, because the clichés here are as tightly packed in as tchotchkes in a traveler’s suitcase: Amanda is a perky American Type A; village elders are cute as buttons and wise as Yoda; street food is tantalizing; jaded Westerners rediscover themselves as they ditch their phones and bask in a rural experience made only sweeter by the knowledge that it’s temporary. The soundtrack’s catchy Vietnamese songs provide the only fizz in this otherwise flat concoction.A Tourist’s Guide to LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Ghosted’ Review: A C.I.A. Meet Cute

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      A date becomes a spy skirmish in this action-heavy, paint-by-numbers Apple TV+ rom-com starring Chris Evans and Ana de Armas.“Ghosted,” a frothy spy-thriller rom-com in the tradition of “Romancing the Stone” and “The Jewel of the Nile,” is one of the least convincing movies I have ever seen. I don’t just mean that the dialogue is trite and phony, or that the characters feel inauthentic, or that the action is badly choreographed, or even that the plot is paper-thin and contrived, although all of this is regrettably true.I mean that “Ghosted” barely seems like a real movie. It has movie stars, in the figures of Ana de Armas and Chris Evans (and, as the villain, Adrien Brody). It has a competent director, Dexter Fletcher, whose hit “Rocketman” wasn’t half-bad.But this tedious, unfunny, screamingly unoriginal romantic adventure film is so flimsy and so insubstantial that it’s practically vaporous.Evans, who can be charming, stars as Cole, a clean-cut, down-to-earth farmer who dreams of publishing a book on the history of agriculture. While working at his family market stall one afternoon, he meets Sadie (de Armas), and within minutes the two embark on a high-speed fling. But it turns out that Sadie is a C.I.A. agent, code name the Taxman, and in a gender-reversed “True Lies” situation, Cole is swiftly embroiled in Sadie’s high-stakes world of international espionage, whisked off in escapades across London and far-flung destinations that look like they were filmed on green screens.Evans and de Armas are likable actors, but any charm they might have mustered for each other is torpedoed by the facile writing, featuring such memorable zingers as “I have dated some crazies in my day, but you are certifiable!”The spy stuff is also laughable. The movie seems more concerned with shoehorning in transparently fan-baiting cameos (including Sebastian Stan and Ryan Reynolds) than with developing anything remotely like credible stakes, while the action set pieces suffer from unimaginative staging and some of the cheapest-looking visual effects in recent memory.GhostedRated PG-13 for some graphic violence, torture, strong language and mild sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More