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11 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week
Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.Critic’s PickA double dose of dark comedy.Sebastian Stan in “A Different Man.”A24‘A Different Man’Edward (Sebastian Stan), a man with a condition that warps his facial features, discovers his problems are internal after he gets cosmetic surgery and meets another man, Oswald (Adam Pearson), who has the same condition in this dark comedy written and directed by Aaron Schimberg.From our review:Like many literary and cinematic fables before it — think of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” or “The Elephant Man” — “A Different Man” is really a morality play, of a kind. It’s just that the moral isn’t all that straightforward. It’s about a societal obsession with particular standards of beauty. The fact that conventionally attractive people, or people with certain features and skin colors, tend to encounter more success in life simply by dint of genetic luck is explicit throughout. But that fact is so obvious, and stated so blatantly outright, that it feels like a joke.In theaters. Read the full review.Like two cool cats who just swallowed the canary.Brad Pitt and George Clooney enter their Redford-Newman era in “Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts.Apple TV‘Wolfs’George Clooney and Brad Pitt play underworld fixers — the people you call to make criminal evidence disappear — who begrudgingly team up for a job.From our review:It isn’t remotely tense or mysterious, and its modest thrills derive wholly from the spectacle of two beautifully aged, primped, pampered and expensive film stars going through the motions with winks and a degree of brittle charm. The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, “Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s PickGirls gone gory.Demi Moore in “The Substance.”Mubi‘The Substance’In this body horror stunner directed by Coralie Fargeat, Elisabeth (Demi Moore) is an aging starlet who tries a new drug that promises to create a younger, better version of herself (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley). It performs as advertised, but with disastrous and disgusting consequences.From our review:Be warned: This is a very gory and often bombastic movie. The logic is also not airtight, especially when it comes to whether, and how, Sue and Elisabeth share a consciousness. … It’s all metaphor, though, not in the least bit meant for a literal analysis. That’s an awkward thing to mix into a movie that turns every subtext into text, which means its constant hammering of its points starts to feel patronizing, as if we might not get it. But it’s also quite funny, and the worse things become for Elisabeth, the harder it is not to giggle with glee. By the end, things have become monstrous and mad.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s PickSisters, under the skin.Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne in “His Three Daughters,” directed by Azazel Jacobs.NetflixWe 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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Natasha Lyonne’s Success Is Driven by a Sense of Mortality
Natasha Lyonne has her funeral all planned out.Not just planned, really, but choreographed, produced and directed, complete with music cues and writing prompts, to calibrate the emotion just right. “Otherwise it can run long,” she explained. So Lyonne, the downtown vivant actress, writer and director, has diligently assigned her passel of famous friends “jobs that they didn’t want.”There will be a month of commemorative screenings at Film Forum and songs by Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“I have a sworn promise that she performs; I’m very grateful”) and the “Color Purple” star Danielle Brooks, because her voice “breaks my heart.” The comedian John Mulaney will be on hand to punch up material. “I actually tasked him with writing speeches for people that wouldn’t want to get onstage,” Lyonne said, like her BFF Chloë Sevigny. “I was like: You need to give Chloë some jokes.”The plot she acquired, at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, alongside her boyfriend at the time, Fred Armisen, she has now graciously ceded to his wife, Riki Lindhome. “I probably don’t want to be buried in Los Angeles anyway, if I’m honest,” she allowed. But she’s still making him the funerary musical supervisor.That Lyonne, at 45, has thought at length about her own demise is, to anyone who knows her or her oeuvre, not surprising. All of her recent, most celebrated projects — including “Russian Doll,” the Emmy-winning Netflix series; “Poker Face,” the retro crime procedural on Peacock; and her latest role, in the Netflix drama “His Three Daughters” — find her confronting life’s end. She does it with a spectacular, bewitching buoyancy. Even in “His Three Daughters,” in which she displays an unexpected reserve (but exuberant hair) opposite Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen as estranged sisters caring for their father in his last days. It’s earning her Oscar talk.As a producer, Lyonne “likes the grind and the hustle, and the hard work that comes with it,” said Amy Poehler. “That’s not always the case.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesSo, when we found ourselves in an East Village restaurant on a drizzly Friday night, ordering a dessert made of Pop Rocks and talking about death, it felt just as the universe — or New York City, same difference — intended.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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‘Happy Clothes’ Review: Patricia Field Doc Is Pleasantly Chaotic
“Happy Clothes” covers her work on “Emily in Paris” and “Sex and the City,” as well as her time as a tastemaker in the 1970s and ’80s underground.Patricia Field likes, as she puts it, “happy clothes.” If you’ve seen her work, you get it; if you’ve watched TV, you have probably seen her work. The fashion maven is one of the most celebrated and influential costume designers of the past three decades, with “Emily in Paris,” “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Sex and the City” among her credits. Michael Selditch’s new documentary, “Happy Clothes: A Film About Patricia Field” (in theaters and on demand), follows Field as she works on the second season of the Starz comedy “Run the World,” but the feature is really a celebration of her long career.A movie like this can head in a lot of directions, and a possible weakness of “Happy Clothes” is that it tries to go in all of them. There are conversations with Field’s friends and collaborators, including the “Devil Wears Prada” director David Frankel, the “Sex and the City and “Emily in Paris” creator Darren Star, and the actresses Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall and Lily Collins. Field’s work in the past as the owner of a well-known boutique that bears her name comes to life through archival footage and interviews, while observational images show her working with assistants, shopping for pieces and going to sets.There’s just a lot here. But with a subject like Field, the mild chaos feels pleasantly appropriate. Her taste runs toward the conspicuous and bold, and several interviewees — particularly Parker, who became a fashion icon partly because of her willingness to wear anything Field selected — note that her choices can be shocking at first. Prints and patterns, gems and silhouettes, neons and bold accessories: You never really know what you’ll get when you work with Field.But that’s why people love her. Her style, as she says, is happy. “I like clothes that don’t die,” she explains, a statement that reveals she’s always thinking about longevity. Field is amazingly energetic — her 80th birthday approaches as the film begins — and she’s interested only in the future, telling someone at one point that she doesn’t keep an archive because she’s always looking forward.It’s probably ironic, then, that the most illuminating element of “Happy Clothes” is a sequence in which her taste now is linked to her history as a central figure in New York’s underground culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Former employees and customers attest to what it meant to have a place — her store — where they could be unapologetically queer or trans or just interested in fashion, where they didn’t have to hide their identities. Field was ahead of her time in more ways than one, and this history suggests that she has been practicing an exuberant joy her whole career. That, “Happy Clothes” says, is her real legacy. More
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After ‘The Substance,’ Watch These Body Horror Movies
As “The Substance” hits theaters, here’s a look at eight other films in the goopy subgenre of body horror.In some scary movies, the sources of horror are closer than in your town or even in your house — they’re in your very own skin.These films belong to a subgenre called body horror: movies that depict various transformations, mutations and degradations of the human form. The terrifying changes often emphasize the futility of our efforts to control our horribly unpredictable bodies. We like to think of ourselves as a mind managing a body, but these movies remind us that we’re ultimately at the mercy of the meat sacks we walk around in.Coralie Fargeat’s newest film, “The Substance” (in theaters), starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, participates in this robust tradition, depicting an aging starlet who uses an experimental new drug to create a younger, better version of herself. As you might guess, the treatment causes some unexpected and disgusting side effects, satirizing society’s (and particularly Hollywood’s) obsession with wanting women to stay stereotypically beautiful and youthful — at any cost.If you’re looking for a primer on the subgenre, here are eight films that will give you a crash course in the gutsy, the gory and the goopy.‘The Thing’ (1982)Stream it on Peacock.Kurt Russell in “The Thing.”Universal Pictures/AlamyWe 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 Octagon Inside the Sphere: Bloody Fights and Soaring Films
To amplify the first live athletic competition at the Las Vegas landmark, the Ultimate Fighting Championship turned to Hollywood.After an animated vignette of conquistadors ransacking Indigenous Mexican temples played on the Sphere’s enormous video screen and the venue’s haptic seats shook violently, two mixed martial arts fighters approached each other on Mexican Independence Day weekend. As they battled in the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s caged octagon, birds soared across a backdrop of temple ruins.The Sphere — a futuristic orb-like structure with more than 700,000 square feet of programmable screens inside and out — has primarily hosted musicians, keynote speakers and filmmakers since opening its radiant gaze upon the Las Vegas Strip in July 2023.It was one of those concerts last year, part of U2’s nearly six-month residency, that amazed and inspired Dana White, the U.F.C.’s chief executive. For months he has grandiosely proclaimed that he would hold the first live athletic competition at the Sphere, which can typically seat about 17,000 people.The company invested $20 million into Saturday night’s spectacle, called Noche U.F.C., as White challenged his staff to mesh a brutal, polarizing blood sport with pageantry and flair by working with award-winning Hollywood creators.“We showed everybody tonight what’s possible,” White said after the fight, which he said broke U.F.C. records for ticket and merchandise sales. “You can do more than just concerts here and pull them off and make them great. So who’s next?”The U.F.C. filled more than 700,000 square feet of programmable screens with tributes on Mexican Independence Day weekend.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 Babadook’ Is Still an Unnerving Dream 10 Years Later
Back in theaters for its 10th anniversary, the haunting movie never really left, with a legacy that includes an entire horror subgenre.Before I even saw “The Babadook” I was scared of the Babadook. He quickly became such an icon of horror that the idea was immediately unsettling.Invented by the Australian director Jennifer Kent for her 2014 film, Mister Babadook is a creature from a children’s pop-up book that suddenly appears in the home of Amelia (Essie Davis) and her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). The brute is crudely drawn, with a top hat, long spindly fingers and teeth that form a grimace. “If it’s in a word or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook,” the foreboding red hardcover reads.Despite his silly name and somewhat dapper attire, the Babadook is the stuff of nightmares, inexplicable but threatening. And as you watch Kent’s film, the terror only intensifies. You never actually see the corporeal form of the Babadook, but he infiltrates Amelia, an exhausted mother grieving after her husband was killed while driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. He has grown into an erratic little boy who believes monsters are lurking in their house and has behavioral issues in school. When the Babadook book suddenly appears out of nowhere, his fears seem justified. Amelia, however, tries to pretend everything is normal.She has buried her pain, allowing it to fester into a bloodthirsty animosity toward her own spawn. The Babadook latches on to what’s been growing inside of her.When the film was originally released, it grossed just a little over $960,000 domestically (and a little over $10 million worldwide). Yet like the Babadook himself, the film has cast a long shadow that grows only more encompassing as it celebrates its 10th anniversary with a rerelease starting Thursday.The character became an internet phenomenon, even making an appearance in the Urban Dictionary. One popular post from 2016 featured the comedy writer Katie Dippold announcing that for Halloween she had “dressed as the Babadook but my friend’s house had more of a grown-ups drinking wine vibe,” complete with a photo of herself out of place in full Babadook drag. Somehow the creature also turned into a gay icon. (Well, he is quite fabulous.)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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‘Never Let Go’ Review: Do the Woods Have Eyes?
Halle Berry plays the ultimate helicopter parent in this new horror movie, where evil lurks in the trees beyond the family cabin.Morbid moments are frequently the bread and butter of horror movies, but “Never Let Go” serves them up in helpings that become repellent. It’s directed by Alexandre Aja, whose past work, including a remake of “The Hills Have Eyes,” is also as crass and pretentious in almost equal measure.Halle Berry, the star of “Never Let Go,” plays the mother of two young boys, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), who all live in a cabin in a forest clearing. The surrounding woods are tangled and dark. She and the kids have to tie thick ropes around themselves when they leave the cabin to forage for food. According to Berry’s matriarch, “the Evil” is in those woods, and one touch will infect a family member, who would then bring it back to the house. So they all hold onto the rope to stay safe.The movie plays peekaboo with its central conceit — is “the Evil” real, or is mom just off her rocker? There are some jump scares at the outset, followed by a series of nonsensical plot turns that may annoy viewers.After one of the boys does something unspeakably stupid (he’s a kid, yes, and an ostensibly brainwashed one, yes, but still), it’s hard to keep caring. Berry is drained of glamour for her role here, and she performs with fierceness; the two boys are also stalwart, but what the movie asks these child performers to do doesn’t add up to effective horror — it’s just opportunistic and gross.Never Let GoRated R for language, grisliness and morbid imagery. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More
