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      ‘Juror #2’ Review: Clint Eastwood Hands Down a Tough Verdict

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      In his latest (and perhaps last) movie as a director, Eastwood casts a skeptical eye at the criminal justice system in a mystery starring Nicholas Hoult.Clint Eastwood has been such a familiar force in American cinema for so long that it’s easy to think you’ve got him figured out. Yet here he is again, at 94, with a low-key, genuine shocker, “Juror #2,” the 42nd movie that he’s directed and a lean-to-the-bone, tough-minded ethical showdown that says something about the law, personal morality, the state of the country and, I’m guessing, how he feels about the whole shebang. He seems riled up, to judge from the anger that simmers through the movie, which centers on a struggle to find justice within — though perhaps despite — an imperfect system and in the face of towering self-interest.Justin (a very fine Nicholas Hoult) has just finished fixing up a baby nursery at home when he walks into a Savannah, Ga., courtroom to report for jury duty. He and his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), are expecting, and tying themselves into knots of worry because several years earlier, their last pregnancy ended tragically. For them, his civic duties couldn’t have come at a worse time. Even so, Justin shows up, eager and attentive, and before long is seated on a jury in a criminal case that takes an abrupt, unexpected turn: The defendant has been charged with murder, and Justin quickly realizes that he himself might be the real killer.Did he or didn’t he is one question, and the start of a mystery, both procedural and existential, that soon finds Justin playing at once a freaked-out juror, potential culprit and dogged detective. The defendant on trial, James (Gabriel Basso), has been accused of murdering his girlfriend, Kendell (Francesa Eastwood, the director’s daughter). They’d been drinking at a local dive when they began arguing. They went outside, where it was dark and pouring rain, and continued to fight in front of a smattering of customers who had followed them. She walked off alone, he trailed after her in his truck, and before long she was dead.It’s a deliciously twisted setup, like something out of an old film noir in which the hero becomes the main suspect and, by desperate default, also slips into the role of a detective working the case. In this movie, voir dire has scarcely ended — Eastwood, who famously likes to work fast, races through the typical preliminaries — when Justin is sweating in the jury box and listening to the prosecutor, Faith (Toni Collette), and the defense lawyer, Eric (Chris Messina), make their cases. Before long, the lawyers have made their closing arguments, and Justin is sequestered in a room with 11 people who are also on the case.Eastwood takes a bit of time to find his groove. The opener is, by turns, pokey and rushed, and you can almost feel his impatience as he lines up the story’s pieces. He doesn’t seem to have spent much time thinking about the movie’s visuals; they look fine, I wish they looked better. He seems especially uninterested in Justin’s home life, and given how dreary and claustrophobic it looks, you can hardly blame him. Once the trial begins and the lawyers start prodding and probing, Eastwood settles in nicely. Justin realizes that he was at the bar the same night as the defendant and victim, triggering a series of jagged flashbacks that, as the trial continues, grow longer, more detailed and, in time, help fill in the larger picture.Written by Jonathan A. Abrams, “Juror #2” is a whodunit in which justice turns out to be as much on trial as the defendant. Both sides seem to have a weak case. The defendant is shady, the autopsy inconclusive, the only witness questionable, and there’s an enigma among the jurors, most of whom just want to go home. And while Eric nevertheless delivers a righteously indignant defense, Faith seems overly eager to wrap things up, partly because she’s running for district attorney and already fake-smiling like a glad-handing politician. Their arguments are shrewdly handled, pared down and delivered in a dynamic volley of edits that turn their speeches into a he-said, she-said duel, with a stricken Justin caught in the middle.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 Graduates’ Review: How to Move On

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      In this delicate drama set in Utah, three individuals deal with survivor’s guilt a year after a school shooting takes the life of a loved one.In “The Graduates,” a delicate high-school drama by the writer-director Hannah Peterson, students, teachers and parents grapple with survivor’s guilt a year after a shooting transforms their lives.We never see the violence. Instead, Peterson’s camera lingers on locker-lined hallways and newly-installed metal detectors, places and objects that bear traces of a tragic past.This haunted restraint is also what makes the performances so affecting. The film centers on three characters united by their connection to Tyler, one of the shooting’s victims: Genevieve (a stirring Mina Sundwall) was Tyler’s girlfriend; Ben (Alex Hibbert from “Moonlight”), his best friend; and John (John Cho), his father as well as the school’s basketball coach.Genevieve, a senior, is preparing to graduate, but she feels little excitement for the future. At the same time, Ben has recently moved back to the area after transferring schools, and John is waiting to move to Houston (where his wife and daughter have relocated) until Tyler’s class, specifically his basketball teammates, walk the stage.“No one knows how to talk about it,” Genevieve says of the shooting and Tyler’s death to her concerned mother (Maria Dizzia). This mental blockage is underscored by a mood of quiet agitation. Naturalistic scenes of typically cheerful teen activities — diner hangouts, lake swims and bike rides through peaceful suburban streets — carry a melancholic undercurrent. And Sundwall, Hibbert and Cho inhabit their parts with a coiled grief while slowly, reassuringly, opening themselves to find hope in camaraderie.Set in Utah and subtly attentive to its community’s religious values and economic conditions, the film is ultimately narrow in purview, limited to the trauma of losing a loved one without exploring other reasonable shades of emotion: What about the rage victims feel about the seemingly unstoppable recurrence of gun violence in this country? The fear and anxiety of re-entering public life?Peterson’s script is frustratingly single-note and occasionally bends toward unearned sentimentality. Still, “The Graduates” feels true to its milieu; its emotional clarity impressive given the loaded subject matter and the film’s subdued style.The GraduatesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Blitz’ Review: Love in the Ruins

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      Steve McQueen’s World War II drama may appear conventional on the surface, but don’t miss what it’s really doing.World War II is almost certainly the big screen’s most immortalized conflict, and for good reason. It broke just as cinema was beginning to mature as a form of entertainment, and footage from the front narrated by peppy tales of victory was part of many people’s moviegoing experience. What’s more, though, the outlines of World War II could be boiled down to clean tales of good versus evil, bravery versus cruelty — the sort of stories that make good two-hour feature films.As the historian Elizabeth Samet argues in her excellent 2021 book “Looking for the Good War,” the heroism performed in Hollywood’s World War II movies soon became the filter through which all American involvement in foreign wars was seen and encouraged. In the aftermath of war, she writes, “causes are retrofitted,” and “participants fondly recall heroic gestures.” The tendency extends far beyond America, because the tale of valor richly rewarded and goodness winning the day is the kind of World War II movie we want to see — and the kind we mostly have.Yet most stories during the war didn’t end in glory and goodness. They ended in death and dismemberment, heartache and trauma, lives destroyed, families ripped apart. Yes, the good guys won. But winning a war still means losing.The British film industry is hardly immune to the triumphalist tales, and watching “Blitz,” I began to have a strong suspicion that those are precisely the movie’s target. The filmmaker Steve McQueen, whose film “12 Years a Slave” won the Oscar for best picture in 2014, works with the eye of a protesting artist, as aware of form as he is of content.In his 2018 film “Widows,” about women pulling off a heist, the form is that of a crime thriller. But the real subject is the class and economic contradictions of Chicago, which McQueen paints into the background except in one subtle, unforgettable scene: As characters have a conversation of some note in a car, the camera stays resolutely pointed out through the windshield, and we watch the setting starkly change from run-down projects to exquisite mansions in a matter of minutes. It’s a gutting accompaniment to the machinations of power being discussed in the car. You can’t really take one without the other.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 Gutter’ Review: A Phenom Is Born

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      This bowling comedy, co-directed by the standup comedian Yassir Lester and his brother Isaiah, has absurdity to spare.The pantheon of Great Bowling Comedies is a small one. You’ve got the terribly rude 1996 “Kingpin,” directed by the Farrelly brothers and featuring an over-the-top, vulgar performance by Bill Murray as a maniacal strikes competitor. Then there’s the Coen brothers’ 1998 “The Big Lebowski,” in which Jeff Bridges, in the sort-of title role, looks like a slightly buzzed beacon of sanity compared with his fellow frame enthusiasts. “The Gutter,” written and co-directed by the standup comedian Yassir Lester and his brother Isaiah, is even more overtly absurdist than those earlier offerings.“The Gutter” tells the story of a Black phenom, Walt (Shameik Moore), achieving stardom in a sport dominated, if not defined, by white men. Walt — his elusive last name is a running joke — has a way with a strike that is discovered while he is tending bar at his aunt’s alley, which of course is in imminent danger of going out of business. Walt is not an ambitious man. His unlikely friend Skunk (D’Arcy Carden), a bowling observer, advises him to start putting away some money after he has won a few tournaments. “Don’t you have any dreams or anything?” she asks him. He considers this for a couple of blinks, and answers, “A threesome?”In addition to ridiculous — think the Wayans brothers’ parody pictures, or “Napoleon Dynamite” (that movie’s director, Jared Hess, is an executive producer here) — the humor is almost uniformly broad. The organization sponsoring the contests here is the “Super League of Bowling,” known as SLOB. And Susan Sarandon, as a champion bowler compelled out of retirement by Walt’s success, smokes and mugs with confident abandon, recalling Cecilia Monroe, the egomaniacal soap star she played on “Friends.”The GutterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Chasing Chasing Amy’ Review: A Fan’s Favorite

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      Sav Rodgers sets out to define the legacy of Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy” in this documentary, which is elevated by one instructive interview.Partway through “Chasing Chasing Amy,” Sav Rodgers, a first-time feature director and a mega fan of the 1997 movie he’s exploring, sits to interview the film’s star, Joey Lauren Adams. He begins to discuss the role when Adams cuts in.“Are you looking to me for something that I can’t give you?” she asks Rodgers. “I don’t know what it is you want from me.”The moment marks a turning point in Rodgers’s agreeable documentary, which sets out to provide a contemporary lens on “Chasing Amy.” It opens with the director sharing that he once used the story as a queer field guide and a source of comfort amid adolescent struggles. He then calls on writers and thinkers to unpack the movie’s themes and fraught position in the queer canon.But it is not until his interview with Adams that Rodgers touches on the most urgent questions of his cinematic survey. What do filmmakers owe their fans? Who can lay claim to a movie? And who defines its legacy?Adams goes on to share painful memories from that era, including leering Hollywood men — Harvey Weinstein was the producer — and jealous barbs from the “Chasing Amy” director Kevin Smith, her boyfriend at the time.Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution. It’s a convenient ending, but one senses that Rodgers can’t see that, in his overview of the movie’s cultural impact, some perspectives are more instructive than others.Chasing Chasing AmyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Absolution’ Review: Brain Drain

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      Liam Neeson plays a regretful gangster with a serious medical condition in this drab, downbeat action movie.In 2019, Liam Neeson teamed up with the Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland to make the action thriller “Cold Pursuit.” It did not go well.Nevertheless, the two are back in harness for “Absolution,” a dreary gangster tale as depressing as Neeson’s repeat portrayals of aging tough guys-turned-reluctant avengers. This time, he’s a rumpled, rueful alcoholic and an enforcer for a Boston crime boss played by Ron Perlman. (Tony Gayton’s script is so lazy it declines to even name most of its characters.) The hook here is that Neeson’s leg-breaking character, let’s call him Punchy, is starting to forget important details like where he lives and the names of his criminal cohort. If he hurries, he’ll have just enough time to reconnect with his long-estranged daughter (Frankie Shaw), bed a feisty barfly (Yolonda Ross) and maybe rescue a sex-trafficking victim or two before succumbing to his disease. Or an associate’s bullet.Wrapped in drab visuals and a doomy atmosphere, “Absolution” paints a world where lowlifes rule and neither doctors nor priests can be trusted. Yet there are moments when the beatdowns pause and a misty melancholy shines through: Punchy, hands shaking, writing reminders in a little notebook, or having hallucinatory chats in a fishing boat with his long-dead, abusive father. The movie seeps sentimentality; but Neeson’s scenes with Shaw, who created and starred in the scrappy Showtime series “SMILF” (2017-19), have a touching authenticity, and Ross’s character is so spiky and warm she offers relief from Punchy’s soggy self-centeredness.Watching “Absolution,” I was reminded that Neeson is now 72 and his possible weariness with this kind of role might be lending credence to his character’s frailties. The problem with movies about declining antiheroes is that their arcs can only bend in one direction.AbsolutionRated R for violent men and damaged women.. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We Live in Time’ Inspires a Thousand Crying Selfies

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      After seeing “We Live in Time,” social media users filmed themselves sobbing, creating a loop of people seeking an emotional release and then sharing it with the world.When they came across videos on TikTok of people crying after they watched “We Live in Time,” a new romantic drama starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, Carmen Wells and her five roommates decided to watch the film.After the screening, “We were the last ones in the movie theater, sitting on the floor, sobbing,” said Ms. Wells, 19, a student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.Thinking that their reactions were amusing, and wanting to encourage others to see the movie, Ms. Wells made her own video.“This is me before ‘We Live in Time,’” Ms. Well says in the video, looking composed and casual in a hoodie and glasses. A few seconds later, a shaky hand captures Ms. Wells walking on the street, sobbing as she cries out, “He loves her so much!” Another few seconds pass, and Ms. Wells is holding the camera again. She turns it toward herself. “This is me,” she says through tears.The video, which she posted last week, joined a wave of “crying selfies” that fans of “We Live in Time” have created in response to the film’s heart-wrenching story about love and loss. Crying selfies, which have gained traction in recent years thanks to posts by celebrities like Justin Bieber and Bella Hadid, are photos or videos usually shot in response to overwhelming stress or to an emotional crisis like a breakup. But in this new iteration, the videos are endorsing an experience: Go see this movie if you want a good cry.The TikTok call has been heard: Eighty-five percent of the people who saw “We Live in Time” were under 35 years old, according to Deadline. A24, the film’s production company, has leaned in, distributing branded tissue packs at select screenings on opening weekend.

      @_catman0 straight blubbering (everyone needs to see this movie) #weliveintime #andrewgarfield #sobbing @Maeve @brie @Mary Cooper @Danielle ♬ original sound – carmone

      @brianna.kearney We Live In Time is just wow. #weliveintime #florencepugh #andrewgarfield #movie #movies #moviestowatch ♬ QKThr – Aphex Twin

      @cameliacgarcia this is what happens when you don’t watch the trailer and go in blind @We Live In Time so good tho 🥹 #weliveintime #weliveintimemovie #andrewgarfield #florencepugh #paratii #fypシ ♬ Fine line – Instrumental – Kapa Boy 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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      ‘Youth (Hard Times)’ Review: Working Till They Drop

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      In Wang Bing’s riveting new documentary about Chinese garment workers, a generation asks: What good is money when you have no rights?Wang Bing calls his new films about Chinese garment workers the “Youth” trilogy for good reason: Most of the people shown clocking marathon hours at sewing machines are barely in their 20s. Maybe that’s why the concrete buildings where they both work and live can feel like dystopian dorms. The men and women split their time largely between cluttered workshops downstairs and bunkrooms upstairs, where they trade war stories of long hours, short wages and bad bosses.It’s a story as old as time, or industrialization, which may be why the English title of the trilogy’s second entry, “Youth (Hard Times),” evokes Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel set in a mill town. Wang’s nearly four-hour documentary depicts the migrants who trek to these streets of Zhili in the district of Huzhou City and earn “bitter money” (to borrow the title of an earlier Wang film). To watch them toil away despite thankless conditions is to admire their resilience but also feel their time being lost.“Youth (Hard Times)” leans into the obstacles thrown at workers and how, despite iron nerves and late nights, the house always wins. Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation. Some tales are mundane but maddening: A man is pushed to work faster with a broken machine. Others combine the ache of short fiction and the brutality of a police report: A slender young man fumes to friends about getting locked up in a police station over a wage dispute, and then his boss stiffs him when his “pay book” (logging his hours) goes missing.Wang’s camerawork feels keen, even personal. Often we hustle along the buildings’ open-air terraces, which lend a theatrical sense of everybody being in everybody else’s business. Days blur into nights — the workrooms don’t seem to have much sunlight — and Wang follows the workers’ youthful energies and comings and goings, which set the film’s pace over the machine-gun chatter of sewing desks. In one workshop, one man starts working shirtless, prompting someone to quip, “That’s a bit sexy.”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