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      ‘Carmen’ Review: We’re Not in Spain Anymore

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      The choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s directing debut is an of-the-moment but scattered take on a classic love story.You can’t have “Carmen” without the color red.In the choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s debut film — an adaptation of the classic story, previously told in prose by Prosper Mérrimée and more famously in opera by Georges Bizet — it’s there from the start, in the opening titles, the pedals of a rose, the title heroine’s shirt.But nothing more than color signifies that this is a “Carmen” tale, that old psychosexual drama of a male soldier so seduced by a Spanish femme fatale, he forgets his duties and is driven to jealousy and murder. No, here Carmen is instead a young Mexican woman both headstrong and naïve, restless and searching — much like the film itself.That is disappointing for a movie seemingly assembled from promise: in Millepied, an enterprising dance-maker who pioneered small-screen performance during the pandemic; in Nicholas Britell, a composer of knockout, earworm-rich soundtracks; in Rossy de Palma, an alluring, otherworldly fixture of Pedro Almodóvar films; and in Paul Mescal, a fast-rising, Oscar-nominated star capable of conveying swaths of biography and feeling in a sadly handsome smile.They make for a film with elements of dance on camera, musical, of-the-moment melodrama and visual poetry — but without a thorough commitment to any one of those and few, if any, moments of coalescence. The screenplay is spare to the point of meager; characters speak in clichés, like claiming that music won’t pay the bills, and are divided, boringly, into categories of unequivocally good (Mexican immigrants mainly) and bad (all white characters except Mescal’s Aidan).No dialogue, anyway, communicates more effectively than Britell’s soundtrack, a constant presence, tense and evocative, functioning like opera by fully integrating with, if not driving, the story rather than underscoring it. The movie also says more through movement than speech: percussive flamenco; climactic krumping in a fight sequence starring and set to an original song by the D.O.C.; a touching pas de deux of Carmen’s balletic fluidity and Aidan’s awkward, failing attempts to match her.Little seems to keep this couple of lost souls — he a tormented war vet, she an undocumented Mexican immigrant on the run — together other than fear. As Carmen, Melissa Barrera is beautiful but somewhat blank, an obtuse mystery next to Mescal, his face having the shape and solemnity of a Roman statue, but eyes that repeatedly betray his pain. De Palma is a welcome source of levity as Masilda, a nightclub owner who tells Aidan that if she were younger she would eat him up like a plate of chilaquiles.Masilda tells Carmen that her name means poem, that she is “the most beautiful poem made into a woman.” Yet much of the film’s poetry comes from the cinematography of Jörg Widmer — a veteran of Terrence Malick’s sweeping, awe-struck camera gestures — who renders a desert landscape expansive and entrapping, and finds wonder in the otherwise stressful tangle of Los Angeles freeways. Millepied relishes close-ups of bodies in motion, and scatters dreamy symbolism throughout the story, populating his world with angels of death.Carmen and Aidan are connected, before they meet, by small flames that rise spontaneously from the ground. In the end, they are separated by tragedy. Their trajectory couldn’t be simpler, but this film, at nearly two aimless hours, doesn’t seem interested in, or capable of, that kind of focus.CarmenRated R for language, nudity and violent dancing. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Plan 75’ Review: Leaving Early

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      In this quietly bold debut feature, the Japanese government offers a euthanasia program and a 78-year-old woman considers her future.In the lurid 1973 dystopian thriller “Soylent Green,” Edward G. Robinson movingly played a man who embraced euthanasia, dying in a special chamber while being soothed by classical music. That story was set in 2022. “Plan 75,” the quietly bold debut feature of Chie Hayakawa, is on the same page, envisioning a more or less present-day version of Japan that hawks euthanasia services to the aged.As macabre as that sounds, the conceit channels actual anxieties in Japan about providing for a growing population of seniors. The sober drama centers on a 78-year-old woman, Michi (Chieko Baisho), who still has her independence, her health and a karaoke-loving friend circle.The government’s assisted suicide program seems like an over-advertised nuisance to Michi, until she loses her job and finds a friend slumped over dead. Life turns precarious, Michi grows isolated and Plan 75 — the name of the government program — starts to sounds appealing. We are also introduced to a Plan 75 clerk, Hiromu (Hayato Isomura), and a Filipino caretaker, Maria (Stefanie Arianne), who takes an unsavory gig with the program.Hayakawa avoids slipping into satire or a stylized dystopia, making details like a euthanasia spa package seem plausible (and insidious). Yet a somnolence hangs over the film, and Hiromu and Maria are left somewhere between having full-fledged story lines and just being useful foils. Still, Baisho gets across the creeping despair that morbidity and the loss of community can create — a sensation that lets “Plan 75” double as a consummate entry in pandemic-era cinema.Plan 75Not rated. In Japanese and Tagalog, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant’ Review: Call of Duty

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      Jake Gyllenhaal stars in this furious and discomfiting war film that tugs on your conscience for days.“Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant,” the saga of a U.S. sergeant (Jake Gyllenhaal) honor-bound to his Afghan interpreter (Dar Salim), starts like most other movies about the ultimately unsuccessful 20-year effort to suppress the Taliban. There’s aerial footage of parched mountains, sudden explosions of violence and an outdated wail of classic rock exposing a younger generation’s as-yet-unrealized ambition to make war pictures able to stand alongside those that sprang from Vietnam. Sincerity is an unusual tone for its director, Guy Ritchie, who specializes in laddish shoot-’em-ups. Here, Ritchie is not just earnest — he’s morally outraged about the broken promises made to thousands of Afghans who believed they’d earned Special Immigrant Visas only to be abandoned to fend for themselves. For all its clichés, this furious and discomfiting film tugs on your conscience for days, making a powerful case to turn the American public’s attention back to a conflict it would rather forget.John Kinley (Gyllenhaal) is on his fourth tour when his squad partners with Ahmed (Salim), a former heroin trafficker, to scour the countryside for bomb manufacturers. During this ain’t-war-hell opening stretch, Ritchie and his co-writers Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies attune the audience to the use of language, particularly how most soldiers refer to Ahmed as “the interpreter,” as if he’s a tool, not a person. In the field, John is terse and authoritative; Ahmed, intuitive and polite. “I believe you, but they need to believe you,” he advises one local. Back under the goofily dramatic flickering lights of Bagram Air Base, Ahmed presses John on the distinction between “translate” and “interpret” with the acumen — and enunciation — of a Cincinnati lawyer. (Salim, raised in Denmark, doesn’t slather on an accent.)Then the film pivots. In the second act, the two men are stranded in hostile terrain. Ahmed saves John’s life. Once home in California, John vows to save Ahmed after he learns his protector has been forced into hiding. “I’m on the hook,” John explains to his wife (Emily Beecham), as Gyllenhaal’s watery blue eyes flood with shame. When John braves the State Department’s byzantine phone tree, he soon becomes so irate that he grabs a beer and a hammer. The bombastic rescue attempt that follows is the bitterest form of wish fulfillment — a showcase of individual loyalty intended to embarrass gummed-up bureaucracy.Ritchie’s action scenes suffer from the gamification of combat: Our heroes shoot first, grab a dead man’s gun and repeat. The body count becomes unconscionably high. Yet we eventually submit to the primal awe of the film’s fraught and nearly dialogue-free escape sequences, driven by Christopher Benstead’s meaty, hand-thumping score. Watching the exhausted Ahmed shoulder John through mud and fog while sharing a long opium pipe for the pain, one can’t help overlaying images of Samwise and Frodo in Mordor. Gyllenhaal’s character becomes so stoned that the film rewinds the first adventure in flashback almost as soon he sobers up — an unnecessary flourish whose sole benefit is letting us relax the second time the same pack of long-nosed Afghan hounds comes sniffing back into view, only now in slow-motion and upside-down. For once, Ritchie might not want the audience to giggle. But in the moment, we’re relieved that we can.Guy Ritchie’s The CovenantRated R for grisly violence and language befitting the circumstances. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Somewhere in Queens’ Review: Rooting for the Underdog

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      Ray Romano plumbed the absurdities of family life on his sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.” For this, his feature directing debut, he sticks to an Italian American milieu.Someday, when conventional wisdom gives way to common sense, “Everybody Loves Raymond” will be recognized as one of the best network situation comedies. Incisively written and superbly acted, it explored with surgical precision the bottomless hostility animating passive-aggressive family dynamics. Ray Romano, whose standup comedy fueled the series’ themes, very successfully bridged the skill set of a standup comedian with that of an ensemble comedic actor. And yet. No respect, or not enough respect.In any event, the series is now a thing of the past, and Romano is taking a turn behind the camera for his feature directing debut, “Somewhere in Queens,” which he co-wrote with Mark Stegemann. Here, Romano sticks to the outer-borough Italian American milieu of his series. The results are mixed.Romano plays Leo Russo, a likable, “Rocky”-obsessed screw-up who’s the underdog of his dad’s family construction firm. His tough cookie wife, Angela (Laurie Metcalf), is recovering from cancer. Their only son, nicknamed Sticks (Jacob Ward), is recessively shy but fiercely talented at basketball. His gift might yield him a college scholarship and has already attracted Dani (Sadie Stanley), a free-spirited girl.But when Sticks crowds Dani, things cool between the two. Leo, in a fit of desperation, approaches Dani with an appalling proposition that will continue the momentum of the young couple’s relationship and keep Sticks on track for his college tryout.This genuinely discomfiting narrative material hits some raw nerves, and the cast, which also includes the great Tony Lo Bianco, doesn’t back down from emotional authenticity. But if you’ve been following the movie’s music choices, which contain a number of songs that are at least wet-noodle adjacent, you won’t be surprised that Romano eventually contrives soft, and arguably goofy, exits for his troubled characters.Somewhere in QueensRated R for language and some sexual material. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      How Naomi Watts and Elle Fanning Stay Hungry

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      Naomi Watts: Elle impressed me the first time we met [while making the 2015 film “3 Generations,” in which Watts plays the mother of Fanning’s character]. She was 16, but with such emotional intelligence. When I was trying to get my start in my late 20s, I was already being told I was too late. They said, “You’d better get going. You’ve got only seconds left!” I think that’s changed — for the better, obviously. We’re now seeing women in their 50s carry films. There even seems to be a bit more movement in the opposite direction, like aging is suddenly trending.On the CoverWatts wears a Bottega Veneta dress, $6,600, and boots, price on request, bottegaveneta.com; and Ana Khouri earrings, price on request, anakhouri.com. Fanning wears a Bottega Veneta dress, $20,000.Hart Lëshkina. Styled by Tess HerbertWith women, but never with men, “ambition” always gets labeled an ugly word. I’ve always been hungry, and that’s what got me here. I spent many years under the radar, not getting jobs — just tiny bits here and there — until David Lynch gave me an incredible role [in 2001’s “Mulholland Dr.”]. Had I not maintained that level of determination or ambition, whatever you want to call it, I would have packed it in and just tried to find something else. Knowing why you love what you do is important. What’s feeding you that makes you keep coming back for more?Watts wears a Bottega Veneta dress. Fanning wears a Bottega Veneta dress.Hart Lëshkina. Styled by Tess HerbertWatts wears a Bottega Veneta dress; and Ana Khouri earrings.Hart Lëshkina. Styled by Tess Herbertculture banner More

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      Lessons From Gina Prince-Bythewood on the Set of ‘The Woman King’

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      Gina Prince-Bythewood: When Thuso first auditioned for “The Woman King,” I thought, “This is Nawi” [one of the film’s leads, a warrior in training], but there were still other people she had to meet with, so I said, “Good luck with your career.” We laugh about it now, but to her that sounded like a death knell. Once we were on set, my admiration for her only grew. You see her going toe-to-toe with Viola [Davis] and Lashana Lynch. Plus I could give her harder and harder fight elements — she’s someone who has the desire to be great and who puts the work in until she is. In the big Oyo battle, her character has this sequence with a machete tied to a rope that I didn’t know how we were going to do without a stunt double. Well, Thuso learned it. She took that rope everywhere with her.culture banner More

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      Book Review: ‘Honey, Baby, Mine,’ by Laura Dern and Diane Ladd

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      Laura Dern and her mother, Diane Ladd, both made careers in the movies. In “Honey, Baby, Mine,” they drop names, rehash arguments and lean on each other.HONEY, BABY, MINE: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding), by Laura Dern and Diane LaddWhen Diane Ladd is diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and given six months to live, her daughter Laura Dern looks at her and thinks, “You can’t die.” Determined to increase her mother’s lung capacity and life span, Dern gets the doctor’s permission to take Ladd on daily 15-minute walks, distracting her mother by asking questions about the past.Transcripts of those conversations are the beating heart of “Honey, Baby, Mine,” the actresses’ joint memoir, which also includes photographs, recipes, memorabilia and short, interspersed chapters written by each woman.They commiserate over the timeless frustrations of their industry, while also reflecting on what has slowly changed. Dern recalls visiting her mom’s sets as a child, catching the acting bug when Martin Scorsese asked her to appear as an extra in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Allowing a child on the set was still frowned upon nearly two decades later, when they worked together on “Rambling Rose” (for which they became the only mother-daughter pair ever to have been nominated for Academy Awards for the same film) ‌and had to advocate for their director to be allowed to nurse her baby at work.By the time Dern co-starred in the 2017 TV mini-series “Big Little Lies,” actors’ children were so commonly present that, she writes, “we had effectively created a … day care.” Along the way, they toss about glittery names, among them Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Shelley Winters, Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon (who also provides the foreword). If you’re in it for the stargazing, you’ll be rewarded with plenty — but that’s not what lingers most after the telling.As actors, Dern and Ladd have spent decades peeling back layers to reveal their characters’ fears and desires. It’s when they turn that focus to each other and themselves that something remarkable emerges.At first it seems a bit repetitive. Mother and daughter reminisce, joke and bicker, circling back to the same topics: the craft of acting, the strange experience of fame, the infinite doubts and compromises of motherhood.On one walk-and-talk, they tell funny anecdotes about Ladd’s mother, “Grandma Mary,” a wisecracking Mississippi divorcée who assisted with Dern’s upbringing after Ladd divorced Dern’s father, the actor Bruce Dern. Mary defied her era’s Southern Belle stereotypes, rejecting racism and classism in favor of everyday advocacy for equality. Her daughter and granddaughter learned a lot about independence from her, they agree.Then the tone shifts. On a later walk, Dern admits that she often resented being left with her grandmother while Ladd was away for work. A suddenly emotional Ladd says she sometimes felt unfairly burdened with the responsibility of supporting not only her daughter but her mother, “working 12-hour days making the money to pay the rent, buy her clothes, put food in her mouth for her to go get entertained and travel and play with you.” Emboldened by each day’s revelations and driven by their abiding love for each other, they wade into deeper confessions. The book is at its most memorable and affecting when they work up the courage to excavate heavy, sharp-edged emotional artifacts.Neither has forgotten the time Ladd slapped a teenage Dern in the kitchen of their home, though each remembers the moment differently. They reopen a bitter argument about the time Ladd took Dern’s young son for a significant haircut without her permission; neither party is ready to back down, still. They revisit the time Dern, racked with grief over her divorce from the musician Ben Harper, yelled, “You have no idea what I’m feeling right now!” and upended a sofa — and how her mother responded by making tea and reminding her that her scoliosis made it unwise to lift such heavy things. Eventually they confront Ladd’s greatest pain, a nearly unendurable loss she experienced as a young mother. They yell, grow quiet, accuse and forgive, allowing us to witness their relationship evolving, walk by walk. Ladd’s health improves. Dern draws even closer to her mother. For them, the experiment proves successful. For readers, it may depend on what we come for. I recommend going into “Honey, Baby, Mine” curious about the origin stories, separate and intertwined, of two prolific artists who pushed through private challenges — are pushing through still — while forging lives in the public eye.Mary Laura Philpott is the author, most recently, of the memoir “Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives.”HONEY, BABY, MINE: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding) | By Laura Dern and Diane Ladd | Illustrated | 256 pp. | Grand Central Publishing | $32 More

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      Happy 100th Birthday, 16-Millimeter Film

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      The format was initially a boon to amateurs. Now, with moviemaking gone digital, it’s the choice of auteurs like Darren Aronofsky and Kelly Reichardt.One hundred years ago, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced a shiny new camera that promised to revolutionize moviemaking. The company had been selling filming devices for more than two decades by then, but this novel contraption — the Ciné-Kodak camera, sold with the Kodascope projector — offered a new thrill: the ability to make and screen movies at home, with no special expertise.The technical marvel, however, wasn’t just the camera but also the film inside. Until 1923, the film used most commonly in motion pictures was 35 millimeters wide. That year, Kodak produced a new format that was only 16 millimeters. The image wasn’t as sharp when you blew it up on the big screen, but it allowed for smaller, cheaper and more portable cameras.16 millimeter ushered in a new era of movies made outside the Hollywood system. Regular folks could now record their own lives, journalists and soldiers could film in the midst of war, and activists could shoot political documentaries in the street. Until digital video arrived in the late 1990s, 16-millimeter film was the mainstay of the amateur or independent filmmaker, requiring neither the investment nor the know-how of commercial cinema.Last week, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which holds thousands of 16-millimeter reels in its collection, the film archivist Elena Rossi-Snook projected some shorts for a group of undergraduates from Marymount Manhattan College. As the projector whirred, a beam of light cut through the darkened room, painting the screen with scenes from the 1946 animated “Boundary Lines,” a stirring movie by Philip Stapp about social integrity in the wake of World War II. That was followed by “The End,” an antiwar stoner comedy directed by a teenager, Alfonso Sanchez, in 1968. The third film, “Black Faces” from 1970, was an ebullient, one-minute montage of portraits of Harlem residents.These productions, precious documents of the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans, have endured, Rossi-Snook explained, because their makers had relatively cheap and convenient access to film, a medium that can last hundreds of years if stored properly.Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” another Aronofsky film shot on 16 millimeter.Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight PicturesToday, 16 millimeter is no longer optimal for the amateur filmmaker. Analog film is increasingly expensive, fewer and fewer labs can process it, and the format doesn’t allow the nearly unlimited shooting and instant playback that video does. But even as it turns 100, 16 millimeter still has a unique look that neither 35-millimeter film nor video can rival.When projected on the screen, analog film has a three-dimensional, pointillist texture called “grain,” a product of its synthetic makeup. There is more grain in 16 millimeter than in 35 millimeter, resulting in a fuzzier, flickering picture. In the 20th century, that was a drawback for professional filmmakers seeking crisp, theatrical images. But today, as high-definition media saturate our lives, some directors choose 16 millimeter precisely for its rougher look. It reminds us that what we’re watching is not the world as is, but filtered and transformed, with great creativity, through a chemical process.The filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has shot several movies on 16-millimeter film, including “The Wrestler” (2008), “Black Swan” (2010) and “Mother!” (2017). But when he was making his debut feature, “Pi” (1998), 16 millimeter was a necessity, not a choice. The resolution of available digital cameras wasn’t good enough for feature filmmaking at the time, and Aronofsky couldn’t afford 35 millimeter. But he and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, soon realized that 16 millimeter — especially the high-contrast stock they used called reversal film — emphasized the hallucinatory style of “Pi,” a black-and-white psychological thriller that delves into the obsessions of a paranoid number theorist.“We decided to really lean into 16 millimeter,” Aronofsky said in a phone interview. “I wanted the big grain and the contrast-y look. It’s funny, because we just had the 25th anniversary of the film, and we blew it up for IMAX. And the IMAX people were nervous because of how grainy it was. They wanted to know if I wanted to clear out some of the grain with computer technology. And we said, absolutely not. We loved the look of it.”Several TV shows from the late ’90s and early 2000s, including “The O.C.” and “Sex and the City,” used Super 16, a variation of 16 millimeter with a larger picture area that gave them a sense of real-time immediacy. The first 10 seasons of “The Walking Dead” were also largely shot on 16 millimeter to capture the grimy, crumbling feel of classic horror cinema.The cinematographer John Inwood, who filmed 150 episodes of the comedy “Scrubs,” recalled that 16-millimeter cameras, which are smaller and lighter than their 35-millimeter counterparts (and even many contemporary professional video cameras), were crucial in developing the series’s frenetic mockumentary style.“It was good for ‘Scrubs’ because we moved the cameras a lot, and we were sometimes in tight spaces,” he told me. “We shot in an actual hospital, the former North Hollywood hospital, and we shot in every square inch of it, even down to the morgue.”Chadwick Boseman in a flashback to the Vietnam War in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” The director wanted those scenes to look as if they were archival newsreel footage.NetflixAs digital cameras have become sharper and more versatile, many filmmakers have turned to 16 millimeter to evoke the analog past and the blurry, precarious nature of memory. In an interview with Gold Derby, Newton Thomas Sigel, who filmed Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” (2020), said the director had insisted to Netflix that they use 16-millimeter reversal film for the sequences set amid the Vietnam War, despite the costs and logistical challenges. The film had to be shipped from Vietnam to an American lab for processing, and by the time the crew members could see what they had shot, Chadwick Boseman’s acting schedule had already ended. But Lee was adamant that the scenes look authentic, like archival newsreels filmed in the field in the 1970s.The veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman used Super 16 on two of his collaborations with the director Todd Haynes, both of them period dramas: the mini-series “Mildred Pierce” (2011), and “Carol” (2015), which garnered him an Academy Award nomination.On both projects, the format was chosen to mimic photographic images from the 1940s and ’50s, and the grittiness of postwar America. But Lachman realized that the grain also brought “tension to the surface of the image,” paralleling the repressive qualities of the characters in both “Mildred Pierce” and “Carol.”For Lachman, the appeal of 16 millimeter transcends nostalgia. It comes down to cinema’s status as an art, meant to stylize rather than simply reproduce reality. He likened film to painting, and grain to brushstrokes. “The grain changes in each frame with exposure,” he said. “It’s like breathing, almost like an anthropomorphic quality.”Kelly Reichardt turned to 16 millimeter after video shots of the snow looked too flat.Sony Pictures ClassicsThe filmmaker Kelly Reichardt recalled that when she started shooting her 2016 feature, “Certain Women,” she didn’t have the budget for 16 millimeter. But when she and her cameraman, Christopher Blauvelt, did test shoots in Montana, where the film is set, Reichardt was horrified at how “flat” the snow looked on video.“With film stocks, things weren’t so real looking,” Reichardt said. “A lot of it is grain, and 16 has more grain than 35. So when you blow it up, you don’t get the hard lines that you get in HD, which is what you see in sports.”A grant ultimately allowed Reichardt to shoot “Certain Women” on 16 millimeter. It made the production more laborious, but the results — soft, textured images of wide roads, snowy mountains and grassy plains, all shimmering with light, dust and shadow — made it worth it.“I guess it’s about beauty, in a way,” Reichardt said. “I remember on ‘30 Rock’ they did a little thing where Lemon walks in front of the HD camera, and it’s like, she’s a skeleton hag. You know? You see every single thing. It’s very unforgiving. For nature, too.” More