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      ‘Only the River Flows’ Review: A Spiraling Murder Investigation

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      In this Chinese police procedural, directed by Wei Shujun, solutions are murkier than they first appear.Near the start of “Only the River Flows,” police officers set up an office in a closing movie theater. That backdrop suits this Chinese noir, the third feature from the director Wei Shujun, which, at times, feels like it unfolds in a universe of other films.Tangled, unresolved procedurals like Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and David Fincher’s “Zodiac” loom large. Much of the score, on the other hand, is taken, strangely, from David Cronenberg’s “Crash” — not a murder mystery, but perhaps a clue to the kind of mind-body disconnect and existential stakes that Wei’s film means to ponder.The story, largely set in 1995, follows a police captain named Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) as he investigates the killing of a woman called Granny Four. At first, the case seems straightforward: Granny Four had taken in a simpleton who, throughout the movie, is known only as “the madman” (Kang Chunlei) — a natural suspect. But nothing is so clear-cut. Many of this thriller’s pleasures involve watching Ma Zhe chase leads, as he listens to a cassette found at the crime scene to try to locate a woman heard on it or questions a hairdresser (Wang Jianyu) who seems eager to be apprehended.But “Only the River Flows,” based on a work by the author Yu Hua, is not the pure pulp a summary suggests. (An opening quotation from Albert Camus is fair warning.) As Ma Zhe’s personal life and the investigation begin to merge in his mind, Wei’s film increasingly blurs the line between the real and the imagined. The filmmaker has a gift for disorientation — a chilling cut connects a scene of a pregnancy ultrasound to Ma Zhe flipping through slides of murder evidence — that partly compensates for the muddiness of the plot.Only the River FlowsNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rhinegold’ Review: Rapping With a Rap Sheet

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      Based on the life of an Iranian German drug dealer and rapper, Fatih Akin’s interminable drama feels uncomfortably partial to its violent subject.Any enjoyment of Fatih Akin’s protracted, genre-hopping “Rhinegold” requires that you give a hoot about its thoroughly unlikable subject, a violent criminal and, later, successful rap artist named Giwar Hajabi. And while Emilio Sakraya deserves respect for tackling the monumentally unsympathetic role of the adult Hajabi, his cocky charisma only underscores the movie’s seeming enchantment with his character’s wrongdoing. As does a fairy-tale ending featuring frolicking, animated mermaids.Inspired by Hajabi’s tumultuous life, “Rhinegold” opens in 2010 with his torture in a Syrian prison for refusing to cough up the bullion from an audacious gold heist. From there, the film flashes back to his inauspicious birth in a rubble-strewn cave as his parents, both Kurdish musicians, flee the Iranian Revolution. By the mid-1990s, safely settled in Bonn, the young Hajabi is busily selling drugs and purloined pornography while perfecting his ability to deliver bare-fisted beatdowns. Luckily, the Persian beauty (Sogol Faghani) he has his eye on will later forgive the vicious pummeling he gives an adversary right in front of her.Mixing war movie, coming-of-age drama and gangster thriller, Akin and Hajabi’s screenplay is a dispiriting brew of repellent behavior and odious rap lyrics. Incarceration ends the film’s parade of criminal conspiracies while kick-starting Hajabi’s singing career; but beneath the nefariousness we catch a glimpse of a more interesting story, one of dispossessed minorities repeatedly banding together to claim power in a new world.“Rhinegold” is not that movie. As its swaggering subject sniffs out another ally and a new angle, careless of the pain he’s causing his family, the picture seems almost impressed.“My kismet sucks,” Hajabi complains after one of his many setbacks. Somehow, I don’t think kismet was his problem.RhinegoldNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Fabulous Four’ Review: Beaches (and Lots of Mojitos)

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      This raunchy comedy features Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally on a bachelorette weekend.“The Fabulous Four” stars Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally as old pals who cut loose during a bachelorette weekend in Key West.Marilyn (Midler), a recent widow, is marrying a guy she just met at the D.M.V. But first, she’s itching to grind on an exotic male dancer. In the last year and a half, this kind of all-star girls trip flick has become its own genre (see also: “80 for Brady,” “Summer Camp” and “Book Club: The Next Chapter”). This one, directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse and written by Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly, is the raunchiest and loopiest so far. Slapdash but executed with gusto, “Fabulous Four” feels like it was made after guzzling three bottles of champagne — and honestly, that’s an apropos way to watch.The central conflict is that Marilyn is a self-absorbed TikTok influencer and Lou (Sarandon), a self-righteous stick in the mud who considers her estranged best friend’s wedding a personal affront. Lou blames Marilyn for turning her into a lonely cat lady — and, fittingly, gets tricked into the vacation by a phony claim that she’s won one of Ernest Hemingway’s polydactyl felines, descendants of his six-toed pet Snowball that continue to roam the grounds of the author’s former Florida home. (Sarandon’s saucer eyes light up endearingly as she clutches a pet carrier to her chest.)Rounding out the foursome are Kitty (Ralph), a cannabis farmer with a born-again daughter (Brandee Evans) who wants to stick her in a religious retirement home (“Heaven’s Gate?” Kitty groans, “More like hell on earth”) and Alice (Mullally), a lusty singer who roams the margins of the plot blurting as many gasp-inducing one-liners as she can.The jokes dance right on the edge of what you’re willing to giggle at in a matinee with your mother-in-law. Somehow when Lou meets a love interest (Bruce Greenwood) who happens to be clutching one of Key West’s famous wild chickens, the script restrains itself from a wisecrack about his rooster. There’s a little too much reliance on half-baked physical comedy. Midler kicks up her heels with such pizazz that her shoes literally go flying offscreen; later, she twerks, and she’s pretty good. More impressively, she and her fellow professionals do their utmost to add at least one layer to their caricatures. Midler allows her narcissist’s vulnerability to poke through, while Sarandon, tasked to look severe, wins us over every time she loosens up. (One scene has her blitzed on edibles and hallucinating a cat performing heart surgery.)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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      ‘Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net’ Review: How the Magic Happens

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      This documentary chronicles the reboot and reopening in Las Vegas of the acrobatic show “O,” which shutdown during the pandemic.Conventional wisdom once held, snootily, that circus folk were quirky, superstitious, given to idiosyncratic behavior. Whether that was ever really true or not, the members of the rather unconventional Cirque du Soleil, as portrayed in the new documentary “Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net,” happen to be rather remarkably levelheaded.In scenes of conception, rehearsal and more, nobody raises a voice, storms off, indulges in Machiavellian scheming or displays anything vaguely resembling diva or divo behavior. One acrobat expresses a hope to bring a new trick to a revived show. When she can’t make it work, she reverts to her rehearsed routine and resolves to come up with something some other time. No drama.The movie is not boring or dry, though, as “Without a Net,” directed by Dawn Porter, chronicles a critical period in the organization’s history: the remounting of a show after the pandemic shutdowns. (It had dozens of shows playing around the world before the pandemic. The virus shut them down within 48 hours in March 2020, and 95 percent of the company’s staff was laid off.) Over a year later, the company began remounting “O,” its popular Las Vegas show. The title is a pun: This spectacle features acrobats performing without a net above an ingeniously engineered pool of water — as in “eau,” the French word for water.Porter’s inquisitive camera gives the viewer enticing detail on how everything comes together — for instance, unbeknown to the audience, the pool is constantly monitored by rescue divers in scuba gear who also serve as prop people — while holding in suitable awe the actual magic all this work eventually yields.Cirque du Soleil: Without a NetRated PG-13 for some strong language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘Didi’ Review: 13 Going on Nerdy

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      A vibrant coming-of-age story about an awkward teenager in California in 2008 is also a love letter to the director’s mother.When a filmmaker makes a semi-autobiographical movie that’s also a story about growing up, it’s very often about learning to see. In “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg’s youthful stand-in becomes obsessed with looking at the world through a camera lens, and the film functions almost as an apology for a lifetime of always inserting the camera between himself and the world. “Roma” recreates Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexico City in the 1970s; “The Souvenir” recreates Joanna Hogg’s northern England in the 1980s; “The Cathedral” recreates Ricky D’Ambrose’s American suburbs in the 1990s. In each case, we’re given a glimpse of memories the way the directors remember seeing them, often half-captured or framed in a way that proves meaningful to the protagonist’s maturing perspective.What we realize, watching these movies, is that any self-reflective adult restaging youthful memories will see them from a new angle, understanding them in a way their younger self never could. That’s what Sean Wang accomplishes with “Didi,” a film about a Taiwanese American boy named Chris stumbling through the summer in Fremont, Calif., before he starts high school. Chris (Izaac Wang, no relation to the director) lives with his grandmother (Chang Li Hua, the director’s grandmother), his mother Chungsing (Joan Chen), and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen, no relation to Joan), with whom he fights viciously.Like this summer’s “Janet Planet,” which recalls the excruciating nature of being bored and 11 in the summertime, “Didi” leans hard into the exact variety of aimless discomfort that comes with being 13. It’s 2008, so Chris spends a lot of time poking around YouTube, which back then was filled mostly with random, amateur drivel that occasionally went viral. He and his best friends, Fahad (Raul Dial) and a kid everyone calls “Soup” (Aaron Chang), play stupid pranks and film them, like blowing up an old lady’s mailbox. Chris has a MySpace account, but his friends are starting to move toward the cleaner, more sophisticated Facebook. He is obsessed with skateboarding, and with filming skateboarders on his little camcorder. And he has a massive crush on Madi (Mahaela Park), who’s a grade ahead of him.Chris’s family calls him Didi, the Mandarin term for “little brother.” His friends call him Wang Wang. He isn’t quite sure who he is, and hesitates before introducing himself to new people. Entering his teen years, he’s stuck fast in that awkward stage where nothing quite makes sense, everyone is annoying and life is filled with an endless tug of war between immaturity and something more grown-up. Chris and his friends use crude slang to refer to sex and girls and anatomy, but they’re all virgins, and they know it; this is their time for posturing, for trying on personas for size, figuring out who they’re going to be next.Chris is a stand-in for Sean Wang, who built the movie on top of his own memories. So while those recollections are highly specific to the setting and the time period — Chris uses all the AOL Instant Messenger acronyms, chats with the SmarterChild chatbot and checks a friend’s MySpace page to see if he’s still in their Top 8 list — they feel universal, too. When Chris flubs a first kiss, we feel his embarrassment. When he flips out at his mother, and friends look at him askance for his behavior, we feel his confused shame. “Didi” is as much about realizing how others see you as it is about learning to see them for who they really are.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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      Why Is ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Projected to Set Records?

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      Opening-weekend estimates have been a Hollywood fixture since the 1980s. But surveys of moviegoers can fail to capture those who infrequently visit the theater.Savvy moviegoers may have noticed that these are very uncertain times at the box office. Not only are ticket sales this summer down about 17 percent compared to last year, according to Comscore, but it seems challenging to anticipate what will hit and what will flop.The domestic opening-weekend totals for would-be tent poles “The Fall Guy” and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” came in lower than expected, while “A Quiet Place: Day One” and last weekend’s “Twisters” far exceeded their estimates.So how do Hollywood studios and their analysts make these predictions? And what explains why they fail?Box office projections, typically derived from more general audience sentiment data known as “tracking,” have been a fixture of the industry since the 1980s. The idea that studios should know in advance how a film will perform — down to a specific dollar figure — was promoted by the Coca-Cola Company, which bought Columbia Pictures in 1982 and thought it should be run more like a conventional maker of consumer products.“They were used to certain metrics of units sold,” said Kevin Goetz, the founder and chief executive of the analytics firm Screen Engine/ASI and the author of “Audience-ology.” “They pushed the National Research Group to come up with an estimate figure for their movies, and thus began what is essentially a parlor game of predictions.”How Does Tracking Work?To get a dollar estimate for a given movie, tracking companies poll prospective audience members weeks or even months in advance. Their questions are designed to gauge three metrics: awareness, interest and choice, meaning where the film ranks among others the respondent is interested in seeing.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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      A Rarely Seen David Bowie Rom-Com Gets a New Life

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      “The Linguini Incident,” a low-budget ’90s film directed by Richard Shepard and featuring Bowie and Rosanna Arquette, makes its way to Blu-ray in a director’s cut.Even David Bowie’s biggest fans might be unaware of his solitary foray into romantic comedy, and for good reason: It was barely released in 1992, and has been all but impossible to see since. Now, its director has restored, reclaimed and recut the film in question, “The Linguini Incident,” which made its Blu-ray debut this week.Richard Shepard was only 25 when he directed the quirky, New York-set indie, which was his solo feature directorial debut. (He directed an earlier film, “Cool Blue,” alongside Mark Mullin.) As was typical of the era, the low budget was gathered from multiple sources. “The whole movie was financed very weirdly,” Shepard said in a Zoom interview. “We had home video money and foreign sales money and mysterious money — a lot of mysterious money.”His first casting coup came early, when he landed Rosanna Arquette, already a star with “After Hours” and “Desperately Seeking Susan” on her résumé. So what made her take a chance on this young novice? “I loved the script,” Arquette said in a phone interview. “I just thought it was well-written and funny … and then, lo and behold, we had David Bowie, so that was really exciting.”Shepard sent the script to Bowie on a lark, with the idea that he and the fellow rock legend Mick Jagger could play the film’s flamboyant restaurateurs. “We naïvely just sent it to them, to play those small parts, with no money offered, no anything,” Shepard recalled. “We get this note back from Bowie saying, ‘I’m interested in your movie, but I don’t want to play that supporting role. I would like to play the lead.’”Shepard with Bowie, center, on the set of “The Linguini Incident.”via Richard Shepard
      Bowie wanted to play Monte, a British bartender at a hip, downtown restaurant who tries to talk one of his co-workers, the aspiring escape artist Lucy (Arquette), into a green card marriage, but is instead sidetracked into helping her rob their employers. Marlee Matlin, Eszter Balint, Buck Henry and Andre Gregory were among the cast; the future Oscar nominee Thomas Newman would compose the score, and Robert Yeoman, Wes Anderson’s go-to cinematographer, was behind the camera. The film was shot in 30 days in 1990.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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      If A.I. Is Coming for Comedy Writers, Simon Rich Is Ready

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      The author of humorous short stories finds emotional connections in tales that engage with tech. But he’s more interested in the ties between humans.The author Simon Rich believes it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence will be able to outwrite any human. Specifically, four years. So, what’s the twist?That’s what you wait for in a Simon Rich story, one of pop culture’s most consistently funny genres, with a foundation built like a classic joke: a tight premise developed in clear language, some misdirection, and then a pivot, delivered as quickly as possible.Rich, whose 10th collection of short stories, “Glory Days,” was released this week, said his dark view of the future was informed by a longtime friendship with an A.I. scientist, who recently showed him a chatbot the public hasn’t seen. It’s more raw, unpredictable, creative.“Even though I don’t know anything about A.I. really, I’ve been processing it emotionally for several years longer than everyone,” he told me in his Los Angeles home office one afternoon in May.He considered the implications of artificial intelligence displacing human creativity in “I Am Code,” a book he helped edit last year that featured A.I.-crafted poetry. The theme is also deeply woven into his new collection, his most mature effort yet, which includes some regular obsessions like “Back to the Future”-style encounters between generations, dystopia and the inner life of video game characters.“The whole book is basically about different types of obsolescence,” he said of “Glory Days,” whose other organizing theme is early midlife crisis. There’s a story about Super Mario turning 40 (Rich just did, too) and a spiky rant from the perspective of New York City itself. It’s about “the great migration when an entire generation discovers they are too old to live in New York,” he said.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