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    ‘Leo’ Review: Adam Sandler as a Gruff Lizard, Dishing Advice

    Adam Sandler plays a gruff old lizard who dishes out advice to fifth graders in this animated comedy.Adam Sandler stars in “Leo” as a grumpy lizard who has spent his entire life in the terrarium of a fifth-grade classroom. He’s been joined by a turtle named Squirtle (Bill Burr), and the two are mostly content to stare out the glass, year after year, commenting like Statler and Waldorf on the various tween archetypes that show up on the first day of school: the motormouth, the class clown, the kid with helicopter parents who’s allergic to everything. But the bubble bursts for Sandler’s Leo when he realizes that he’s approaching 75 — the average life span for his species — and has hardly gotten to live out his dreams as a free lizard.Leo sees an opportunity with the arrival of a no-nonsense substitute teacher, Ms. Malkin (Cecily Strong), after the usual instructor goes on maternity leave. Along with implementing a stricter disciplinary system, she assigns her students at the Florida school to take turns bringing Leo home, caring for him as their own pet. The kids are dismayed, until one of them, the chatty Summer (voiced by Sandler’s daughter Sunny), discovers that the seemingly docile lizard can talk, and begins to open up to him about her problems. Leo, finding fulfillment in his new task, takes on the role of therapist each week, dishing out advice and convincing each student that they’re the only one who can hear him speak.“Leo” is the second animated film from Sandler’s creative house Happy Madison Productions and his newest release for Netflix. Unlike the company’s first foray into animation, the raunchy 2002 Hanukkah flick “Eight Crazy Nights,” “Leo” aims for wholesome family entertainment, combining themes like the challenges of growing older with a healthy dose of G-rated toilet humor (and a few double entendres that will go over kids’ heads).Sandler does a fine job as the voice of Leo, delivering a good mix of gruffness and sweetness into an absurd scenario. The kids in “Leo” confide in him their desire to be understood by their parents and peers, and the film drives home the overdone but nonetheless true message that everyone faces this struggle — even popular girls like Jayda (played by Sandler’s other daughter, Sadie). These tender moments are punctuated by several original songs — yes, “Leo” is a full-blown musical — and a plethora of running gags, like portraying the school’s kindergartners as wide-eyed bobbleheads crashing into walls.Written by Sandler, Paul Sado, and Robert Smigel (who also directed the film with Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim), “Leo” sometimes has trouble identifying its audience. The musical sequences aren’t particularly interesting visually and will drag on for adults, yet it’s hard to imagine children sitting through Leo and Squirtle’s extended riffs on divorced parents or the courtship behaviors of reptiles and not getting a little bored. But with the holidays rolling around and families gathering, this will undoubtedly work as something to put on in the background for everyone.LeoRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Genie’ Review: Melissa McCarthy, Granting Unlimited Wishes

    Melissa McCarthy grants unlimited magical requests in this holiday fantasy film.In conventional, old-fashioned stories about wish-granting genies, the number of wishes is limited to three, the better to deliver a solid punchline or useful lesson. In our consumerist and content-crazy times, a mere three wishes won’t do. “Genie,” a new film directed by Sam Boyd, stars Melissa McCarthy as Flora, a genie unleashed by an overworked dad as he massages an old jewel box he tried to pass off as a birthday present for the daughter whose celebration he missed.Flora offers Bernard (Paapa Essiedu) unlimited wishes by which to save his marriage, delight his daughter, take revenge on his bad boss (Alan Cumming) and enhance his home art collection. Predictably, at least if you’ve seen “Aladdin,” Flora is an ancient being who speaks colloquial American English with a deft command of idioms, but also doesn’t know what pizza is. Her riffing is typically McCarthyesque but feels strained at times. Guessing her new master’s desires, she reaches: “Girls? Gold? Golden girls?” When pressed, would McCarthy claim credit for that bit, or would the screenwriter Richard Curtis?The flights of fancy Curtis (“Love, Actually”) concocts here include the “Mona Lisa” finding a new home in New York. And the ostensible rules of the fantasy shift according to mere plot whim: While Flora supposedly has the power to manifest anywhere, when Bernard is pinched for art theft, Flora can’t help him on account of their physical separation.Fantasy movies are of course free to be far-fetched, but some of the plot turns here are so wide as to suggest shrugging contempt. The holiday themes feel arbitrary and tacked on; one guesses the script was rescued from Curtis’s bottom drawer and spruced up with some Christmas fairy dust. The story, finally, is only about a man who learns the true meaning of punctuality.Also, the flying carpet special effects are lousy.GenieRated PG for a little salty language. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

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    ‘Stamped From the Beginning’ Review: Examining Racist Thought

    The documentary, based on Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book, looks at the ugly history of anti-Black ideology.The documentary “Stamped From the Beginning,” based on the 2016 book by Ibram X. Kendi, begins with a trick question and ends with a sage retort.“What’s wrong with Black people?” asks the director Roger Ross Williams of the film’s heady roster of Black female scholars as they consider the ways in which the slave trade created anti-Black racism and, as Kendi argues, not the reverse. The formidable interviewees include the novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers; the historian Elizabeth Hinton; and the activist and scholar Angela Davis. When Davis discusses the work “not done” at slavery’s end to retool “the entire society so that it might be possible for previously enslaved individuals to be free and equal,” her words are as muscularly poignant as they are pointed.The subtitle of Kendi’s book is “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” And Williams employs several methods to distill the National Book Award-winning tome’s ambitions as it moves from the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, back to the Portuguese enslavement of Africans and forward to the rise of Trumpism in reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama.In addition to interviews and archival images, film clips and news footage, Williams (“Cassandro” “Life, Animated”) leans into animation. In an engaging gambit, the director utilizes a mix of visual effects, painting and collage to tell the stories of the poet Phillis Wheatley; the author Harriet Jacobs and the journalist and anti-lynching pioneer Ida B. Wells. In a film brimming with visual gestures, these mini portraits of anti-racists are among its most memorable.Stamped From the BeginningRated R for some violent content, language, drug content and nude images. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘No Need to Worry,’ Says ‘Wallace and Gromit’ Film Studio, After Clay Supplier Shuts Down

    Rumors that Aardman Animations, the makers of stop-motion films, had lost their supplier worried fans. But fear not, the studio reassured, there is plenty of clay.It might have been an existential question for the creators of the beloved stop-motion animation characters Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep: What would happen if they ran out of clay?Fans spent the weekend worrying about the fate of Aardman Animations when the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that the studio, based in Bristol, England, would be facing its “hour of knead” after the only manufacturer of the special clay used in its creations had closed its doors earlier this year. Having bought what it could, The Telegraph reported, the studio had enough clay left to make only one more film, a new “Wallace and Gromit” feature coming next year.But no, the studio’s foundations are not crumbling. Aardman Animations said on Monday it had plenty of clay to keep molding.Fans had “absolutely no need to worry,” the studio said in a statement. The studio has “high levels of existing stocks of modeling clay to service current and future productions,” it said.The manufacturer of the clay, Newclay Products, announced last month that it had stopped selling its products in March. The company had become known for Lewis Newplast, a Plasticine beloved by animators that is malleable enough to mold but strong enough to keep its shape during filming. Newclay Products did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“Shaun the Sheep.”Cinematic/Alamy Stock PhotoBut its directors, Paul and Valerie Dearing, told The Telegraph that they were retiring and had decided to close the company’s doors after they couldn’t find anyone to take it over. They said Aardman had bought about 400 kilograms, or almost 900 pounds, of the remaining Newplast stock.More than a ton of modeling clay is ordered for each of the studio’s feature films, and about half that is used to shape the characters, according to modelers for Aardman.Aardman on Monday sought to reassure fans, telling them that once its supplies of Newplast were gone, it had plans to transition to new stock.“Much like Wallace in his workshop, we have been tinkering away behind the scenes for quite some time,” it said, referring to the eccentric inventor who is one of Aardman’s most beloved characters.The studio is famed for its signature Claymation style, producing hits such as the “Wallace & Gromit” franchise, the spinoff series “Shaun the Sheep,” and the 2000 film “Chicken Run.”A sequel, “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” is set to be released on Netflix on Dec. 15, and the studio will also release a new “Wallace & Gromit” film in 2024, premiering on Netflix and the BBC. More

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    The Best True Crime to Stream: Family Matters

    Four picks from television, films and podcasts that show blood is not always thicker than water.Family secrets, tumult and trauma are at the heart of so many — if not most — true crime stories, and breed some of the most bizarre betrayals. Here are four picks including podcasts, television and films that explore unforgettable crimes involving families, all of whom prided themselves on presenting a perfect image until the truth came crashing through the facade.Docuseries“Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal”Watching a true crime documentary that is following events that are presently unfolding — where those telling the tale also have no idea of what’s to come — is particularly gripping. And this tale of greed, corruption, outlandish cover-ups and murder in the lowcountry region of South Carolina is a doozy. It is, as the New York Times television critic Mike Hale put it, an “unbeatable crime story.”The first three-episode season, on Netflix, premiered midway through the trial of the family’s patriarch, Alex Murdaugh: the disgraced personal injury attorney and an heir to the area’s legal dynasty, who was accused of killing his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in 2021. The second season picks up from there, covering the march to the verdict. Both seasons were released this year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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    ‘Saltburn Review’: Lust, Envy and Toxic Elitism

    In the new film from Emerald Fennell, Barry Keoghan plays an Oxford student drawn into a world of lust and envy at a classmate’s estate.“Saltburn” is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement. This thing was written and directed by Emerald Fennell, whose previous movie was “Promising Young Woman,” a horror flick about rape that was also a revenge comedy. So believe me: She wants you riled. Fennell’s seen the erotic thrillers, studied her Hitchcock and possibly read her Patricia Highsmith, and gets that if you name your main character Oliver Quick he’s obligated to do something at least arguably Dickensian. The question here, amid all the lying, lazing about and (eventually, inevitably) dying, is to what end?We’re dragged back to 2006, where two boys at Oxford — bookish Oliver (Barry Keoghan) and rakish Felix (Jacob Elordi) — forge one of those imbalanced, obsessive friendships that one of them mistakes for love and the other tolerates because he’s needier than he looks. It goes south or sideways or to outer space but also nowhere. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, since it also goes, for one summer, to Saltburn, Felix’s family’s estate, a grassy expanse that boasts a Baroque mansion with stratospheric ceilings, one cantilevered staircase, copious portraiture, a Bernard Palissy ceramic platter collection and one of those garden mazes where characters get lost right along with plots.These two meet, in earnest, when Oliver loans Felix his bike, a moment Oliver’s been waiting for. The best scenes in the movie happen during this Oxford stretch when Oliver experiences Felix as an intoxicant, and Felix’s prepster coterie experiences Oliver as an irritant. There’s some crackle and dreaminess and post-adolescent instability here. Identities are being forged. It’s been better elsewhere — John Hughes, “Heathers,” Hogwarts, Elordi’s HBO show “Euphoria.” But Fennell squeezes some hunger, cruelty and passable tenderness onto these moments. When Oliver tells Felix his father’s just died, Felix extends his Saltburn invitation out of sincere compassion.Now, what happens over the course of this visit amounts to a different movie — or maybe three. Lust and envy take over. As does Fennell’s tedious, crude stab at psychopathology. Felix hails from one of those stiff, pathologically blasé clans where “clenched” counts as an emotion. Everybody at Saltburn seems ready for a new toy. And Oliver’s A-student impulses make a sport of ingratiation. His erudition, availability and blue eyes impress Felix’s droll mother, Elspeth (Rosamund Pike); his mere arrival arouses Felix’s self-conscious zombie of a sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver). In a different movie, their enthusiasm for this newcomer would make you sad for Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a schoolmate and old pal of Felix who’s already on the premises, practically a member of the family and flatulent with attitude by the time Oliver shows up. He’s the one nonwhite major character in “Saltburn,” a fact the movie considers doing something intriguing with but abandons. His eyebrows are just chronically Up to Something. Is Farleigh worried about losing a financial lifeline? Is he jealous that Oliver might consummate things with Felix before he does?But this isn’t a movie in which anybody’s reaction to new developments is straightforward — and not because there’s anything complex or psychological going on with the screenwriting or the performances (Richard E. Grant pumps Felix’s father full of drollery). It’s because Fennell is more drawn to — or maybe just better at — styling and stunts than she is the tougher work of emotional trenchancy. If she gives us one music-video bit (a montage, a whole tracking shot), she must give us half a dozen. When the time comes for the movie to make its switch to gothic mischief, it’s like watching the first half of “Psycho” turn into the video for “When Doves Cry” or George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90.” What’s that look like? Well: Oliver sneaks a peek as Felix masturbates in a tub, and once the coast is clear he bends over and sips the draining bathwater. It’s a fine shot that’s also an absurd thing to have this guy do. Which is how you know the movie is failing as a good work of trash. I didn’t laugh or gape. I just sat there watching an actor do his damnedest to save the rest of the movie before it heads down the drain. Fennell keeps going, though, turning her mild protagonist into someone ripe for the cover of a bodice-ripper: a crafty virgin discovers the lethal weapon of lust.This was the gist of “Promising Young Woman,” too: that sex was like a chain saw or a gun. When it landed in 2020, the moment seemed right. Fennell had found a way to turn a premise you’d propose at a dinner party or while tipsy in the back of a cab into something tight and mordant: a “rape culture” revenge-o-matic. But it was so morally and formally tidy that it punched its own teeth out. The “o-matic” won. “Saltburn” has the same seductive sleekness — the nerve. But none of the dread or poison kick.The film’s comic centerpiece was also the star of Fennell’s other movie: Carey Mulligan. Here, she’s deadpanning her way through a chicly ratty mess named Pamela. Mulligan does blinkered, stammering and sad like if Tama Janowitz had written Miss Havisham first. It’s just Helena Bonham-Carter karaoke. But the movie needs it. Pamela has maybe three actual scenes, then we never see her again. She’s overstayed her welcome at Saltburn. But the movie misses the campiness Mulligan’s giving. You’d like to see her and Pike try on the vulgar farce of “Absolutely Fabulous.” But Fennell is going for real opulence, not a comedy of it.If “Promising Young Woman” had feminist vengeance on its mind, what’s “Saltburn” thinking? I spy three hovering text dots. It’s got some twists and a handful of good lines (nearly all of them belong to Pike), but it doesn’t have many thoughts and even fewer feelings. Here is a movie where gay things occur, but homosexuality abuts, alas, corruption and conniving.I suppose Fennell has made a movie about toxic elitism, but she’s done it in the way Ikea gives you assembly instructions. And barely even that, since the most blatant class indictment is outsourced to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent” during a bout of actual karaoke with Oliver and Farleigh. Staging the warfare between two strivers isn’t a bad urge, but that doesn’t go far enough, either. The movie does for “posh” what “Soul Plane” did for “ghetto”: luxuriate in what it’s pretending to blow up.I’m even left doubting Fennell’s expertise in main characters. Are we meant to clock a nerd who, when he sheds the clothes and spectacles, makes you as horny as Felix is supposed to make him? Barry Keoghan is trying to create a role out of the disparate parts of other ones (Norman Bates, Tom Ripley, Patrick Bateman), yet doesn’t get all the way there. He couldn’t have. There is no “there.”The whole movie seems to exist for its coda, and presumably the prosthetics designer whose name appears in the closing credits. It’s another music-video fantasia, but so cynical, literal-minded and literally cheeky that I cringed my way through it. And it asks a lot of Keoghan, who could have built a memorable, original character for Fennell. But real acting is not what Fennell’s after here. Oliver has a decent amount of strategic sex and Keoghan does his share of nudity, but the only pornographic thing about the movie is the house.SaltburnRated R. Throw a rock. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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    After ‘Saltburn,’ Watch These Five Country House Movies

    From upstairs to downstairs and the challenging moments in between, a walk through a particular subgenre of films ripe for dramatic tension.If “Promising Young Woman” was Emerald Fennell’s darkly comic take on the rape-revenge thriller — one that rode a zeitgeisty wave of discourse onto a best original screenplay Oscar in 2021 — “Saltburn” is the writer-director’s entry in the country house canon. The film (in theaters) is the latest in a subgenre ripe for dramatic tension: upstairs versus downstairs; invited versus interloped; public versus private. Away from prying eyes, characters in these tales tend to revel in their idyllic surroundings as unseen, often sinister, forces work against them, resulting in an unforgettable stay.In “Saltburn,” Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a shy Oxford student, accepts an invitation to spend the summer at the family estate of a wealthy classmate, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). While there, Oliver’s adoration for the charming aristocrat reveals itself to be much more than an innocent infatuation.With its covetous double helix of class consciousness and homoeroticism, “Saltburn” fits in nicely alongside literary classics like “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (and their many screen adaptations). Here are five other films where summering at a country house leads to significant power imbalances and lifelong consequences.The Coming-of-Age Country House Movie‘The Go-Between’ (1971)Stream it on the Roku Channel.Joseph Losey, whose 1963 film, “The Servant,” is its own masterpiece of queer-coded dominance, works once again from a Harold Pinter screenplay to direct this quintessentially British period drama. Young Leo (Dominic Guard) is invited by a wealthy friend to spend the summer at his family’s country house. But when his friend is quarantined with the measles, Leo must devise another way to pass the time. He soon finds himself the fraught messenger for his friend’s beautiful sister (Julie Christie) and her secret lover, the tenant farmer (Alan Bates). Stunning shots of the property’s fertile grounds fuel this Palme d’Or winner with a sense of freedom that its owners are quick to curtail; when the film catches up with Leo decades later, his loss of innocence can be pinpointed back to that fateful summer.The Art House Country House Movie‘Cries and Whispers’ (1972)Stream it on Max.The silence of God, humanity’s inability to connect, the secret grudges that quietly tear families apart: all themes the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman saw fit to set against the peacefulness of a summer house no less than a half dozen times. Here, it’s a searing look at the final days of a woman dying of cancer at her family’s opulent mansion, and her two sisters’ painful attempt to thaw out years of estrangement. As they struggle against the clock to process their emotions, the house’s maid shuffles in saintly servitude. Sven Nykvist’s Oscar-winning cinematography places the white-clad women — including the Bergman regulars Liv Ullmann, Harriet Andersson and Ingrid Thulin — against richly saturated crimson walls, bringing out piercing performances from their icy exteriors.The Documentary Country House Movie‘Grey Gardens’ (1975)Stream it on Max.One of the most consequential documentaries of all time serves as a cautionary tale about what happens when you don’t pack it up at summer’s end. When Albert and David Maysles were hired by Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister Lee Radziwill to make a film about their family, the documentarians’ attention quickly shifted to the women’s eccentric cousins: “Little Edie” and her mother, “Big Edie” Beale. The erstwhile socialites had boarded themselves up for nearly 20 years in their decaying home in East Hampton, N.Y., the stench of garbage and cat urine undergirding their peculiar relationship. With a distinctly American blend of can-do and laissez-faire, the Beales continue their business as usual, impervious to the changing tides of the outside world.The Cruel Country House Movie‘Chinese Roulette’ (1976)Stream it on the Criterion Channel.Alexander Allerson and Anna Karina in ”Chinese Roulette.”Janus FilmsBorn in Germany in 1945, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made films that emerged from a deep-seated mistrust of humanity. But he gave a despairing, devilish wink in even his cruelest works, like this bleak psychological thriller where two cheating spouses accidentally take lovers to their country estate on the same weekend. When their resentful young daughter arrives, she manipulates the foursome, the housekeeper and her son into playing the titular game, a sort of diabolical truth or dare, over dinner. Michael Ballhaus’s cinematography constructs a claustrophobic ballet around the house’s mirrored interiors, tightening reflective nooses around each of its deeply guilty guests.The Tender Country House Movie‘Call Me by Your Name’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.James Ivory picked up the country house torch and ran through the ’80s and ’90s with hits like “A Room With a View” and “The Remains of the Day,” all of which were produced by his partner, Ismail Merchant. But it was for adapting André Aciman’s novel “Call Me by Your Name” that he won his first Oscar — becoming the oldest-ever winner at 89. The director Luca Guadagnino bathes the film in its Northern Italian setting, where a bookworm teen learns of the wounding and healing powers of sexual attraction after a graduate student arrives at his family’s lush villa. More

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    ‘Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later’ Review: Trailblazers Revisited

    This documentary from Daniel Peddle offers an update on the transmasculine people of color who participated in ballroom culture in the 1990s.The 2005 documentary “The Aggressives” provided a novel view of ballroom culture, or the underground pageant scene which emerged as a haven for queer Black and Latino youths in the 1980s and ’90s. The subjects of the 2005 film are people who identified themselves as “aggressives” — they were assigned female at birth, but they competed in ballroom categories highlighting their masculinity. They walked the catwalk dressed in construction gear and basketball jerseys. The original film followed its stars for five years, as they carried their gender performance out of the ballroom and into the streets, into their relationships and family lives.Now, decades years later, the director Daniel Peddle follows up with his former subjects, in the documentary “Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later.” Four of the original subjects of “The Aggressives” return to offer updates from their lives, and once again, the filmmaker interviews his subjects across five years.One such subject, Kisha, who was once a model, has grown into an artist, and the film uses Kisha’s photography as a clever way to include commentary on the original film from new transmasculine, nonbinary or lesbian subjects. Trevon now identifies as transmasculine and nonbinary, and is happily partnered and considering how to build a family. Octavio works to reestablish a relationship with his son, and he considers when to pursue gender affirming surgery. Chin seeks support from the Transgender Law Center for assistance in navigating immigration law after he is targeted for deportation by ICE. In each of these updates, Peddle hews close to his original film’s style: he asks his subjects to define themselves and then he keeps watching, letting their actions color in the lines of their self-definition. It’s an approach which grants dignity to his subjects, an effect which is only amplified by the passage of time.Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years LaterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More