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      ‘Full River Red’ Review: A Song Dynasty Blockbuster

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      The latest film from Zhang Yimou weaves slapstick fun into an investigation of a 12th-century political murder.Nearly everyone in China is familiar with “Full River Red,” a wistful, jingoistic poem by the 12th-century general Yue Fei. Zhang Yimou’s new film of the same name is an origin story of sorts for the poem, spinning a web of political intrigue and comedy that takes place during the Song dynasty and unfolds early one morning, entirely in the pre-dawn hours.Qin Hui (Lei Jiayin), a prime minister preoccupied with his reputation, brings an army with him to a diplomatic meeting with enemy forces. But before the meeting, a delegate carrying a mysterious letter turns up dead, leading to an investigation, full of twists and turns, helmed by a commander (Jackson Yee) and his bumbling nephew (Shen Teng).The film, which has skyrocketed to popularity in China — currently the country’s sixth highest-grossing box office entry of all time — is somewhat surprising as the most bankable of Zhang’s career. Despite a prolific filmography of grandiose art house fare that has often wrestled with the vast span of Chinese history, the filmmaker has suffused a dynastic war fable with elements of a slapstick whodunit. Yet the light charm, mostly offered by Shen as the oafish sidekick, serves as a saving grace amid the shadowy political games.At times, particularly in its overwrought closing act, the film feels as if it’s going to collapse under the weight of its relentless, convoluted twists. But the lighthearted tone poking through keeps it afloat, and suspends the viewer in mostly carefree entertainment for its two-and-a-half-hour running time.Full River RedNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Review: ‘Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game’

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      The mesmerizing silver ball, banned for decades in New York for its perils, pings from bumper to bumper in a film that tilts toward the underwhelming.Steven Spielberg’s 2021 “West Side Story” had a lot going for it, including a cast of bright newcomers to the screen. Particularly outstanding was the wiry Mike Faist, who crackled in the role of aggrieved gang member Riff.Now Faist has the lead role, sort of, in a new comedy based on the real-life story of Roger Sharpe, who helped overturn New York’s ban on pinball in the mid-1970s.As a vehicle for Faist’s talents, “Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game,” written and directed by Austin and Meredith Bragg, here credited as the Bragg Brothers, is underwhelming. For one thing, there are two Roger Sharpes. The older one is embodied by the reliable character actor Dennis Boutsikaris (“Better Call Saul”), who narrates under the pretense of giving an on-camera interview. Sharpe interacts with his younger self, who moves to New York in the ’70s seeking a career, only to learn that his favorite pastime is illegal there.Sharpe also falls in love, gets a job, etc., activities that are interrupted by offscreen directives that he get back to pinball. The fourth wall isn’t broken; it doesn’t even exist. The movie strives for a knowing, amiable tone. It achieves a cutesy, slight one instead.And the film’s meta mode sometimes works against it. A snippet of a famous song plays early on, then cuts off, because, we’re told, it’s too expensive to include, a revelation that highlights the many ways in which the Braggs can’t transcend their budget.While Faist must hide his light under the bushel of an ostentatious 1970s mustache, he, like Boutsikaris and the love interest Crystal Reed, musters up noteworthy charm. But not much else.Pinball: The Man Who Saved the GameNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Wildflower’ Review: The Parents Are All Right

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      A snarky teenager navigates her loving but complicated relationship with two intellectually disabled parents in the coming-of-age comedy “Wildflower.”Bea Johnson (Kiernan Shipka), the protagonist of the plucky coming-of-age film “Wildflower,” is a snarky high school senior whose future holds great promise. However, Bea begins the film with a slight problem, one she is quick to brush off. Bea is in a coma.Bea hardly shows any true concern that she’ll eventually wake up. But this flimsy conceit enables the film to jump back in time, to tell the story of how a teenager became so confident in her ability to take care of herself.In voice-over, Bea explains that both of her parents are intellectually disabled. Bea narrates the film in flashback, beginning when her father, Derek (Dash Mihok), and her mother, Sharon (played by the disabled actress Samantha Hyde), married in a whirlwind romance. This left the family matriarchs, Peg (Jean Smart) and Loretta (Jacki Weaver), to worry over the fates of their respective children. Peg wanted the pair to divorce, and Loretta wanted them to be sterilized. In the end, neither happened, and Bea was born.This initial face-off establishes that despite the film’s light, sardonic tone, the discussions that it includes about its disabled characters are blunt and often cruel. And as a child, Bea engages in her own internal debates. She wants to defend her parents against school bullies, but she’s also ashamed to bring a boy home. She resists her extended family’s offers to take her in, but she also expresses resentment toward her parents over the difficulty of moving out to go to college.Shipka ably handles the responsibility of leading the story, but the director Matt Smukler has a harder time balancing the charming and empathetic ensemble performances with the script’s constantly judgmental tone. “Wildflower” is a nervy sit, a movie that eventually makes its way toward acceptance, but only after putting its disabled characters through the trial of dehumanizing questions.WildflowerRated R for language and references to teenage sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Innocent’ Review: A Heist With a French Accent

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      A light, enjoyable confection of a film that is built upon an amusingly absurd premise.Louis Garrel’s “The Innocent,” which the French cinema star directed, wrote and stars in, is about as frothy and bite-size as heist movies get, one that has more in common with a rom-com than with “Dog Day Afternoon.” That’s not a knock. The film, which opens at IFC this Friday, is a humanistic story wrapped in a fun, punchy exterior, much like the French synth-pop music throughout its soundtrack.Abel (Garrel), a young man who’s grown apathetic since losing his wife in an accident, is close to his mother, Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg). But their relationship is tested when she marries a convict, Michel, (Roschdy Zem) shortly before his release. Abel’s suspicions grow as Michel helps procure a flower shop for the family through mysterious means, leading Abel to spy on the former con with his close friend Clémence (a very charming Noémie Merlant). Predictably, Michel isn’t as reformed as he claims to be, and Abel finds himself pulled into a criminal enterprise that he’s in no way equipped for.Garrel knows how to maintain tension throughout the film without giving the audience a panic attack, and he even manages to imbue it with stylistic flair here and there. (The fact that Abel and Clémence work at an aquarium certainly helps with unusual visuals.) But the entertainment value of “The Innocent” lies not in the actual heist — which amounts to little more than a shipment of caviar at a truck stop — but in its lighthearted comedy, its by-the-numbers romance plot and its relatable family drama grafted onto an absurd premise. It is, as one character orders at a diner, a “Coke Zero with sugar” of a film.The InnocentNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Magician’s Elephant’ Review: The Promise of a Pachyderm

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      Adapted from Kate DiCamillo’s beloved children’s book, this animated adventure sands down the somberness of its source material while turning up the silliness.“Anything is possible,” the saucer-eyed characters insist in “The Magician’s Elephant,” a new animated adventure directed by Wendy Rogers. The movie adapts Kate DiCamillo’s 2009 book by the same name, which celebrates the power of serendipity: When a magician accidentally conjures a pachyderm in the war-ruined European city of Baltese, he sets off a chain of unexpected events that gives renewed hope to an orphan boy searching for his long-lost sister.The beauty of DiCamillo’s text is that it is equal parts somber and silly, its undercurrent of grief balanced by fantastical absurdities. In jazzing up the tale for the screen, Rogers sands down the somberness — Baltese is all fuzzy blues and pinks, with nary a trace of postwar grit — while turning up the silliness for gimmicky thrills.In this version, the orphan, Peter (Noah Jupe), has to perform a series of ludicrous tasks to win the elephant — who is crucial to his search — from a ditzy king (Aasif Mandvi). The characters’ motivations are so thinly defined (the king simply wants to be “entertained”) and the challenges so anticlimactic (in one set piece, Peter defeats a fearsome warrior by waving a book in his face) that the refrain “anything is possible” starts to feel as if it’s an excuse for sloppy plotting.The voice performances are lively and evocative — Benedict Wong as the magician and Brian Tyree Henry as a palace guard are standouts — but the film is stuffed with too many characters for even TikTok-fed young viewers to keep straight. And for a tale about the power of belief, the narrator, a fortune teller (Natasia Demetriou), breaks the fourth wall a few too many times, offering commentary like a parent lecturing in the middle of a bedtime story.The Magician’s ElephantRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      After Her Oscar Win, Will Michelle Yeoh Get to Lead Again?

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      The historic victory should mean opportunities to star again, but too often after such milestones, Hollywood doesn’t find central roles for women of color.We’re conditioned to think of an Oscar win as the endpoint to a journey. For some actors, holding that trophy is the realization of a dream held since childhood. For others, it’s the culmination of a well-deserved comeback.But what happens after that win? In our eagerness to treat Oscar victories as career capstones, do we pay too little attention to the opportunities that are supposed to come afterward, yet often don’t?I’ve been mulling that over since Sunday night, when Michelle Yeoh took the best actress Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It happened at the 95th edition of the Academy Awards, the kind of big, tantalizing milestone that prods you to contemplate what has come before, and Yeoh’s win proved especially historic: The first Asian star to win best actress, she was greeted onstage by Halle Berry, the first Black woman to have pulled off that feat.Asking Berry to announce the winner with Jessica Chastain (the previous year’s winner) was a gamble twice over. If Yeoh had lost to one of her four competitors — all of whom were white women — the ensuing photo op would have served as a stark example of a best-actress category that has been hostile to women of color for 95 years. And though Berry has returned to the Oscars several times since her 2002 win for “Monster’s Ball,” it has always been as a presenter and never as a nominee. To see her there is to be reminded that an Oscar win carries no guarantees when an actress is already liable to receive fewer scripts and career opportunities than her white counterparts.So though Yeoh’s triumph was a long time coming, and I teared up as she addressed “all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight,” I also found myself worrying that it won’t be enough. The people in the Dolby Theater looked awfully proud of themselves after Yeoh’s win, but if they really want to do right by her, they have to keep writing lead roles for 60-year-old Asian actresses; otherwise, it’s just empty back-patting.That, after all, was the real breakthrough of “Everything Everywhere,” Yeoh told me in October. We were at an awards event where, flanked by the “Everything Everywhere” directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, she reminisced about a Hollywood career that had mostly been filled with supporting parts.“Look, I’ve been very blessed — I’ve continuously worked, and I’ve worked with great directors,” she said. “But for the first time, I’m No. 1 on the call sheet, thanks to these guys. I do meaningful roles, like in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and ‘Shang-Chi,’ but it was not my movie.”Yeoh said she hoped that “Everything Everywhere” would not be a one-off, but more than a year after the film’s release, it’s unclear when, or if, she will have another lead film role. Coming projects — including the big-screen musical “Wicked,” the third “Avatar” movie, and the ensemble mystery “A Haunting in Venice” — all consign her to supporting parts. Though she is a headline-making superstar who led the hip studio A24 to its biggest ever worldwide hit, Yeoh is still too often treated as additional casting rather than the main event.“Even you, Michelle Yeoh — on the top of the world — has struggled to find the right roles,” Kwan told her when we met in October. “I think that has taken a lot of people by surprise.”Yeoh laughed ruefully. “I read scripts and it’s the guy who goes off on some big adventure — and he’s going off with my daughter!” she said. “I’m like, no, no.”Few Hollywood movies are conceived with a woman over 50 as the central character, and the ones that are greenlit tend to offer those leads to a triumvirate of white women: Meryl if she’s older, Cate if she’s younger and Tilda if she’s weirder. To ensure that Yeoh can be first on the call sheet again, filmmakers must think more creatively, as Kwan and Scheinert did when they revamped “Everything Everywhere” for Yeoh after conceiving the film as a Jackie Chan vehicle. (And while they’re at it, can they find something juicy for last year’s best supporting actor, Troy Kotsur, similarly a boundary breaker — with “CODA,” he became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar — who has been seen in little since?)As momentum in the best-actress race swung from the “Tár” star Cate Blanchett to Yeoh over the last few weeks of awards season, I kept hearing a common refrain from voters: While Blanchett already had two Oscars and would surely be nominated again — she has eight nominations overall — this could be Yeoh’s only chance at gold. Though I understand the practicality of that argument, I hope those voters understand that their job isn’t done simply because of how they marked their ballot. Yeoh’s Sunday-night win is a big one, but the real victory will come when the lead roles that had long eluded her grasp start to become commonplace. If Hollywood can make that so, then instead of an endpoint, Yeoh’s historic Oscar will serve as a long-needed new beginning. More

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      Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu and the Joy of Playing Villainous Goddesses in ‘Shazam’

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      The “Shazam!” actresses say they signed on for their first superhero movie because the roles are a leap forward for women.If superheroes have one thing in common, it’s not so much capes or extraordinary abilities but memorable foes. As its spoilery title reveals, the new movie “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” (a sequel to 2019’s “Shazam!”) has supersized its antagonist factor by going for immortal divinities, plural.Which is how Billy Batson (Zachary Levi), whose nom de superhero is Shazam, and his pals find themselves battling the daughters of Atlas as they do the kind of things power-mad mythological beings are wont to do: unleash oversized beasties, flatten entire cities and point menacingly into the distance.“A good thing about being about magic and gods was that they didn’t have to be in a similar age or anything like that,” the director David F. Sandberg said by phone. “We could just cast the best people we could get.” That turned out to be Helen Mirren as the bossy eldest sister, Hespera, and Lucy Liu as the steely Kalypso. (Rachel Zegler, from “West Side Story,” plays younger sibling Anthea, whose relationship to humans is more ambiguous.)Sandberg quickly realized that Mirren, 77, had not come to play — or maybe she had. “We had to talk her out of doing certain stunts that she wanted to do,” he said.In a video interview, Liu, 54, and Mirren displayed an easygoing rapport, along with a few differences in temperament and approach. Calling from Los Angeles, Mirren dispensed lighthearted jokes and pretended to be a quasi-gadfly at this whole acting thing, while Liu, who was in New York, brought up the ins and outs of portraying an antagonist. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Hespera and Kalypso are introduced as gods rather than goddesses. Is it an important distinction?LUCY LIU We’ve been talking about this, trust me. It’s “Fury of the Gods,” and I was like, “Shouldn’t it be goddesses?” We thought, “We’re already in that realm, as long as it’s not human, we’re fine.”HELEN MIRREN See, I love being an actress. It feels very Belle Époque, very sort of 19th century. Certainly if I’m a god, I would think of myself as a goddess, I have to say.LIU During press, we generally say that we are goddesses. [They both laugh.] This will be the only time I could say that.“It’s ‘Fury of the Gods,’ and I was like, ‘Shouldn’t it be goddesses?’ We thought, ‘We’re already in that realm, as long as it’s not human, we’re fine,’” Lucy Liu said.Warner Bros. PicturesWhat drew you to sign on for your first superhero movie?MIRREN We’re above the superheroes. [Laughs] I don’t go see a lot of superhero films, quite honestly, but I had seen the first “Shazam” and been utterly charmed. So when “Shazam 2” came along, I thought, “Well, if I was going to do a superhero-type movie, that is the one I’d like to be involved in,” because of the wit.LIU To have that experience with one another — outside of working on the blue screen and not really knowing exactly what was going on — was really special. I don’t immediately think about the characters as much as the relationship that was built from that time. We were all learning what we were supposed to be doing, and isolated. We were luckily in the same Covid pod with one another.Were you surprised to see that your outfits would be so gladiator-like?MIRREN I now have a lot of sympathy and respect for any man playing a gladiator because they are carrying one hell of a load on their shoulders, as I found out. The costumes are heavier than they look. And we were wobbling around on enormous platform shoes — gladiators never had to contend with huge, great high heels.LIU And the cape! We would ask oftentimes if we could un-cape ourselves because it was so heavy. It would just pull everything down our shoulders and pull the armor back against our necks. I had them cut mine shorter. Helen’s was longer and heavier than mine.MIRREN With me it’s all about the look. If it looks good, I’m going to suffer it. Also it covered up my bum.Is playing a god different from playing a regular antagonist?MIRREN It’s a different psychology because you don’t have to deal with normal human psychology, which is great. We didn’t have to consider “Why is this villain doing this? Was she abandoned by her mother at a young age?” My stand-in did some of a scene when we walk through a marketplace and I was telling her how to do it like a goddess: “You have to walk as if you’re walking through honey or cream or butter or whatever. You have to absolutely own the space.”LIU I do think there is a delight in having a mission, and having that intention helps you have a straight line that you’re following regardless of what’s happening around you. We worked with the sibling rivalry, the level of experience that each of us had. In the beginning I’m guessing that everyone thought, “Kalypso is going to be so strong and powerful,” but then Hespera grabs her head and pulls her back. That’s the dynamic and those are the nuances that we have engaged in because, as Helen said, we own who we are — we’ve been given this, we were born into it, and so the struggle is the disagreements between each other and our opinions, essentially.For a long time female baddies used sexuality as a weapon, which is not the case here. Do you feel this reflects the ways we now conceive of women’s power onscreen?LIU Yes, it’s not a femme fatale. I think back in the day they would not have made “Wakanda Forever” with a female lead — they probably would have replaced Chadwick Boseman or had another male lead take over. I still think there’s a long way to go. And I do think that there’s sometimes a little bit of a stereotype or stigma where if a woman plays what the audience perceives as the antagonist, she automatically falls into a group or some sort of prescription of what was in the past, as opposed to creating something new and dynamic.MIRREN You did “Charlie’s Angels” and for someone of my generation, it was a huge sea change: full force, fearsome women action. But controlled by a man, so even though it was a massive step forward, there was still that anchor holding it back, in a way. Now that anchor has been let go, thank God. We move forward in a different way, hopefully.“The costumes are heavier than they look,” Helen Mirren said. “And we were wobbling around on enormous platform shoes — gladiators never had to contend with huge, great high heels.”Warner Bros. PicturesLIU If you can believe it, that movie was made 23 years ago. When it was first out on television, it was, “Here’s the sexy one and here’s the one that’s smart.” You always had to categorize it in order to make it sellable: Which audience member prefers which kind of girl? Now it’s very different. It’s moving in the right direction.Who are some of your favorite movie villains?LIU One that happens to be in a superhero movie is the Joker, somebody who has mental illness or is different and becomes ostracized, then assumes a position of power. Cinema doesn’t always portray them as people that are just born evil — that’s not as interesting as somebody who has become something to survive. That fight or flight becomes their way to journey through the world. Unfortunately, often it’s just with destruction or pain against others.MIRREN I would say, Ian McKellen playing Richard III is one of the greatest supervillains of all time. “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” He declares his evil intentions in that very first monologue: “I hate you all and I’m going to [expletive] you up. You just watch me.”It feels that doing Shakespeare would be great prep for a supervillain’s grandstanding rhetorics. A lot of that style goes way back.MIRREN I was just thinking the other day that those great ancient verbal poems people learned by heart are superhero stories: They are about guys who have super strength and can go in and kill a whole army. There’s big descriptions of the way their swords cut through everybody. They’re totally superhero stories. I was wondering why superhero movies seem to be eternally successful and I thought, “Well, of course, for thousands of years these are the stories that human beings have been telling to entertain each other and excite each other and frighten each other.”Do Hespera and Kalypso have action figures?LIU We have these Funko Pops with our exact outfits.MIRREN We do? Oh, good, I want one.LIU Rachel sent a picture of the three of us and said, “It’s like we’re hanging out,” and I was like, “Yeah, during Covid because we’re all in boxes.” Somebody brought it up to me to sign, so now I know it’s real, the project has now been franchised.Lucy, has your son seen the film?LIU He’s 7, and I told him, “I think there’s too many scary things in the movie.” He said, “I’ll just wait until I’m 10.” He’s obsessed with Helen, and when he was 5 he said he was going to marry her. She’s magical for all ages. More

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      When Best Picture Winners Overcome a Release Early in the Year

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      “Everything Everywhere All at Once” isn’t the first top film to have its debut long before awards season. But it is one of the few to go the distance.When “Everything Everywhere All at Once” made its debut last March at the South by Southwest film festival, followed by a nationwide release the next month, expectations were modest.Maybe the quirky A24 film about a multiverse-jumping mother striving to finally connect with her daughter — and busting some martial arts moves along the way — would make some money. And then “hot dog fingers” mania happened. Seemingly overnight, TikTokers glommed on to the prompt “If the multiverse is real, I hope there’s one where …” and imagined alternate timelines for their lives. Moviegoers across the country flocked to see the film once, twice, nine times. But back in spring 2022, no one could have anticipated the movie’s best picture triumph at the Oscars on Sunday night.Conventional wisdom has it that films released in the fall make stronger contenders. So when “Everything Everywhere” won, it joined a select group of films that were similarly released early — or early-ish — in a previous year, and that went on to capture the most coveted prize in Hollywood.Here are nine times a release in spring or summer — or, once, even in January — has gone on to win big.January 1943‘Casablanca’A release early in the year was not viewed as a competitive disadvantage until the early 1990s, when the former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s guerrilla-style efforts on behalf of smaller indie films like “The Crying Game” (1992) and “Il Postino” (1995) kicked off the modern era of Oscar campaigning. The World War II-set romantic drama “Casablanca” was actually in good company among the 10 best picture contenders: All but three were released between January and August.May 1952‘The Greatest Show on Earth’In the 1950s, it was common for best picture winners to also be box-office behemoths. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Cecil B. DeMille’s 152-minute circus extravaganza, became the highest-grossing film of the year in 1952, thanks to its extended stay in theaters.March 1965‘The Sound of Music’David Lean’s epic romance “Doctor Zhivago,” a December release, was the favorite after he won best director for his previous two movies (“The Bridge on the River Kwai” from 1957 and “Lawrence of Arabia” from 1962). But audiences loved Maria — “The Sound of Music” became the highest-grossing film of 1965 — and the film won five statuettes, including best picture.May 1969‘Midnight Cowboy’The only X-rated film to ever win best picture hit theaters long before the four other best picture contenders. The idea of releasing awards contenders as close as possible to the date of the ceremony — just before the eligibility cutoff at the end of the previous year — so they’d be top of mind for voters was just beginning to take hold and would become common in the 1980s.March 1972‘The Godfather’ Paramount brass locked horns with the director Francis Ford Coppola on every major decision, and the studio chief at the time, Robert Evans, fought to push the film’s original Christmas 1971 release to the spring to force Coppola to do another edit. (That made the film, which runs nearly three hours, even longer!) To be fair, “The Godfather” would have been Oscars catnip no matter when it was released.February 1991‘The Silence of the Lambs’Like “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “The Silence of the Lambs” was bolstered by huge word of mouth and strong reviews. The cannibalistic thriller — still the only horror movie to win best picture — topped the box office for five consecutive weeks after it was released in February 1991. Then it hit VHS just before Halloween, vaulting it back onto voters’ radar.July 1994‘Forrest Gump’This crowd-pleasing baby boomer tale was up against a stacked lineup of best picture nominees that included “Pulp Fiction” and “The Shawshank Redemption.” But moviegoers had embraced the tale of Tom Hanks’s kindhearted Alabamian, and it spent the summer hovering at or near the top of the box office, a run that Oscar voters surely noted.May 2005‘Crash’The divisive, Los Angeles-set race-relations drama pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history. The gay western “Brokeback Mountain” was an early front-runner and theories abound about why voters gave its filmmaker, Ang Lee, the best director Oscar but the top prize to Paul Haggis’s urban drama. In hindsight the win wasn’t exactly definitive. In 2012, Film Comment named “Crash” the worst best-picture winner of all time.June 2009‘The Hurt Locker’“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s low-budget American war thriller, had a slow rollout in theaters, going from four to 535 by the end of July. But it racked up strong performances at precursor award shows leading into the Oscars. More