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      ‘Ne Zha 2,’ Blockbuster Chinese Animated Film, Will Get English Version

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      The English-language version will feature the voice of Michelle Yeoh and be released in the United States in August.An English-language version of the Chinese movie “Ne Zha 2,” which has surpassed “Inside Out 2” as the highest-grossing animated feature of all time, will be released in the United States next month.“Ne Zha 2,” which is based loosely on Chinese mythology and a famous 16th-century novel, has made $2.2 billion at the global box office, including $20 million in the United States and Canada, according to A24, which is distributing the English version. That is more than any other animated film when not accounting for inflation; “Inside Out 2” made $1.7 billion last year.The English version will open on Aug. 22 and feature the voice of Michelle Yeoh, the first Asian star to win best actress at the Academy Awards for her role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Yeoh will voice Nezha’s mother. The movie will also feature Aleks Le, Crystal Lee and Vincent Rodriguez III.In the original “Ne Zha,” which earned $726 million worldwide when it was released in 2019, Nezha is born as the reincarnation of a demon with supernatural powers who is destined to live only three years. He fights back against his fate and saves his village.In the sequel, written and directed by Yu Yang, Nezha challenges the political order and authority governing gods and demons, fighting the Dragon King of Four Seas and other creatures.The sequel was released in China in January and quickly became a smash hit, earning more than $1 billion in ticket sales in less than two weeks. “Ne Zha 2” was the first non-Hollywood film to reach that milestone.Yeoh, who also plays Madame Morrible in the “Wicked” movies, said in a statement that she was honored to be part of “Ne Zha 2,” calling it a “landmark in Chinese animation and a powerful reminder of how universal our stories can be.”“I can’t wait for everyone to experience the wonder, heart, spectacular artistry and magic of this film on the big screen,” she said.The success of “Ne Zha 2” has been good news for the Chinese film industry, which was struggling with poor ticket sales amid a weakening economy. The recent films to break through in China have not been the typical Hollywood blockbuster, but domestic features with patriotic themes or those that showcase traditional Chinese culture or folklore. More

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      Danielle Deadwyler on ’40 Acres and Balancing Brutality and Family

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      The star plays a stoic matriarch raising a militant brood to protect their land and each other against cannibals in R.T. Thorne’s new horror indie.Onscreen, the actress Danielle Deadwyler has become known for expressing with her eyes what words rarely do. She can appear at once steely and heartbroken, fierce and fragile.She has used this ability to great effect in the HBO Max dystopian drama “Station Eleven”; in Jeymes Samuel’s 2021 western, “The Harder They Fall”; and in Chinonye Chukwu’s 2022 historical drama, “Till,” in which she played the doting mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.Now, Deadwyler, 43, is applying her skill to R.T. Thorne’s first feature, the horror indie “40 Acres,” which is set in the near future. She plays a mother and former soldier, Hailey Freeman, who, alongside her partner, an Indigenous man named Galen (Michael Greyeyes), is preparing her brood for the harsh truths of their famine-decimated postapocalyptic life. They must fight threats from all sides, the scariest of which are bands of ferocious cannibals.The family tries to balance survivalist reality, including grisly encounters, with serene farm life. Days are spent training the four children to be warriors while also honoring their heritage and their land, finding surprising joy in the small things. In his critic’s pick review for The Times, Robert Daniels wrote that “Deadwyler’s forceful energy fills the frame” and that she “lends power and humor to this lovingly stern mother.”Hailey and her family are the descendants of African American farmers who settled in Canada after the Civil War, when the United States failed to fulfill Gen. William T. Sherman’s promise of 40 acres of land for Black Americans freed from enslavement.“It’s a unique family — R.T. said he hadn’t seen Black and Indigenous families together onscreen,” Deadwyler told me in a video interview in June. “I hadn’t either, like this.”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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      ‘Superman’ Review: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a Reboot!

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      Beginning again with the Man of Steel, this time in the hands of James Gunn.In one sense I can’t really spoil “Superman.” Even comic book agnostics already know the basic idea: A Kryptonian baby with incredible powers, sent to Earth by his parents ahead of his planet’s destruction, is raised by a pair of American farmers. By day, he’s the bespectacled journalist Clark Kent; by night, he’s — well, you know. That’s been the story since Action Comics No. 1 was published in 1938.On the other hand, the ubiquity of those bare facts makes it extra easy to spoil this newest movie, a hard reboot for the character and his universe, because you’re probably going to the movies to see what they’ve done to the guy now, and the discovery is the fun part. “Superman” is the first film for DC Studios, of which Peter Safran and James Gunn are the chief executives. Elaborate histories of the byzantine path that got us here are available to you, should you be interested, but if you’re just a normie like me, the most important thing to recall is this: Gunn is probably best known for directing the three “Guardians of the Galaxy” films for Marvel and the 2021 DC film “The Suicide Squad” (not to be confused with the 2016 movie “Suicide Squad” — you see what I mean about byzantine).Gunn tends to nail the right tone with superhero material: He mixes big-hearted themes with a dash of real-world allusions and a good-natured understanding that all of this should be treated as if it’s a bit silly because, let’s face it, it is. Guys in capes zooming around, humans with magical powers that let them make big punching fists out of matter and energy, tech billionaires consumed by envy who hang out in shadowy lairs trying to control the universe, I mean, come on.Well, OK, maybe that last bit. And maybe a little more. Let’s not forget that Superman was created by two Jewish men, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were keenly aware of rising antisemitism and Nazi oppression, as well as the despair of a people saddled with economic depression, looking for someone to save them. Superman took on corrupt politicians, unscrupulous businessmen and substandard housing conditions. And he was staunchly antifascist: In a noncanonical 1940 story titled “How Superman Would End the War,” Superman brought Hitler himself to justice.So while staying true to Superman requires trotting out certain familiar plot elements — his birth parents, his adoptive parents, his susceptibility to Kryptonite, his big old crush on the scrappy lady reporter Lois Lane — it also means tapping into those ideological roots. He’s a metahuman, but he’s also a man who’s almost guilelessly attached to truth, justice and something called “the American way”: protecting the little guy, pummeling the baddies. Set that guy down in the 21st century, and things get complicated.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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      How to Escape a T-Rex in ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’

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      The director Gareth Edwards narrates a harrowing sequence from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to escape by raft from an island riddled with dinosaurs and you manage to wake up a sleeping T-Rex in the process?That scenario becomes one of the signature moments in “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the latest in the long-running dino thriller franchise.In the scene, a family becomes trapped on an island where the setting is lush and the creature threats are plentiful. One family member, Teresa (Luna Blaise), finds a raft but also encounters a certain snoozing theropod nearby. The raft, per the instructions written on the side of it (seen in a close-up shot), must be opened on land.“This was something we added in the edit,” Edwards said, narrating the scene and discussing the close-up, “because we did a test screening and the audience was just like, why would you inflate it in front of a T-Rex?”Next, the filmmakers used the opportunity to make a dino disappear before the viewers’ eyes. The T-Rex is in the background of the shot, but then is hidden from view once the raft inflates on its side. When the raft gets turned flat in the water, the dinosaur has disappeared. “You sort of get this David Copperfield moment,” Edwards said.In discussing where the sequence was shot, Edwards said, “What you’re looking at is two main locations. One is in Thailand and it’s really actually a lake. We use it as a river, but it’s this big lake within a quarry. And then, once the rafting begins proper, it becomes this location in the U.K. called Lee Valley, which was essentially built for the London Olympics in 2012.”Only one of these locations was warm.“In London, in the rapid section,” Edwards said, “it’s freezing cold. And the actors, they were very tolerant, but we had to do take after take after take as you can imagine. And slowly through the day, I could see the look in their eyes. They wanted to kill me.”Read the “Jurassic World Rebirth” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Superhero Movies Dominated the Box Office, but Not the Top 100 List

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      The notable exceptions — “The Dark Knight” and “Black Panther” — stood out among the many sequels and spinoffs.Any way you look at the last 25 years in film, there’s no denying that superhero movies have been a vital part of 21st-century big screen entertainment. Many refer to the release of “Iron Man” in 2008 as the official kickoff of what would become the moneymaking engine that resulted in a steady stream of blockbusters, sequels, phases and cinematic universes unto themselves. And yet “Iron Man,” and most of its successors, plucked from Marvel and DC Comics alike, are conspicuously absent from The New York Times list of the 100 best films from the 21st century so far, as voted on by influential directors, actors and other notable names in Hollywood.For some, this may not be at all surprising. Audiences will buy tickets to the next Marvel movie, and perhaps even enjoy it for whatever combination of cinematic spectacle, fan nostalgia and actual solid filmmaking it offers, but many would be more loath to grant it the prestige of a top film.But it’s also worth considering how years of oversaturation of superhero stories on movies and TV have worn on even the most loyal fans, causing superhero fatigue and casting a shadow over even the acclaimed films that have come out of the genre. It’s difficult to consider the individual merits of films that primarily serve as cogs in the larger wheels of their franchises.Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight,” which along with “Black Panther” is one of the two superhero movies that made the list, is acclaimed for bridging the gap between prestige filmmaking and comic book material. It doesn’t hurt, too, that the film looks the part of your typical award-winning drama, with a grim, realistic tone and showcasing well-loved serious actors like Christian Bale and Gary Oldman.“The Dark Knight” and “Black Panther” are prime examples of the idea that there can be more to superhero movies than camp, spandex and CGI. The two stand out for their nuanced philosophical musings: “The Dark Knight” questions the line between chaos and control, and the significance of the hero as a symbol of justice in a world where justice is not always synonymous with law and order.And “Black Panther” was not simply the first major Black superhero film of the century, featuring Black leads, Black culture and a beautiful Black utopia, but an examination of how the diaspora created a rift between Black Africans and African Americans. And both films starred now-departed actors giving career-defining performances: Heath Ledger and Chadwick Boseman.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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      Michael Madsen, Actor Known for ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Kill Bill,’ Dies at 67

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      He had the air of a timeless Hollywood bad guy who seemed to have stepped out of a 1940s film noir. “I’m a bit of a throwback to the days of black-and-white movies,” he said.Michael Madsen, a sledgehammer of an actor who became one of Hollywood’s reigning bare-knuckled heavies thanks to indelible performances in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill” series, as well as in the critically acclaimed mob film “Donnie Brasco,” died on Thursday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 67.The cause was cardiac arrest, said his manager, Ron Smith.Mr. Madsen never achieved true leading-man status like his soul mates Charles Bronson and James Gandolfini — but perhaps, measured by volume, he did. A tough guy’s tough guy, he seemed ubiquitous in his 1990s heyday, one of those guy-who-was-in-everything actors, like Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán.His Internet Movie Database entry cites 346 acting credits. By comparison, Mr. Bronson, a longtime marquee-topper known for star vehicles like the “Death Wish” series, had 164 when he died in 2003 at 81.With a whiff of Mickey Rourke, a hint of Sylvester Stallone and a linebacker’s physique, Mr. Madsen had the air of a timeless Hollywood bad guy who seemed to have stepped out of a 1940s film noir.This point was abundantly clear to the actor himself.“Maybe I was just born in the wrong era, man,” he said in a 2004 interview with The Guardian. “I’m a bit of a throwback to the days of black-and-white movies. Those guys back then, they had a certain kind of directness about them. A lot of the screenplays, the plots were very simplistic — they gave rise to a type of antihero that maybe I suit better.”If the role called for a sprinkle of sadism, Mr. Madsen was your man, as showcased in “Reservoir Dogs” (1992), Mr. Tarantino’s breakout thriller about a crew of slick-suited thieves bungling a diamond heist in the bloodiest possible fashion. He was part of an ensemble cast that also included Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn and Steve Buscemi.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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      Charlize Theron and Uma Thurman on Injuries, Action and ‘The Old Guard 2’

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      In the Netflix film “The Old Guard 2,” Charlize Theron and Uma Thurman play immortal warriors blessed — or cursed, depending on your outlook — with incredible recuperative powers. Stab them in the back, shoot them in the face, and wham-o, they heal in seconds. Theron’s character, Andromache of Scythia (Andy for short), has been fighting the good fight, and several bad ones, for over 6000 years; her archnemesis Discord, played by Thurman, is even older.The action epic marks Theron’s return to the franchise five years after the critically acclaimed first film (the Times’s A.O. Scott praised the movie’s action sequences and “tone of hard-boiled melancholy.”) It also marks Thurman’s high-profile return to the action movie genre, 21 years after she starred in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill: Volume 2.”The actors created two of the most celebrated action heroines of all time: Thurman’s The Bride, the vengeful, katana-wielding assassin of the “Kill Bill” films, and Theron’s Imperator Furiosa, the buzzcut-sporting, big rig-driving heroine of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” “Fury Road” was one action film among many for Theron (others include “Atomic Blonde,” “The Italian Job,” and the “Fast and the Furious” franchise). After the “Kill Bill” films, however, Thurman eschewed the action film genre for rom-coms, TV and a run on Broadway, among other things.The two recently got together at the Netflix offices in Hollywood to discuss women in action films, on-set injuries and what they won’t do in a picture. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.Uma Thurman, left, with Charlize Theron in New York.Uma, it’s been a while since you’ve done an action movie. Why now, and why this one?UMA THURMAN Well, I find Charlize to be very mysterious. I feel like she keeps a tight circle around her. But she’s revered and admired, and her work speaks for itself, so this was a special opportunity. Getting to work with a great actress is a precious thing, and projects are usually not designed to bring multiple heavyweight women together, as Charlize has done with this franchise. Every once in a while you see these great ensembles with, like, seven great actresses, and you always feel bad that you weren’t included! You look at them with, like, hunger.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