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      ‘Girls Will Be Girls’ Review: Surviving High School

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      The filmmaker Shuchi Talati’s debut feature follows a model student and her stifled mother, who are both vying for the attention of a new crush.“Girls Will Be Girls,” the debut feature from the Indian filmmaker Shuchi Talati, is a careful, naturalistic coming-of-age story with a clunky title.This film aims to explore how women’s sexuality is stifled in patriarchal settings. The story takes place in the 1990s at a conservative Indian boarding school in the Himalayas, where the straight-A senior Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) must balance her academic duties with her new crush on Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a sly charmer and recent transfer student.Here, one might expect “Girls Will Be Girls” to take the same route as countless other adolescent tales of obedient girls who meet naughty boys. But Talati is less interested in bringing us on a raw emotional journey than she is in looking at the effects of repressive rules on women. As Mira grows close to Sri, so does her mother, Anila (Kani Kusruti), who oversees her daughter’s studies from a home nearby. Anila’s own social and romantic frustrations manifest in her also vying for Sri’s attention.The screenplay suffers from some unevenness, but it never wavers in its empathy. It helps that Talati demonstrates a keen eye for composition; her static shots often make use of mirrors and other frames within the frame. These elements give “Girls Will Be Girls” a distinct sense of perspective, and imbue even the more familiar aspects of its story with fresh feeling.Girls Will Be GirlsNot rated. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Matt and Mara’ Review: Will They or Won’t They?

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      Two former college friends reconnect for a possible romance in this irritatingly vague and vapid drama.Whatever the bond between the title characters of “Matt and Mara” (Matt Johnson and Deragh Campbell), it’s an uncomfortable one. How could it be otherwise when one of them is constitutionally unable to recognize her needs and the other is clearly accustomed to satisfying his?Either way, these two belong anywhere but together. He’s confident and pushy, a successful author whose recent collection of short stories has been widely praised. She’s pensive and cautious, a creative writing professor with a hot husband (Mounir Al Shami) and a small daughter, neither of whom seem of particular concern when Matt, a friend from college, shows up and elbows his way into her life and her classroom.A nebulous bid to capture the tension between a seemingly cozy marriage and a romantic fling, and between the academy and the outside world, “Matt and Mara” is less a movie than an idea for one. It doesn’t help that neither character is likable, or that the director and writer, Kazik Radwanski, fills the screen with close-ups in lieu of information. Potentially shattering declarations are made and fade without remark, as when Mara announces to her husband, an experimental musician, and a group of their friends that music is essentially meaningless to her. What this says about her, or her marriage, we are left to guess.Matt is similarly a cipher, though Mara’s skittishness makes him appear more bullying than besotted. There is something so deeply indistinct about these characters that their actions are often puzzling. One minute Mara seems repelled by Matt’s emotional directness, the next she’s erupting with jealousy when he has an innocent dinner with an acquaintance. Yet if she’s made of glass, as Matt claims at one point, then he’s made of rubber in a movie constructed almost entirely from thin air.Matt and MaraNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Critic’ Review: Dangerous Liaisons

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      Ian McKellen stars a drama critic in 1930s London who has much higher standards for the theater than for his own professional ethics.Anyone who works in the arts can be forgiven for casting a critic as a villain. But a reviewer who dangles potential praise as leverage in a blackmail scheme? That’s going a step too far.Jimmy Erskine (Ian McKellen), the title character of “The Critic,” set in London in 1934, considers himself an erudite wit who holds the city’s drama scene to high standards. In reality, he is a fiendish egoist who tears down gifted performers for his own amusement. The movie, directed by Anand Tucker, is based on “Curtain Call,” a novel by the former film reviewer Anthony Quinn, whose purported inspiration for the character was James Agate, who held the stage beat at London’s Sunday Times for years.The screenwriter Patrick Marber (“Closer”) brings a typically nasty edge to the proceedings. After an encounter between Jimmy and the police threatens his position at the Chronicle, Jimmy hatches a plot that involves Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), a rising actress, and David Brooke (Mark Strong), who has inherited the paper from his father and is said to dislike Jimmy’s “proclivities.” (Jimmy barely conceals his sexual orientation; in addition to cruising the park at night, he has a live-in secretary, Tom, played by Alfred Enoch, who accompanies him in public.)Visually, “The Critic” is polished enough, despite some splashes of apparent digital lacquer. But Marber hasn’t supplied an incontrovertible motive to bind Nina to Jimmy. And there is something arguably troubling about the way McKellen’s character has been conceived. The subtext seems to be that Jimmy’s familiarity with operating in the shadows and having his liaisons genteelly wielded against him has given him a special aptitude for extortion. But as a gay man in an era when Britain criminalized homosexual activity, he would, one assumes, be far more likely to be a victim of blackmail than its perpetrator.The CriticRated R for murder and meanspirited reviews. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The 4:30 Movie’ Review: Kevin Smith Comes of Age

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      The writer-director Kevin Smith looks back fondly on his New Jersey childhood in this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy.“The 4:30 Movie,” a nostalgic period comedy about teenage cinephiles coming of age in small-town New Jersey, is alternately juvenile and sentimental. It’s an awkward tonal balance familiar from the writer-director Kevin Smith’s early features, including “Mallrats” and the ’90s cult classic “Clerks.”But with its soft lighting and almost obsessive fondness for its mid-80s production design, this is clearly Smith working in a different register — more sincere and personal, as befits what he’s described as his “secret origin story.”The jokes range from old-school, foul-mouthed patter (lots of stuff about “second base” and various euphemisms for masturbation) to throwback cultural signifiers (including “The Brady Bunch,” Van Halen and Hands Across America), delivered by Austin Zajur, Reed Northrup and Nicholas Cirillo with capable if largely unamusing adolescent brio.You can tell Smith has put more effort into this movie than both his trite studio cash-ins (“Cop Out”) and his dashed-off experiments (“Yoga Hosers”), trying earnestly to account for how he fell in love with cinema and became a filmmaker. It’s like “The Fabelmans” if Steven Spielberg had grown up to make bad movies.The script is loaded with droll, audience-flattering nods to the future, where characters confidently insist things that viewers know make them sound stupid, like “no one will ever pay to see a Batman movie” or “the Mets will never win the World Series.” This is the cheapest type of joke you can make in a period comedy, and “The 4:30 Movie” makes it constantly. Effort goes only so far, and “The 4:30 Movie” doesn’t surpass Smith’s usual limitations.The 4:30 MovieRated R for strong language, mild violence, some sexuality and lewd humor. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Speak No Evil’ Review: He Seemed So Nice

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      In this horror remake, James McAvoy plays an aggressively friendly British stranger who extends a dubious invitation to an American couple. Suckers!Given the travel horror stories that fill the news — cruise-ship contagion, passengers trying to open plane doors mid-flight — the movies have some serious competition when it comes to fear mongering. Yet filmmakers keep trying to top reality with familiar stories about the terrors that await you when you venture into the world. Characters keep heading down dark roads. They visit weird hotels and isolated cabins (come on!), invite creeps into their homes and enter those of people they scarcely know (as if!). These travelers don’t ask for trouble; they beg for it.The first time that Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben (Scoot McNairy), an American couple, really notice Paddy (an exhaustingly over-the-top James McAvoy), he’s taking a splashy leap in a pool. They’re on vacation in Tuscany and having a good time, and meeting new people is fun (unless you’re in a horror movie, that is). Paddy seems excitable, a bit over-eager — for attention, certainly — but he and his wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), are friendly, attractive and British, so they’re easy to talk to. Like Louise and Ben, they have a boy, Ant (Dan Hough), so they must be nice. They’re like us, you can almost hear Louise and Ben thinking.For reasons that never make any sense — rationality is often in short supply in horror cinema — it isn’t long before Louise and Ben take up Paddy and Ciara’s invitation to visit them at their house in the English countryside. First, though, the writer-director James Watkins stirs up some marital tension for Ben and Louise, who have moved to London, upturning their lives. (Davis and McNairy starred in the great AMC show “Halt and Catch Fire,” and are persuasively cozy together.) She seems to be just fine, but Ben is unhappily unemployed, a divide that Watkins also uses to feed the story’s themes, chiefly masculinity and middle-class norms.Red alarms have already begun blinking by the time that Louise and Ben and their 11-year-old daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), an anxious child who self-soothes with a stuffed bunny, pull up to Paddy and Ciara’s house one portentously dark night. Once inside, the alarms start flashing faster. Louise tries to put on a good game face, but she’s visibly put off by the house, an uncomfortable, ramshackle warren of cluttered rooms with low ceilings that boxes them in. Soon, Paddy is slaughtering a goose (uh-oh) and pushing a forkful of cooked bird at Louise — a vegetarian — and the atmosphere has appreciably soured. Things only get worse because they have to.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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      ‘My Old Ass’ Review: If She Could Turn Back Time

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      A buoyant comedy with a big heart follows a teen girl who meets her older self the summer before college.That summer before college can be strange, a moment suspended between life stages, and Elliott (Maisy Stella) is right in the thick of it. She’s turning 18 in the tiny picturesque community in Muskoka, Ontario, where her family has farmed cranberries for generations. She has a janky little motorboat, two best friends and a massive crush on the girl behind the counter at the local coffee shop. And she’s looking forward to heading to Toronto in a few short weeks to start the next chapter of her life.Sounds familiar. You might even relate. But “My Old Ass,” written and directed by Megan Park, does not go in expected coming-of-age directions. It’s as much about reframing middle-aged regrets as it is a story about youth, love and possibility — and thus the emotional heft it wields is two-pronged.Elliott belongs to a newish and very welcome variety of teen girl movie protagonist. For decades, these characters were mostly siloed into vapid types, the better for us, I guess, to “understand” them: Goths, cheerleaders, ditzes, bookish wallflowers, cool girls, bullies. Elliott, on the other hand, is funny, capable and comfortable in her own skin. She can drive a tractor and steer a boat, and also forgets to show up for her own birthday dinner with her family. She is very thoroughly 18, with as strong a sense of self as you can really have at that age, while also being kind of a jerk at times to her parents and brothers. She loves them. She just finds them kind of annoying, though she’s not above apologizing for her behavior.Elliott’s characteristics aren’t markers of being a Strong Female Lead so much as just an actual teen girl, the kind you probably know, or maybe were. I found myself thinking of various characters played by stellar young actresses in recent films: Haley Lu Richardson in “The Edge of Seventeen,” Emilia Jones in “Coda,” Lily Collias in “Good One,” Saoirse Ronan in “Lady Bird.”With this complexity in mind, it makes sense that on Elliott’s 18th birthday, she and her friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) decide, with age-appropriate recklessness, that it’s time to have a transcendent experience. They obtain psychedelic mushrooms and head to a little wooded island to camp out and experience their trips, whatever they might be like. Elliott is at first disappointed that the shrooms don’t seem to have any effect on her, but then the unimaginable occurs: Her older self suddenly appears at the campfire. (You see now where the film’s title comes from.) Elliott at age 39 (Aubrey Plaza) is a Ph.D. student and, perhaps relatedly, more cynical than she was as a teenager. But she seems delighted to meet her younger self, and offers a load of advice, including warnings to stay away from someone named Chad who might turn up soon. And though the mushrooms wear off, the connection between younger and older self outlasts the drugs’ effect, to both Elliotts’ surprise.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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      The Song That Connects Jackson Browne, Nico and Margot Tenenbaum

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      Browne wrote “These Days” at 16. Now 75, he and some famous admirers reflect on his unexpected mainstay: “If a song is worth anything, it’s about the life of the listener.”When he was 16, Jack Browne sat down at his parents’ kitchen table in Fullerton, Calif., and started picking out a tune on an old Kay guitar.It was the fall of 1964, and the fledgling songwriter and high school junior — inspired by books, records and his own suburban disaffection — began weaving together an existential number about loss and regret called “These Days.”It would be a year until he finished the song, nearly a decade before he recorded it properly. By the time Jackson Browne, as he would be known professionally, cut it for his 1973 album “For Everyman” — which will be reissued on Sept. 20 — it had already been done in two distinct, definitive versions: the first by the German chanteuse and Velvet Underground collaborator Nico, then later by the Southern rocker Gregg Allman.“These Days” has proved a remarkably durable composition, reinterpreted by Cher, St. Vincent, Glen Campbell, Miley Cyrus, Paul Westerberg and Drake, to name a handful. It inspired Wes Anderson’s 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and more recently has become the unlikely soundtrack to a series of TikTok trends.While Browne has had bigger hits as an artist (“Doctor My Eyes,” “Running on Empty”) and as a writer (Eagles’ “Take It Easy”), “These Days” has rambled through the decades, morphing musically, changing lyrically and taking on added layers of meaning. “In that regard, it’s sort of like a folk song,” Browne said on a late August afternoon, sitting in the control room of his Santa Monica recording studio, Groove Masters.“I come from folk music, that was my school,” continued Browne, somehow still boyish and bright-eyed at 75. “You’d learn several versions of the same song and adapt the parts of it that you liked and it’d become something else. That’s what’s happened with ‘These Days.’”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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      Edward Johnson, C.I.A. Hero in Iran Hostage Crisis, Dies at 81

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      He was a secret partner who helped rescue six American diplomats in 1980 by passing them off as a film crew. The caper inspired the movie “Argo.”Edward B. Johnson, who as an anonymous C.I.A. officer in 1980 helped rescue six American diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis by casting them as a Hollywood crew scouting a Mideast location — an audacious escape that itself became grist for an Oscar-winning movie — died on Aug. 27 at his home in Fairfax, Va. He was 81.The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son Harold said.Documents detailing the Iran rescue were declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1997, and another C.I.A. officer, Antonio J. Mendez, who had masterminded the scheme and recruited Mr. Johnson, wrote a book about the episode, “The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.” (1999).The caper became the basis of “Argo,” a film directed by and starring Ben Affleck (as Mr. Mendez), which won the 2013 Academy Award for best picture.Mr. Mendez died in 2019 without ever revealing his colleague’s name. Mr. Johnson was identified in the book only by his cover name, Julio, and wasn’t referenced in the film at all. And even at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., in a painting depicting the two C.I.A. officers forging visas for the diplomats, Mr. Johnson remained faceless, seen from behind.“Argo: Rescue of the Canadian Six,” a 2012 oil painting on canvas by a C.I.A. artist, Deborah Dismuke. It depicts the C.I.A. officers Antonio Mendez, top, and Mr. Johnson forging fake visas for six American diplomats who were trapped in Tehran during the hostage crisis in Iran. Mr. Johnson’s role in the escapade was not disclosed publicly until last year.Deborah Dismuke/C.I.A, via Associated PressNot until a year ago, in the season finale of “The Langley Files,” an official agency podcast, was Mr. Johnson’s pivotal role revealed publicly.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