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      ‘Aporia’ Review: Killing Time

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      Strong acting helps stabilize this dopey sci-fi/family drama.Even the most casual consumer of science fiction can tell you that tinkering with the past, however commendable the reason, is a fool’s game. This may be news to the three adults at the center of Jared Moshé’s film “Aporia,” a deeply silly time-travel weepie buoyed solely by the soapy warmth of its performances.Ever since Sophie (Judy Greer) lost her husband, Mal (Edi Gathegi), to a drunken driver eight months earlier, she and her preteen daughter (Faithe Herman) have been struggling. Enter Mal’s best friend, Jabir (Payman Maadi), a physicist and refugee from a dictatorship that killed his entire family. Obsessed with past wrongs, Jabir has been quietly building a time machine, a contraption that looks like a janky iron lung. The machine doesn’t actually go anywhere, but (and don’t quote me on this) can send particles back in time to murder your chosen victim. Someone like, say, the driver who killed Mal.But softhearted Sophie, unable to enjoy a successful assassination, can’t resist befriending the erstwhile driver’s widow and daughter, only to unearth a second villain. Every erasure, of course, demands several minutes of soul-searching and causes unexpected, increasingly troubling repercussions; maybe just one more murder will set everything right?Filled with idiotic behavior and logical ellipses (and a beyond-infuriating ending), “Aporia,” which means an expression of doubt or uncertainty, more than justifies its title. The film’s most beguiling idea, though, is its insistence on the significance of shared memories: When time resets, only Sophie and Jabir remember the original timeline, leaving them excluded from an alternate past — even their own.AporiaRated R for forgivable language and unforgivable behavior. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Eternal Memory’ Review: A Love That Lasts When Recollections Fade

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      This documentary from Maite Alberdi looks at how a couple faces one partner’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis.The word “Alzheimer’s” isn’t spoken until well into “The Eternal Memory.” While that may be because this documentary’s subjects rarely mention it themselves, withholding the diagnosis also seems like a deliberate choice by the director, Maite Alberdi (“The Mole Agent”).An uncannily intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease that affects the mind, “The Eternal Memory” doesn’t aim to hold spectators’ hands. Like Paulina Urrutia, whose husband, Augusto Góngora, is the one with Alzheimer’s, the viewer must continually reassess Góngora’s lucidity, which for long stretches is hardly in doubt. Part of Urrutia’s strategy is to gently quiz him about their lives. Does he remember their first date? Was it at one of their homes? (The correct answer is no: Neither can cook.)Góngora — who died in May, after the film was completed and first shown — was a TV journalist in Chile who participated in underground newscasts during the Pinochet dictatorship. Urrutia is an actress who served as culture minister during the Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s first term. Their occupations add another layer of reflexivity: In different ways, both were involved in telling other people’s stories and preserving the national memory.Urrutia, who is shown taking over the shooting of the documentary once the pandemic necessitated isolation, is almost surreally unflappable; she is rarely seen losing patience with Góngora, although there is a heart-rending scene in which she informs him that he has gone a whole morning without recognizing her. Could any film completely capture such a private dynamic? Surely not, but at moments, “The Eternal Memory” appears to come close.The Eternal MemoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Justin H. Min, Travel Writer? The Path Not Taken for a Rising Star

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      Success came relatively easy — until he tried acting. For a moment, journalism seemed more viable. But now he’s the lead in “Shortcomings.”Five years after Justin H. Min began pursuing acting by Googling “how to pursue acting,” he thought he was getting the hang of it. He had made a viral commercial, and he was in contention for three major roles.He landed none of them.“I was not nervous and I did everything I wanted to,” Min recalled of the auditions. “And that’s the most devastating because you’re like, ‘I guess I just don’t have it.’”It was in this less-than-healthy head space that Min decided to pivot to a different unstable profession: travel writing. He had caught on with a British magazine and it seemed he might cobble together full-time work as a freelance writer if he got on a plane to London.So Min told his manager he was moving. But rather than beg him to stay (as Min had secretly hoped), the manager gave his full blessing. Before Min could head for the airport, though, a fellow actor urged him to reconsider — timely encouragement that set Min, now 34, on the path to “a star-making performance,” as a critic for The Times put it, in the new comedy “Shortcomings,” as well as fan-favorite turns in the Netflix series “Beef” and “The Umbrella Academy.”“This sounds absurd, but I don’t think I’ve really ever struggled with failure until I started to pursue acting,” Min said in a prestrike interview. “So I will absolutely savor this.”INDEED, EVERYTHING IN the first 20-ish years of Min’s life had come to him with relative ease. He concedes this only very sheepishly and with many disclaimers about how fortunate he feels.In Cerritos, Calif., the predominantly Asian suburb where he grew up, Min felt little sense of difference. He found that most success was attainable through application. Min was class president all four years of high school and elected king of the winter formal. He was so good in speech and debate competitions that he won thousands of dollars in prize money that helped pay for a Cornell education. Given his gifts, he thought he might become a lawyer — or maybe a politician.But on the day Min was to graduate from college, he woke up to nine missed calls. His grandfather, who had flown in for the occasion, had died that morning. And so Min’s commencement walk ended in a teary embrace with his family.The death of Min’s grandfather pushed him to reflect during a solo, cross-country road trip back home to Cerritos.“What do I really want to do?” Min recalled asking himself. Life was fleeting, he now understood. Becoming a lawyer or a politician just didn’t feel right anymore. He liked public speaking, writing and storytelling. And back under his parents’ roof, he was near Los Angeles anyway. He decided to give acting a shot.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” said his fellow actor Amy Okuda.Tracy Nguyen for The New York TimesHe soon discovered, however, how hard the business of acting really was and that applying himself would not be enough.When he ran into college friends and they asked about his acting career, “I remember feeling so shattered and so lost in terms of what to say or how to present myself because I no longer could stand on accomplishments,” he said. “I didn’t have that anymore.”IT WAS SLOW going at first. Min dove into Reddit threads, took classes, searched for agents and discovered Wong Fu Productions, a content company run by young Asian Americans that would become a popular part of Asian American media as YouTube blossomed in the 2010s. The guys running it asked Min to audition for what he said they called a “narrative thing, but like branded content.”The “narrative thing” was essentially an eight-minute advertisement for a Simplehuman trash can. But it was built around an exploration of adulting, and the video received tens of millions of views.That work didn’t pay much, and Min began to dabble in journalism as a side hustle. He was a good writer and his photography, like most things in his life, had drawn praise.He traveled to Mexico City to interview the chef Enrique Olvera at Pujol; and to Chicago to pick the brain of Grant Achatz at Alinea. What was not to like about work trips to two of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants?Which helps explain why Min was willing to give writing a full go when he got those back-to-back-to-back acting rejections. But as he pondered his next move, Min had dinner with a friend, the actress Amy Okuda. She tapped the brakes on his travel plans.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” Okuda said in a prestrike interview. So she sent a note about Min to her own manager, Joshua Pasch, who got in touch with him almost immediately; Pasch even had Min submit an audition tape for “The Umbrella Academy” before the pair met.“The rest is history,” Pasch said. “He was on the show a month later.”MIN HAD LANDED THE ROLE of Ben Hargreeves on what would become a hit for Netflix. His part was modest at first — a dead brother in a superhuman sibling squad who occasionally shows up as a ghostlike figure that only the drug-addled sibling, Klaus, can see. The character had very little screen time, and Min was not a series regular initially.Min, left, on “The Umbrella Academy.” He landed the role after a friend urged him to stick with acting.NetflixBut Ben became surprisingly popular in Min’s hands. Steve Blackman, the showrunner, came up with a way to expand the role and even bring Ben back to life as a different, meaner version of himself in later seasons.“The character of Ben doesn’t really exist that much in the graphic novel” on which “Umbrella Academy” is based, Blackman said. “I wrote Ben in to be someone that Klaus could talk to and only Klaus could see.”But, he added, “the minute Justin embodied the character, I’m like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do so much more.’”“The Umbrella Academy,” which premiered in 2019, was an “I made it” moment for Min. But he would also earn acclaim two years later for his thoughtful, sincere portrayal of the titular robot in “After Yang,” a quiet sci-fi drama starring Colin Farrell.“He had such a rich life before he became an actor,” Kogonada, who directed “After Yang,” said of Min. “Like all the great actors, he is consumed with his craft. But I feel like I’m getting to know him better through the different roles that he plays.”Then came “Beef,” and the part of Edwin, an irritatingly perfect leader of a Korean church.Lee Sung Jin, the director of “Beef,” was best friends with Min’s brother, Jason, in college. Lee said in an interview that he had called Jason Min, an admired praise leader, into the writers’ room to help craft the character of Edwin. It was a role Lee said he had always intended for Justin to fill.Both Min and Lee recalled being in Las Vegas years earlier for Jason’s bachelor party and promising each other that they were going to make it in Hollywood, and that they would work together when they did.“Drunk confidence,” Lee said.NOW MIN IS PLAYING another Ben. This one, the main character in “Shortcomings,” is not a ghost but a very flawed would-be filmmaker who, in the words of a girlfriend, is brimming with “anger, depression, your weird self-hatred issues and just the relentless negativity.”Min “is probably the only person who could have played him in the way that he did, with such nuance,” Ally Maki, who plays the girlfriend, Miko, said in a prestrike interview.Min recalled reading the script and saying to himself: “I understand this guy because I was this guy” and “parts of me are still this guy.”When he initially read the first scene — in which Ben complains about a “Crazy Rich Asians”-style movie that everyone else liked — Min said the words felt natural tumbling out of his mouth.Ben is dealing with the gap between his elevated tastes and his lack of career success, he said, “and that disparity is crippling. I remember when I started off in this business, I felt the same disparity. I felt such a chasm between the projects I was doing and the projects that I wanted to do.”“It results in a lot of dissatisfaction. It results in a lot of cynicism,” he continued, recalling how, at one point, “I sort of prided myself in being sort of this funny, cynical, dry kind of guy the way that Ben is. And then through many years of therapy, I realized that that was simply a defense mechanism for me to hide and shield myself from the actual pain of feeling like I had failed at this industry that I so wanted to succeed in.”Min holds onto one particular memory from the movie. Ben is sprinting through the West Village — that classic movie moment when the hero tries to salvage the relationship before it’s gone forever. In the midst of the scene, he thought, “This is crazy that I am in New York in the middle of this busy West Village street, running as the lead of this movie,” he said. And he remembered how some of his favorite movies had iconic running shots. “I never thought that I was going to be the guy who was running.” More

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      ‘Winter Kills’ Returns in New Print at Film Forum

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      Part black comedy, part paranoid thriller, the 1979 movie returns after four decades in a new 35 mm print at Film Forum.A madcap riff on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “Winter Kills,” adapted by the director William Richert from Richard Condon’s 1974 best seller, is part black comedy, part paranoid thriller and — an evocation of cosmic conspiracy that boasts its own conspiratorial back story — part carnival hall of mirrors.The movie, first released in 1979, and then again in 1983 (with its ending supposedly altered), returns after four decades in a new 35 mm print.The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission and established in 1963, was still hotly contested when Condon wrote his novel, a precursor to literary treatments of Kennedy’s death like Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid.” The movie is redolent of Watergate-era films like “The Parallax View” from 1974, but in the age of QAnon it scarcely seems dated. One of the novel’s favorable reviews quotes Condon to the effect that, in contemporary America truths are less important than “the illusion of truths.”Jeff Bridges plays Nick, the younger half brother of a charismatic president murdered by a lone assassin in downtown Philadelphia. Given evidence, years later, of a second gunman, Nick is dragged down a rabbit hole, at once aided and thwarted by his all-powerful father (John Huston, essentially reprising his role in “Chinatown”).A greater mystery than the plot may be the cast assembled by Richert, directing his first nondocumentary, and his shady producers, whose major credit was the soft-core movie “Black Emanuelle.” The always sympathetic Bridges and the ineffably sleazy Huston are supported by the veteran heavies Richard Boone, Sterling Hayden and Ralph Meeker; the international stars Tomas Milian and Toshiro Mifune; and the reliable wackos Anthony Perkins and Eli Wallach, plus the ’50s melodrama queen Dorothy Malone, with the supermodel Belinda Bauer as the requisite woman of mystery. Elizabeth Taylor (uncredited and silent save for a single angry word) was canny enough to take payment upfront. The rest of the cast seems to have been strung along for the duration of the start-stop shoot.As chronicled by Condon in a 1983 Harper’s article no less sensational than the movie, as well as a documentary found on the Blu-ray release, “Winter Kills” was six years in production, during which it was repeatedly shut down for lack of cash. (Drug money was involved. One producer was later murdered, his partner wound up in jail.) While these travails may not be evident onscreen, knowledge of the saga adds to the movie’s sense of imperial hubris — the “Game of Thrones”-style credits announcing the stellar cast, the spectacularly superfluous locations shot by Vilmos Zsigmond (between “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Deer Hunter”!?).“Winter Kills” is not always easy to follow — Condon’s convoluted plot has been simplified and the film is consequently riddled with narrative lacunae — but from beginning to end, the gist is always clear. The movie “doesn’t make a bit of sense, but it’s fast and handsome and entertaining,” Janet Maslin wrote in her 1979 review in The Times. Preposterous as it is, its vision of total surveillance, constant subterfuge and plutocracy run amok has a measure of social realism.If paranoid thinking is the antidote to chaos, “Winter Kills” demonstrates its appeal. The movie is an article of faith. That it exists at all is something of a miracle.Winter KillsAug. 11-24 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      Confusion in Hollywood as Some Productions Are Allowed to Continue

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      The striking actors’ union is granting waivers to some projects not affiliated with the major studios, but questions persist about who qualifies and why.When you’re making an independent film every second counts. Ash Avildsen had six days of filming left on his low-budget biopic “Queen of the Ring” — including a climactic scene involving a majority of his cast — when the actors’ union went on strike on July 14.The production, in Louisville, Ky., shut down immediately. If Mr. Avildsen could not receive an interim waiver from SAG-AFTRA, as the union is known, to continue filming, the project was likely to fall apart. The logistical and financial challenges of sending the cast and crew home and then trying to assemble them again after a strike would be too much for the shoestring production.“It was maniacally stressful,” said Mr. Avildsen, who wrote and directed the film, about Mildred Burke, who became a dominating figure in women’s wrestling in the 1930s. “We could maybe have lasted another day waiting, but after two or three days it would have been a house of cards falling down.”“Queen of the Ring” was granted the waiver, one of more than 160 the union has handed out in the past three weeks. To get one, projects must have no affiliation with the studios the actors are striking against and the companies involved must comply with the most recent contract demands the union presented to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios.Recipients of the waivers have ranged from under-the-radar projects like Mr. Avildsen’s to higher-profile films like A24’s “Mother Mary,” starring Anne Hathaway, and Hammerstone’s “Flight Risk,” directed by Mel Gibson and featuring Mark Wahlberg.For the union, granting the waivers serves three purposes: It allows companies not affiliated with the studio alliance to keep working; actors and other crew members to remain employed when so much of Hollywood has ground to a halt; and major studios to see examples of productions operating while acceding to the union’s latest demands, including higher pay for the actors and increased contributions to the union’s health and pension fund.“Here are independent producers, who generally have less resources than the studios and streamers, who are saying, ‘Yeah, we can make productions under these terms, and we want to and we’re going to if you let us,’” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s lead negotiator, said in an interview.But the agreements are also causing confusion and consternation around Hollywood. Some wonder about the propriety of working on a production when so many in the industry — the writers have been on strike since May — are walking the picket lines. For instance, Viola Davis was granted an interim waiver for an upcoming film she was set to star in and produce. But she declined, saying in a statement, “I do not feel that it would be appropriate for this production to move forward during the strike.”Viola Davis turned down a waiver, saying she didn’t feel it was appropriate to work on a production during the strike.Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe actress and comedian Sarah Silverman criticized the interim agreements in an Instagram post. She said that she had declined to work on an independent movie because of the strike, and suggested that she found the waivers counterproductive to the union’s goals.Ms. Silverman said she wasn’t sure if she should be “mad at these movie stars making these indie movies that are obviously going to go to streaming” or upset with “SAG for making this interim deal for these indie movies” during the strike.After meeting with the union’s leadership, the actress said in a follow-up post that she was happy the waivers allowed some crews to continue working, but that she still questioned the validity of granting waivers to projects with big movie stars and loose affiliations with companies that are part of the studio alliance. The alliance declined to comment for this article.One project that drew grumbles in some quarters when it received a waiver was the AppleTV+ show “Tehran.” The show, filming its third season, employs union actors, but an Israeli company oversees the production, which is shooting in Greece. That situation has created a gray zone, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said, even though Apple, a member of the alliance, is financing the operation.Mr. Crabtree-Ireland called the approval of “Tehran” “outside the norm.”“We have to be mindful that not every country’s law lines up with labor law from the United States,” he said.An Israeli company oversees production of the AppleTV+ show “Tehran,” which is shooting on location in Greece. That situation has created a gray zone, opening the door for a waiver. Apple TV+That has not helped clear up the matter for many in Hollywood. Even when the waivers are granted, there are some — like Ms. Davis — who wonder if accepting them is akin to crossing the picket line.“What’s confusing to us is what should we be doing?” asked Paul Scanlan, chief executive of Legion M, an independent production company that crowdsources funding for many of its projects, some of which await word on interim agreements. “The messaging isn’t clear. There are some people saying, ‘Oh, these interim agreements are bad,’ but then SAG is saying: ‘No, they’re good. They’re part of our strategy.’He added: “We’re sensitive to how we’re perceived in the marketplace, and we don’t want to be one of those companies that is perceived as doing an end run around the strike because that’s absolutely not our intention.”Honoring the interim agreement does raise an independent production’s costs. According to one independent financier, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the strikes have the industry on edge, production budgets can increase by 8 to 10 percent, significant for independent films that already count every penny.There is also the question of timing. Interim agreements can, as in the case of Mr. Avildsen, help a film finish production. But they can also be granted to completed projects to allow actors to promote their films, including at festivals, where they might end up securing a distribution deal with a company that the union is striking against and that has not yet agreed to a new contract. And that could get complicated.“Let’s say we sign an interim agreement,” Mr. Scanlan said. “I do think it makes it harder for Netflix to buy something that has already agreed to terms that maybe they haven’t agreed to yet.”For Mr. Avildsen, he’s still basking in the relief that his movie was able to complete production. The idea that overcoming that hurdle may ultimately imperil “Queen of the Ring” from finding distribution is a scenario he’s not yet ready to grapple with.“It’s a scary thing to think about,” he said. “If by this time next year, when we are ready to release it, if they’re still in their joust, that would be a big drag.” More

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      Nine Provocative William Friedkin Movies to Stream

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      The director specialized in grimy thrillers and social dramas that occasionally courted controversy.An iconoclast even among his New Hollywood peers coming up in the 1970s, the director William Friedkin built a reputation for grimy, high-impact thrillers and social dramas that sought to get a rise out of audiences and frequently drew the controversy they courted.Friedkin, who died Monday at 87, found early success in Hollywood with the one-two punch of “The French Connection” in 1971 and “The Exorcist” in 1973, but his fortunes shifted in the years that followed, which led to a career of unpredictable and often attention-grabbing swerves. One of his best ’80s films, the sleek thriller “To Live and Die in L.A.,” is currently unavailable to stream, but adventurous home viewers will find plenty of scorching work to command their attention.Here are nine films that illustrate Friedkin’s combination of stylistic bravado and willingness to engage on the battlegrounds of race, religion, sexuality and systemic corruption.1970‘The Boys in the Band’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Vudu.Though Friedkin’s relationship with the queer community would turn fraught a decade later with “Cruising,” this adaptation of Mart Crowley’s 1968 Off Broadway play was, at the time, the rare American film to focus entirely (and sympathetically) on the lives of gay men. Friedkin was so impressed by the stage production that all the original cast members were brought into the movie, which takes place mostly in the Upper East Side apartment where a fitfully employed writer (Kenneth Nelson) is holding a birthday party and has invited a motley group of friends. The boozy affair that follows zings with filthy one-liners, but tensions rise as the night carries on and the inner lives of these alienated, often closeted men start to surface.1971‘The French Connection’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Vudu.Friedkin won his only Oscar, for best director, for this ferociously entertaining policier, which remains one of the great New York movies, a seedy snapshot of the city as it once existed — at least through the jaundiced perspective of a detective who has his share of blind spots. With a style that’s simultaneously propulsive and documentarylike in its evocation of place, Friedkin details a heroin smuggling operation that’s making its way to New York from Marseilles via ocean liner. Standing in the way is Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), a bigot and an alcoholic who’s willing to go to astonishing lengths to solve the case, including a car chase under an elevated train that Friedkin turned into a classic of its kind.1973‘The Exorcist’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.Any conversation about the scariest movies ever made usually starts with a mention of Friedkin’s demon possession thriller, but the film’s effectiveness involves more than Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” and the terrifying contortions of a young girl’s body and spirit. “The Exorcist” gains an equal amount of power from the unyielding love a mother (Ellen Burstyn) has for her 12-year-old daughter (Linda Blair) as a demon wrests the girl away from her. Once the Roman Catholic Church gets involved, “The Exorcist” builds to harrowing and often frantic sessions between a priest (a superb Max von Sydow) and the ancient evil he’s desperate to whisk away.1977‘Sorcerer’Rent it on Amazon and Apple TV.After huge back-to-back hits with “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” Friedkin adapted the same French novel that Henri-Georges Clouzot had turned into “The Wages of Fear,” a suspense classic about desperate workers driving truckloads of nitroglycerin through a mountain pass. After a troubled and expensive production, “Sorcerer” was a box office failure — coming out the same summer as “Star Wars” didn’t help — but it’s now regarded as one of Friedkin’s best, playing to his strengths in location shooting and intense physical action. Roy Scheider leads an international cast as one of four outlaws who accept $10,000 and legal citizenship for the job of driving nitroglycerin on hazardous South American roads to an oil well 200 miles away.1980‘Cruising’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Friedkin had a habit of courting controversy, but nothing on the level of “Cruising,” a crime thriller that gay rights activists protested vociferously during and after production for a portrait of West Village nightlife they felt stigmatized their community. With that caveat in mind, it’s still one for the time capsule, a sleazy yet compelling story about a serial killer who targets gay men in New York’s leather scene and a detective (Al Pacino) who goes deep undercover to solve the case. It’s an understatement to say that Friedkin does not approach the material with the sensitivity his doubters might have wished for, but the locations have an almost tactile griminess to them, and Pacino’s performance roils with inner torment.1994‘Blue Chips’Stream it on Amazon Prime and Paramount+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Working from a script by Ron Shelton, who’d made the superb sports comedies “Bull Durham” and “White Men Can’t Jump,” Friedkin tackled the seedy underbelly of college athletics with typical verve, including dramatized basketball action that’s on par with the real thing. Channeling the chair-whipping tempestuousness of Bobby Knight — who appears as an opposing coach in a cameo — Nick Nolte stars as a legendary college coach who’s starting to miss out on “blue chip” recruits. After his first losing season, he risks his reputation and his conscience by deploying school boosters to offer benefits to top prospects, including a rim-rattling center played by future Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal.2003‘The Hunted’Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.In what would turn out to be his last major studio production, Friedkin executed this drum-tight, underrated action thriller in the “Rambo” mode about a disillusioned warrior on a killing spree and the former mentor tasked with bringing him to justice. Benicio Del Toro stars as a highly trained Delta Force soldier so traumatized by the genocide of civilians in Kosovo that he takes to the American wilderness and starts gunning down hunters. Echoing his performance in “The Fugitive,” Tommy Lee Jones is the F.B.I. “deep-woods tracker” who tries to retrieve him, with the advantage (and disadvantage) of having taught him everything he knows.2007‘Bug’Stream it on Pluto TV. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.In the first of two straight collaborations with the playwright Tracy Letts, Friedkin doesn’t hide the stage roots of a drama that takes place mostly within a rundown Oklahoma motel room, but the feverishness of the camera and sound work, along with the two lead performances, have a strong cinematic intensity. “Bug” is also a vital early showcase for Michael Shannon, who projects enough charisma as a drifter to win over a waitress (Ashley Judd) with relationship problems, but soon reveals a frightening volatility. The supposed discovery of an aphid in the motel bed sends these two lonely people into a paranoid frenzy that Friedkin transforms into an alternate reality.2011‘Killer Joe’Stream it on Pluto TV. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Deploying his relaxed, mellifluous Southern drawl to sinister purposes, Matthew McConaughey channels Robert Mitchum in Letts’s bracing redneck noir about a trailer-park murder scheme in West Texas that goes sideways. In a plot that owes a little something to “Double Indemnity,” Emile Hirsch plays a wayward 22-year-old who enlists his father (Thomas Haden Church) in a plan to kill his mother and split her $50,000 life insurance policy, but when they hire a cop/contract killer (McConaughey) to do the job, he requires Hirsch’s virginal sister (Juno Temple) to serve as human collateral on future payment. A sequence involving a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken may be the least appetizing product placement in history. More

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      How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Influenced the New ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Movie

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      The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and other C.G.I. cartoons are taking a looser, imperfect approach. The style represents a shift made possible by Spidey’s success.When “TMNT,” a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated film, was released in 2007, the critic Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The New York Times that it offered “an impressive lack of visual texture.” She was not wrong. The eponymous reptiles are rendered in an inert computer-generated form, as if they were modeled from plastic and then put on a screen. Their green skin is dull and smooth.The same cannot be said for the turtles in the latest incarnation of the ooze-filled tale: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.” In this new film, released Wednesday, our heroes — Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael — appear to spring from a (talented) high school doodler’s notebook. Their bodies and faces are rendered with an imperfect sketchy quality that makes their eyes vivid and their smiles vibrant. Their greenness is distinctive and gains extra contours when reflected in New York’s neon lights.“Mutant Mayhem,” directed by Jeff Rowe, is representative of a larger shift that has occurred in the 16 years since “TMNT” was released. It’s part of a wave of films that proves computer-generated animation doesn’t have to look quite so, well, boring.The turtle heroes in “TMNT,” from 2007, look as though they are molded from plastic.Imagi Animation StudiosThere’s an imperfect quality to the heroes in the new “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.”Paramount PicturesSo what happened? Well, in 2018, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” was released. “Into the Spider-Verse” — along with its even more technically virtuosic sequel, “Across the Spider-Verse” this summer — bucked the trend of modern animation by invoking its hero’s comic-book origins with Ben-Day dots and wild, hallucinogenic sequences.Since “Into the Spider-Verse” became a box office hit as well as an Oscar winner, major studios have grown less fearful of animation that diverges from the norm. The film proved that audiences wouldn’t reject projects that look markedly different from the house styles of Pixar (“Toy Story”) and DreamWorks (“Shrek”). Films like “Mutant Mayhem,” “The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” and “Nimona” all have distinctive looks that are visually sensational without conforming to established playbooks.It’s exciting for the filmmakers, too. “All animators ever did before that was have lunch with each other and bitch about how all animated movies look the same,” Mike Rianda, director of “The Mitchells,” told me in an interview. (Rianda is a member of SAG-AFTRA and spoke before the strike.)Rianda — who worked on that movie alongside Rowe, its co-director — was developing it at Sony Pictures Animation while “Into the Spider-Verse” was in the works. (Both were produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; “The Mitchells” was eventually released on Netflix in 2021.) “The Mitchells,” about a kooky family’s road trip during an A.I. takeover, looks like a window into the overstimulated mind of its teenage heroine, Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), an exuberant film geek — and Rianda and Rowe wanted the animation to have all of her quirks. They felt that the humans should look imperfect and asymmetrical rather than like Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” because the plot concerned a battle between Homo sapiens weirdos and regulated robots. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” blended techniques from 3-D C.G.I. with hand-drawn animated looks.Sony PicturesStill, there was pressure from the studio to go the standard route. “That’s easy,” Rianda said. “The computer knows how to do that. It’s already been taught that. It was wonderful to have ‘Spider-Verse’ going on in the next room so we could point to it and say, ‘Look, they’re doing it. We can do it too, right?’”Films like “Into the Spider-Verse,” and those that have followed in its footsteps, blend animation techniques that are common in 3-D computer-generated movies with those that were commonplace in the 2-D hand-drawn animation that preceded it. It’s not just that the images are less photorealistic, the movements of the characters are as well. The results are more broadly impressionistic in the ways that Looney Tunes cartoons, Disney classics or decades of anime have been.For instance, when the cat hero of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” sticks his sword into the thumbnail of a giant in the bravura musical opening sequence, the sky goes yellow as the giant gasps with pain. The giant’s thumb turns red, and white lines reverberate in the background mimicking the throbbing.“The Last Wish,” directed by Joel Crawford, is linked to the era of animation dominated by C.G.I.; it is a spinoff of “Shrek,” a hallmark of that time. For Crawford, “Into the Spider-Verse” showed studios that “audiences were not only accepting of different styles but craved it because you get the same thing over and over.”Crawford wanted to keep Puss recognizable to fans, but put him in the context of a “fairy tale painting.” That meant rendering his fur more as brushstrokes rather than strands. Fur is actually a good barometer of the shift. In the 2022 DreamWorks caper “The Bad Guys,” which follows a group of animal criminals, the wolf ringleader’s coat looks like it has been shaped by pen strokes, a change from the way his fuzzier lupine brethren were crafted in Disney’s 2016 comedy “Zootopia.”With “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” the director Joel Crawford aimed for a “fairy tale painting.”DreamWorks AnimationBut all the animation directors I spoke with argued that the art has to come from a thematically relevant place. For “Nimona,” now on Netflix, the directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno landed on what they described as a “two-and-a-half-D” style that evoked medieval paintings, a fitting look for their graphic-novel adaptation set in a futuristic world with the chivalrous customs of the Middle Ages. A trailer for Disney’s upcoming “Wish” has an illustrated quality in line with its storybook fable plot about a star descending from the sky. The effect is something out of an Arthur Rackham illustration or a Beatrix Potter book mashed up with “Frozen.”Rowe’s initial goal for “Mutant Mayhem” was just to be as bold as possible, excising any timidity he had felt about pushing boundaries on “The Mitchells.” As he spent more time working on the world of the Turtles, he figured out where those impulses were coming from and how they’d fit into the story. He and the production designer, Yashar Kassai, rediscovered drawings they had done as teenagers. “There’s just this unmitigated expression and honesty to those kinds of drawings,” Rowe said. “It’s a movie about teenagers; that’s our North Star. Let’s commit to the art style looking like it was made by teenagers. Ideally the world and the characters will look like they drew themselves.”As a viewer, I find it’s invigorating to see the animators on “Mutant Mayhem” quite literally coloring outside the lines. When the turtles jump across rooftops, the moon behind them appears to be vibrating scribbles. You can see (digital) pen lines in explosions and expressions.“At first ‘Spider-Verse’ gave people permission,” Rowe said. “And now I think with ‘Spider-Verse 2,’ it’s made it a mandate. I think if anyone makes a film that looks like a C.G. 3-D film from the last 30 years now, it’s going to feel dated.” For audiences, that’s great news. More