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      ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Review: Delightfully Undead Again

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      Tim Burton has brought the band back together — Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, even Bob the shrunken head guy — for a fun but less edgy sequel.After more than three decades and assorted ups, downs and spinoffs like an animated series and Broadway musical, most of the key players in the original “Beetlejuice” band — Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Bob the shrunken-head guy — are back together. A lot has predictably changed along the way, yet one of the enjoyable aspects about reunion tours is that when a group has charmed its way into your consciousness, like this one did back in the day, a.k.a. 1988, you don’t mind (too much) its sporadically sour notes and slack timing.And, so, enter the dependably delightful Ryder as Lydia Deetz, the onetime Goth Girl whose family got into so much trouble the last time. Dressed in her customary black, from bangs to booted toe, her face as ethereally pale as ever, Lydia is the host of a paranormally inclined TV show, “Ghost House With Lydia Deetz,” and now a minor celebrity. She puts on a good front on camera, but Lydia remains a haunted soul, and now there’s more than memories of Beetlejuice (Keaton) that plague her: She’s a widow, and her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), is an eyeball-rolling, heavy-sighing mini-me of gloom, one who’s just itching to have her world rocked.Burton seems anxious to do just that, and he gets this party started without ceremony, cranking it into nicely morbid life as the characters make their introductions. Among these is the first film’s most clueless chucklehead, Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (O’Hara), an arty artist with an outsize ego and cruel lack of talent. Lydia is on warmer terms with her, partly because she needs someone on her side, given that her father is soon dead; he’s dispatched early in a satisfyingly bloody animated sequence. (The character was played in the first film by Jeffrey Jones, who pleaded guilty in 2010 to not updating his registration as a sex offender.)Her father’s death becomes the excuse for Lydia and the rest to return to the family’s old shrieking ground, a hillside fun house with an airy porch and troublesome pests. Once there, Burton cuts loose his cheerfully malignant clowns, and the characters settle down to business with magic portals and visitors from beyond. In bland strokes, Burton et al. also toss in a few romantic complications, partly, it seems, because someone here believes that female characters require love interests. One entanglement involves Lydia and her producer-boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux, farcically insufferable), a mindful kick-me-sign; the other, less developed one concerns Astrid and a local cutie, Jeremy (Arthur Conti).I don’t know why anyone thought that Beetlejuice needed any kind of love interest outside Lydia, his old crush. Whatever the case, Monica Bellucci turns up as his ex, the latest in a line of showy Burton vixens. Given her character’s soul-sucking toxicity, it’s hard not to wonder if the filmmakers are making a joke about bad divorces. Bellucci doesn’t have much to do but look hot, which is easy. Like Willem Dafoe — who’s predictably diverting playing a hammy (totally canned) dead actor — Bellucci is attractive filigree, something to admire amid the chats, chuckles and appealingly humble practical effects that still carry the touch of the human hand.The greatest special effect remains Keaton’s Beetlejuice, however attenuated. The original movie was at once a funfair and a comic family meltdown with heart (and other body parts), but what pushed it joyously over the top was Keaton. With his deathly white face and electric-chair shock of hair, Beetlejuice had been designed to seize your attention (and maybe evoke Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”). What held you rapt, though, was Keaton’s exciting expressive range and unpredictability. With his wild eyes and raspy growl, he pushed and pulled at your affections, and made you wonder about the guy under the get-up. He seemed borderline dangerous, which gave the film frisson. Even as “Beetlejuice” playfully hit its genre notes, Keaton’s vocalizations — he spat words and all but scatted — and his twitchy physicality kept the film from slipping into the generic.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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      Harvey Weinstein Indecent Assault Case Dropped by U.K. Prosecutors

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      The Crown Prosecution Service said that it had “decided that there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction.”British prosecutors have dropped a case against Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul, just two years after authorizing indecent assault charges against him.In a statement on Thursday, the Crown Prosecution Service said that, “following a review of the evidence,” it had decided to halt the proceedings against Mr. Weinstein.Frank Ferguson, head of the service’s special crime and counterterrorism division, said in the statement that there was “no longer a realistic prospect of conviction.”“We have explained our decision to all parties,” he added.On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Crown Prosecution Service said in an email that the service would not be giving any further details of the reasoning behind the decision.The case dates to 2022, when British prosecutors authorized two charges against Mr. Weinstein of indecent assault of a woman in London in 1996. Under British law, it is illegal to identify potential victims of sexual assault, even after prosecutors drop a case.At the height of his powers, Mr. Weinstein, now 72, was one of the world’s most important movie producers, widely seen as able to make or break an actor’s career.In 2017, his career went into free fall after The New York Times reported that he had, over the course of nearly three decades, paid off women who had accused him of sexual assault. In the story’s aftermath, prosecutors mounted cases against him in both Britain and the United States.Last year, Mr. Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being convicted of rape and sexual assault in California.In April, New York’s highest court overturned Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 felony sex crimes conviction, ruling that the original judge had deprived him of a fair trial. The court said that the original judge should not have let prosecutors call witnesses who said that Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them when their accusations did not form part of the case.In May, Manhattan prosecutors announced they would retry Mr. Weinstein on sex crimes charges and he is currently in the Rikers Island jail complex awaiting that case. More

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      ‘Rebel Ridge’ Review: Their Corruption, His Destruction

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      This crime drama from Jeremy Saulnier stars Aaron Pierre as a man whose run-in with small-town police officers uncovers uncomfortable secrets.A veteran arrives in a rural town to find his friend. He comes in peace — but the police demand submission. “Rebel Ridge,” written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, wears its “First Blood” inspirations as boldly as John Rambo sported a patch of the American flag. That franchise distended into Afghanistan, where Sylvester Stallone machine-gunned the Red Army during the long Soviet war there. But Saulnier (“Blue Ruin,” “Green Room”), a specialist in thrillers set in the margins of society, keeps this efficient tale of ethical outrage as simple as a punch to the throat — or rather, given its stark cinematography, like a shot of someone patiently walking up to a bully and then punching them in the throat.The law remains more or less the same as it was 40 years ago, when it didn’t strain the audience’s credulity to imagine conservative cops loathing a hippie drifter. These Southern officers are nearly all indistinguishable, fatuous men with cropped goatees and dull stares, headed up by a swaggering police chief (Don Johnson) who drawls that he wouldn’t cut a guy a break for “eee-ternal life and a catfish sandwich.”But today, and with pointed reason, Saulnier has cast Aaron Pierre, a Black actor, as Terry, a former Marine who is simply pedaling a bicycle when he gets stopped and frisked. The officers, played by Emory Cohen and David Denman, confiscate the cash Terry’s carrying to bail out his cousin (C.J. LeBlanc) who’s been arrested on a weed possession charge, plus a few extra dollars Terry intended to use to buy a new truck. Here, as in the real world, “civil forfeiture,” the seizure of money or property from people who have not been charged with or convicted of a crime, is extra income for police departments. (Terry’s situation, not an uncommon one, mirrors an incident reported in The New York Times in 2021.)The local judge (James Cromwell) won’t help, and the court’s bail collector (Steve Zissis) is unswayed by Terry’s argument that the money to free his cousin is already in the building. (“This is surreal!” Terry sputters.) No one mentions race, not for a long while, and no one has to. The tension is in the cops’ confidence that they can do anything they want to Terry, in how doggedly he remains civil, long past the point where we want him to lose his cool. In one scene, he even appears to bring them doughnuts.Terry will snap, but the dominant mood isn’t revenge — it’s futility. The recent push for increased oversight of law enforcement is folded into the story, yet the fixes haven’t helped. One plot point centers on when a cruiser’s dashboard camera starts recording, and there’s a running gag about the linguistic shift from “nonlethal” to “less-lethal” weapons that hammers home the idea that the damage hasn’t changed, only the veneer. But the script resorts to a go-there, get-the-thing structure that sends Terry and his only supporter, a scrappy low-level court employee named Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), skulking around to obtain taped evidence of police abuse. Given the unshakable mood of cynicism, it’s hard to get very invested in their quest — especially when we’re already aware of so many similar videos that haven’t changed a thing.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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      ‘Red Rooms’ Review: A True Crime Obsession Unravels

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      A mysterious young woman becomes deeply invested in the trial of an accused serial killer in this courtroom thriller.“Red Rooms,” a disturbing courtroom thriller from Quebec, explores the fascination with serial killers and true crime from an enticingly fresh perspective. Directed by Pascal Plante, it takes the genre’s ingredients — vulnerable girls, male sickos — and adjusts them to the loneliness of the internet age.Kelly-Anne (a formidable Juliette Gariépy), a model, is deeply invested in the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) — in part because she looks like the brunette version of one of his victims. Ludovic, a gaunt figure with sleepy eyes, has been accused of killing three teenage girls — not just killing, but torturing, disfiguring and dismembering them. These repugnant acts were captured on video, and anonymous users on the dark web paid extravagant sums to watch.The first half of the film, composed of glacial pans and unsettlingly static images, builds up to the day of the trial when the full-length videos are presented to the jury. A conspiracy-peddler, Clémentine (Laurie Babin), believes Ludovic is innocent — she brings to mind a Manson groupie — but Kelly-Anne is something else, a kind of cyber-samurai who lives alone in a sterile high-rise and has a small fortune in bitcoin from playing online poker. The two women are always the first in line to secure a spot in the trial gallery and they bond, uneasily and with ambiguous motives, until the true nature of Kelly-Anne’s voyeurism pushes Clémentine away.The film’s tension rides on the unknown, a paranoid vibe accented by Kelly-Anne’s shady online presence and Gariépy’s stark, sphinx-like performance. With a gaze that flings daggers, Gariépy’s an anchoring force that makes the more deranged second act feel credible. Most importantly, it’s her face — the way she looks at Ludovic in the courtroom or reacts to audio of screaming and chainsaw-whizzing — that works together with the film’s restraint to tug at our morbid curiosity.In one scene, Kelly-Anne watches one of the videos and all we see is the menacing blood-red glow of the torture room illuminating her enraptured expression. What could be so awful? So hypnotizing? We’re dying to know.Red RoomsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. More

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      ‘Look Into My Eyes’ Review: Emotional Rescue

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      This fascinating documentary that profiles seven New York City psychics is both profoundly sad and surprisingly hopeful.Before seeing “Look Into My Eyes,” Lana Wilson’s fascinating portrait of seven New York City psychics, I had vague expectations of a humorous overview of human gullibility. Or maybe a useful primer on how to identify the grifters from the gifted. What I did not expect was to emerge with not only a deeper understanding of this strange calling, but far greater empathy for those who seek out its practitioners.Because, make no mistake, this is a profoundly sad movie, one soaked in loss and the longing for human connection. Yet it is also surprisingly hopeful, as Wilson gently frames the psychic-client relationship as one of mutual benefit. In cramped apartments and spare rental spaces, her subjects listen as intently as any therapist to the troubles of strangers. But later, when we visit the psychics outside the sessions (most provide the service for free and have other jobs), we learn that the healing, when it occurs, goes both ways.Their candor, as they divulge why they chose to become mediums, is both touching and revelatory. Whether bruised by a devastating loss or a lack of community, they find solace in the metaphysical. One woman, a Christian, explains that attending her first seance “felt like church.” Another channels the resourcefulness learned during a horrific childhood with a drug-addicted parent. Notably, all are involved in some way with the visual and performing arts. This may be simply a consequence of the movie’s location, but Wilson, who knows her way around performers (she has made documentaries about Taylor Swift and Brooke Shields), seizes the moment.“Is it at all like improv?” she asks brightly, encouraging us to view the readings through a different lens. Throughout, the film’s gaze is tender and its tone respectful as Wilson — who experienced her first psychic reading the morning after Donald Trump became president — interjects rarely and never during a session. Like Orna Guralnik’s troubled clients in Showtime’s “Couples Therapy,” these brave supplicants willingly expose the demons they struggle to exorcise.Their stories are often poignant and sometimes traumatic, like the E.R. nurse who’s haunted by the memory of a child’s violent death. Yet whether it’s the Chinese adoptee wondering if her birth parents ever think of her, or the young man voicing a similar concern about his re-homed bearded dragon, most appear comforted by their psychic’s responses, be they intuitive or occult. Though it can’t be much fun to learn that your grandmother is still complaining about your husband from beyond the grave.I was especially moved by the woman who expressed deep distress over her Boston terrier’s refusal to walk on a leash.“She loves me, right?” she asks her psychic, wistfully. Maybe that’s the only thing any of us needs to know.Look Into My EyesRated R for heartbreaking stories and heartwarming connections. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lover of Men’ Review: The Heart of President Lincoln

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      Subtitled “The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln,” the film gathers an array of historians to argue that Lincoln had romantic relationships with men.About a century ago, the poet and biographer Carl Sandburg remarked upon the “streaks of lavender” in Abraham Lincoln and a Southern gentleman named Joshua Speed. Aspiring beyond suggestion, Shaun Peterson’s “Lover of Men” mobilizes an impressive array of historians to argue that Lincoln had romantic relationships with men that affected his life deeply.Four men are at the heart of Peterson’s playfully titled film, most prominently Speed, who bunked with Lincoln for four years in Springfield, Ill., and mentored the lawyer and budding politician. Lincoln’s sleeping arrangements recur as evidence in the film, like how he shared the presidential bed with his bodyguard, David Derickson, when his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was away. (Lincoln also bonded with Billy Greene, whom he met at a general store early in his career, and Elmer E. Ellsworth, who clerked in his law office and later died a Union war hero.)Suggestive phrases in letters to, from and about Lincoln reflect the ardor and closeness in these relationships, and his grief upon their dissolution. Peterson also floods the film with re-enactments to illustrate Lincoln’s time with Speed and others. There is value in imagining this etched-in-granite statesman in emotionally vulnerable private moments, but the scenes, sometimes in slow-motion, are distractingly hokey and undermine the movie.The documentary tends to linger on some assertions about sexuality in Lincoln’s era while papering over others. But the general effort of bringing to light (and potentially to history books) an underrepresented part of American experience remains vital beyond defining Lincoln’s identity.Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham LincolnNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hoard’ Review: Dirty Romancing

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      A spiraling teenager and a tenderhearted garbage collector bond over debris in this stunningly unconventional drama.Mothering and madness, trash and trauma erect an empire of filth in “Hoard,” Luna Carmoon’s gut-punchingly original first feature. In scenes that can shift from warily unsettling to plainly disgusting, Carmoon rubs our noses in the dreadful consequences of maternal dysfunction.For Maria (a captivating Lily-Beau Leach), the grotty home in London that she shares with her mother, Cynthia (Hayley Squires), may be rank and rodent-rich, but it’s filled with magic and love. Together, they sing and play games among the fruits of their nightly rummage through neighborhood dumpsters. At school, though, Maria is too ripe and sleep deprived to make friends.“I’m ashamed of us,” she complains to her mother. Yet “Hoard” is no parable of poverty, as we see when the film leaps forward 10 years to the mid-1990s and Maria, now a vivacious 18-year-old and played by the remarkable Saura Lightfoot Leon, is warmly settled with a loving foster mother (Samantha Spiro). This hard-won stability is threatened when Maria meets Michael (Joseph Quinn), a garbage collector and former foster child who is approaching 30 and on the verge of marriage. Drawn to the scent of each other’s damage, they begin to play their own increasingly dangerous games.Though at times squirmingly unpleasant, “Hoard” is never a drag. The insolence of the filmmaking and the artlessness of the leads energize a plot of stunning recklessness and unexpected humor. Combining joy and tragedy, realism and surrealism, Carmoon — who completed the film before she was 25 — loiters defiantly on incidents of distressing rawness. To Maria, trash is her turn-on, her safety blanket and the keeper of her memories, and Lightfoot Leon plays her with unselfconscious abandon. Like the heroine of David Wnendt’s provocative second feature, “Wetlands,” Maria is an eager explorer in the realm of the senses. She may sometimes gross you out, but you won’t easily look away.HoardNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I’ll Be Right There’ Review: Her Maternal Commitment is Apparent

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      Edie Falco plays a matriarch bending over backward for her grown children in this uneven character study.Early in Barbara Loden’s classic indie film “Wanda” (1971), the emotionally dysregulated title character hitches a ride to the courthouse to surrender custody of her children.It is perhaps with a wink and a nudge that the protagonist of “I’ll Be Right There” shares a name with Loden’s character; in this sappy ode to supermoms, just spending a day apart from her grown children is enough to give Wanda (Edie Falco) a conniption.Directed by Brendan Walsh, the movie opens on Wanda escorting her family members through a series of minor crises. She sits with her mother, Grace (Jeannie Berlin), as a doctor delivers health news. Her pregnant daughter, Sarah (Kayli Carter), expects hand-holding through an anxiety attack. And her ne’er-do-well son, Mark (Charlie Tahan), must be bailed out after a mishap lands him in jail.Set in rural New York, “I’ll Be Right There” aspires to show how, even in a family of adults, matriarchs can come to act as a chauffeur, benefactor, peacekeeper and security blanket all in one. But the movie’s bigger revelation is how these relationships sometimes slip into codependence. For Wanda, being needed by her mom and kids gives life a purpose that she otherwise struggles to find.The screenplay, by Jim Beggarly, is uneven, and many of the movie’s jokes are spoiled by a conservative strain that finds Sarah hellbent against giving birth out of wedlock and Grace making light of Wanda sleeping with a woman. Even as the gifted actresses trade jabs and punchlines gamely, the moments leave a sour taste.I’ll Be Right ThereNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More