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      ‘The Front Room’ Review: A Force Too Malevolent for This Movie

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      Kathryn Hunter is enjoyably creepy in this new horror film starring Brandy Norwood. Too bad the rest of the freakouts are predictable.The first time that Kathryn Hunter appears in the ho-hum horror movie “The Front Room,” her head is forebodingly obscured by a veil. She’s at the funeral of her husband, who, you suspect, probably left this mortal coil unwillingly. It’s too bad that he couldn’t stick around longer because if he had, the poor guy would have been able to watch Hunter — as a flamboyantly malicious force named Solange — rapidly get her weird on, inching into the shadows like a malevolent spider while weaving a progressively stickier, ickier web.Hunter greatly enlivens “The Front Room,” so it’s too bad she is mostly relegated to supporting duties in this tale. Its featured attraction is Belinda (Brandy Norwood), an anthropology professor who quits in a fit of pique shortly after the story opens. She has her reasons, more or less; she feels understandably aggrieved and undervalued at work, but given that she’s pregnant, and that she and her husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap), need the money, it’s clear common sense isn’t her strong suit. This first impression deepens into an irksome trait when she and Norman learn that Solange — his stepmother — will help them out if she can move in with them. Since they’re cash-hungry, they agree; woo-woo trouble ensues.The writer-director twin brothers Sam and Max Eggers, making their feature directorial debut, have a grasp of the genre’s fundamentals: They know how to stage an unwelcoming house, and how to play with light and shadow. But either they don’t know or don’t care how easy is it for viewers to lose interest in characters who, like Belinda and Norman, consistently make wrong choices. It brings out the sadist in you (or maybe it’s just me), especially when those wrong choices are so obviously a matter of narrative contrivance and weak character development. (“The Front Room” is loosely based on a short story of the same title by Susan Hill about a couple who, inspired by a sermon, charitably take in a widowed relative.)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 Goldman Case’ Review: Sticking to the Facts

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      An electrifying courtroom drama based on a real 1976 case calls the very nature of equality and justice into question.Few settings are as omnipresent in screen entertainment as the courtroom. The halls of justice, the argumentation of lawyers, dramatic backroom dealings, the telling facial expressions of the jury — all of it makes for very good drama. (And sometimes comedy, too.)Why? There are obvious hooks: salacious crimes, shocking lies, sudden gasps when a hidden revelation turns the case on its head. But there’s also something epic, almost mythic, about what goes on in a courtroom. Questions as old as Hammurabi or Moses, as ancient as civilization itself, are hashed out: good and evil, guilt and innocence, justice and fairness. Furthermore, modern presumptions of equality, democracy and objectivity face challenges. And that space, increasingly, is where the modern courtroom drama lives.American courtrooms are so familiar, thanks to Hollywood’s ubiquity, that it’s bracing to get plunked down into the minutiae of another legal system. The last few years have given moviegoers an unusually heady dose of French courtrooms. In 2022, Mati Diop’s searing “Saint Omer,” based on the real case of a woman accused of killing her infant, confronted the ways race, class and gender skew and degrade justice. Last year, Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” electrified audiences with its courtroom scenes, which probed the knowability of the inner workings of a marriage.Now there’s Cédric Kahn’s “The Goldman Case,” nearly all of which takes place during the second trial of Pierre Goldman in 1976. It’s a true story: Goldman (played by an electrifying Arieh Worthalter) had been charged with four armed robberies years earlier, one of which resulted in the death of two pharmacists. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Goldman and his legal team appealed his case — some of it, anyhow. While he freely admitted to the robberies, he maintained that he was not involved in the killings. In 1975, he wrote a memoir entitled “Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France,” making him an icon among French leftists, and a month later the appeals court canceled the initial ruling.Set almost entirely within the courtroom, “The Goldman Case” is not a Hollywood-style heart-pumping work. But it’s plenty thrilling. Kahn, whose previous films include the 2004 thriller “Red Lights,” wrote the “Goldman” screenplay with Nathalie Hertzberg, who used newspaper articles and meticulous research to reconstruct what happened in the courtroom. The pair imbues the result with urgent, stirring drama even though it is, for the most part, just people standing at microphones, talking. And shouting. And looking outraged. Because of Goldman’s celebrity, his supporters crowd the room and punctuate proceedings with yelps of derision or support, whatever feels called for.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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      Venice Film Festival Looks: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt And More

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      No amount of star power can truly outshine the beauty of La Serenissima, the ancient republic better known as the city of Venice. But the Venice Film Festival, with its parade of A-listers arriving for movie premieres in water taxis, comes close.Typically held not long after the fall couture shows in Paris, the Venice Film Festival benefits, in pure fashion terms, from being a showcase of the newest garments from some designers. How these elaborate, often form-fitting, confections are transferred so rapidly from Parisian runways to Venetian red carpets hardly matters to looky-loos with their eyes perennially pressed to the glass of fashion.This year’s festival, running from Aug. 28 until Saturday, has not just been an exhibition for new designs, but also of vintage pieces. Some looked as fresh as ever. Garments old and new are among these 15 looks, which will be hard to forget for reasons good and bad (but mostly good).Taylor Russell: Most Modern Retro!Louisa Gouliamaki/ReutersThe actress radiated an icy elegance in a Loewe gown reminiscent of the creations of Jean Louis, a designer who had the lock on high glamour during the golden age of Hollywood studios.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 First Film’ Review: Arriving Where You Started

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      Zia Anger’s movie about her first movie is full of nested layers, but mostly it’s a meditation on how, and why, we create.A cursor appears on a blank screen, blinking, waiting. And then text appears: “This probably shouldn’t be a film … but it is.”A purposefully ironic admission for a movie called “My First Film,” but a great way to set the tone for what follows. In 2018, the filmmaker Zia Anger sat before an audience at a Brooklyn venue, pulling up video clips on her computer from a project entitled “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” that she’d shot and then abandoned years earlier, combining them with spoken and typed words. The presentation morphed into a live performance that Anger toured called “My First Film,” which then further evolved into a digital performance during a pandemic-locked world.I’d seen various iterations of “My First Film,” but the new feature film version, also directed by Anger (and written with Billy Feldman), still came as a surprise to me. It’s as personal and experimental as the live presentations, but mixes fiction (or perhaps autofiction) into the recipe, producing something that looks and acts a little more like a traditional movie. “My First Film” stars Odessa Young as Vita, a Zia stand-in, who is telling us the story of the making of her first film, also entitled “Always All Ways, Anne Marie.” The screenplay of that movie was about a young woman caring for her ailing father. She gets pregnant and leaves home in search of her mother, who had abandoned her.The “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” story is a version of Vita’s reality, just as Vita’s story is a version of Anger’s. But it’s also different, and Vita wonders aloud, in a way that feels appropriate to a 25-year-old first-time filmmaker with dreams of artistic authenticity, about whether it still gets at her emotional truth. Vita wasn’t abandoned by her mother — in fact, she had two mothers, and they raised her together, and she felt loved and supported throughout her childhood. Various other pieces of Vita’s real life refract through “Always All Ways, Anne Marie,” while her narration about drama on set and off give the story of “My First Film” shape.Everything in “My First Film” doubles back on itself, which can make it feel repetitive at times. If you’ve never been a young person harboring dreams of creative genius, it might start to feel a little forced, a little twee. Even if you have, impatience lurks.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 Keaton Michael Keaton Michael Keaton

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      There’s a scene in the upcoming indie dramedy “Goodrich” where Michael Keaton’s character, a Los Angeles art dealer lost in the weeds of a late-midlife crisis, agrees to attend a breath workshop to win over a New Age-y prospective client. As setups go, it’s something of a soft target: a fish-out-of-water Boomer, drowning in California woo-woo.But the actor, his face a small hurricane of hope and anxiety, does more than find his “higher vibration.” He bobs and weaves and tries some kind of freestyle tai chi; he bats at a swarm of invisible bees and unleashes a primal scream (more like a strangled yelp, really). This is the Keaton that the “Goodrich” writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer envisioned when she conceived the screenplay.“I wrote it 100 percent with him in mind,” she said, “to the point where if he had said no, I would have buried it and myself in the backyard.”And it’s the same sense of unpredictability, a certain wild-card gleam, that has compelled the filmmaker Tim Burton to cast Keaton in five movies over nearly four decades, including, most recently, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” “When you just look at Michael in ‘Beetlejuice’ or even ‘Batman,’ he has this sort of look in his eye,” Burton said. “That’s why I wanted him to be Batman, because you just look at him and go, ‘This is a guy who would dress up like a bat.’ You know what I mean? There’s something behind the eyes that’s just very intelligent, funny and dangerous and kind of crazy.”Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton, who both starred in the original “Beetlejuice” movie, return for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”Warner Bros.The Keaton who settled into the corner booth of a hushed midtown Manhattan hotel lounge on a late-August morning didn’t seem like much of a maniac. Dressed in the dapper cool-dad uniform of fine-gauge knitwear and fitted slacks, he was still whippet-slim at 72 (he turned 73 on Thursday), and so soft-spoken in person that it was sometimes a strain to hear him over the cappuccino machine.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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      Watching Movies Like It’s 1999

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      A multimedia Culture desk series, “Class of 1999,” revisits a group of mold-breaking, star-studded films released that year.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.A sci-fi film whose climactic choice — red pill or blue pill? — has become so famous that it’s a meme. A found-footage style documentary horror film that achieved cult-classic status. A “Star Wars,” a “Toy Story” and two Tom Cruise movies.The year was 1999, and it was blessed with an abundance of cinematic riches. So many, in fact, that “The Blair Witch Project,” one of the top-earning indie films ever, was just the fifth-highest grossing film at the U.S. box office three weeks after its release.“It definitely was an epic year,” said Stephanie Goodman, the film editor for The New York Times. She led a team of more than a dozen writers, editors and designers who produced “Class of 1999,” a monthlong series celebrating the 25th anniversary of what many would argue is the greatest year in movie history.The multimedia project, which includes features, profiles and critical essays, not only explores directors’ innovation and risk-taking in 1999, but how their films were, at times, chillingly prophetic about the cultural, social and political themes of today.There’s a look at how the opening scene in “The Matrix” proved remarkably prescient; an essay on how “Blair Witch” foreshadowed the age of misinformation; a profile of Haley Joel Osment, who was 11 when he starred in “The Sixth Sense”; an article about the vulnerability of Tom Cruise; a playlist from the year’s top films; a reflection on reviewing movies in 1999; and a roundup of favorite films from the year, as selected by writers and critics. (Readers were invited to share their picks, too.)“A lot of people who worked on it had a strong connection to the movies,” said Ms. Goodman, who in 1999 was a copy editor at The Los Angeles Times. “That’s one thing that made the year special, in addition to the fact that just about every major filmmaker of the past 25 years was working that year.”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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      Prosecutor Says Manslaughter Case Against Alec Baldwin Should Be Revived

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      The special prosecutor asked a judge in New Mexico to reconsider her decision to toss the charge against the actor during his trial.A prosecutor who oversaw the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin has asked a judge in New Mexico to reconsider her dismissal of the charge during the trial.The judge tossed out the case in July after finding that the state had withheld evidence that could have shed light on how live rounds got onto a film set where a cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, was fatally shot. The judge dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning that it could not be refiled, ending the prosecution of Mr. Baldwin.But in court papers filed on Friday, Kari T. Morrissey, the special prosecutor, sought to persuade Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer to change her mind, arguing that the evidence in question — a batch of rounds brought to law enforcement this year — was irrelevant to whether Mr. Baldwin was criminally culpable for pointing the gun on set that day.“Nothing about the details of how the live rounds were introduced to the set is relevant or material to the charges against Mr. Baldwin,” Ms. Morrissey wrote in the court papers, later writing, “there was no cover-up because there was nothing to cover up.”The dramatic dismissal of the case against Mr. Baldwin prompted the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, to ask for a new trial; she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March and sentenced to 18 months in prison.It was the third day of Mr. Baldwin’s manslaughter trial at the Santa Fe County District Courthouse when his lawyers sought the dismissal of the case over the state’s failure to provide it with live ammunition that came from a man named Troy Teske, a friend of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather, Thell Reed, who is a well-known Hollywood armorer.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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      Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton on ‘The Room Next Door’

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      The director’s first English-language feature inspires talk of beauty, hope and more collaborations.At Monday night’s Venice after-party for “The Room Next Door,” Pedro Almodóvar beamed at his leading ladies as they beamed back.I’m not just speaking of the affection shared between Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton and their director, though it was tangible. I’m talking about the actual beams of light that bounced off the women’s sequined gowns and back at their besotted director as we huddled in a room to discuss the Spanish director’s first feature film in English, a long-held goal that allowed him to cast two big Hollywood stars.“They are not actors now, they are like monuments,” Almodóvar said. Certainly, that’s how Moore and Swinton are presented on the poster for the film, which arranges their famous faces in profile as though they were massive mountain ranges.“Big peaks,” joked Moore.“Big sparkly peaks,” Swinton added, nodding to their dresses. “We can only wear sequins for the rest of our lives.”Adapted from the novel “What Are You Going Through” by Sigrid Nunez, “The Room Next Door” casts Moore as Ingrid, a successful author who hears that her former colleague Martha (Swinton) is in the hospital with inoperable cervical cancer. They reunite, swap catch-up stories and once again become fast friends, but Martha has a weighty request to make.With her experimental treatments failing and another taxing round of chemotherapy to come, Martha has booked a vacation house in upstate New York and bought a drug off the dark web. Might Ingrid be willing to accompany her on the trip, knowing that at some point, her friend will kill herself in the room next door?Though Almodóvar is fairly fluent in English, he had long been wary of shooting a feature film in the language. (Even as we spoke, he kept a translator close by for moments when his second language failed him.) Two recent shorts made in English — the gay western “Strange Way of Life” and the extended Swinton monologue “The Human Voice” — convinced Almodóvar to finally write his first feature-length screenplay in the language.But Almodóvar’s films have aesthetic pleasures that go beyond words, and “The Room Next Door” offers so much to look at — whether it’s a lavender sweater, an olive couch or a precisely chosen shade of burgundy lipstick — that is as satisfying as any line of dialogue. A sequence where the two women ransack Martha’s apartment reveals pulled drawers filled with the most beguiling knickknacks, and the upstate vacation house where much of the movie takes place is an architectural stunner. (Like Martha, I’d die to live there, too.)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