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      ‘Out of the Blue’ Review: The Spider and the Fly

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      An unhappy wife leads her younger lover down a dangerous path in this sexy, yet predictable drama from Neil LaBute.From the moment Marilyn Chambers (Diane Kruger) sashays from the ocean in “Out of the Blue,” a vision in a sizzling orange swimsuit, we sense she’s bad news. (And not just because her creator is Neil LaBute, a director not known for writing sympathetic characters.) There’s something about the way she appraises the handsome young stranger, Connor Bates (Ray Nicholson), who’s watching her approach with puppyish delight. Like her adult-movie namesake, Marilyn knows how to cultivate male lust.And poor Connor, a sweet-natured librarian and recovering felon, is instantly mad for her. Soon, though, a discreetly bruised Marilyn will confess a problem: Her wealthy husband, wouldn’t you know, is knocking her about.“Maybe I can be the solution,” Connor offers, his plans to quietly rebuild his life melting between Marilyn’s milky thighs. Marilyn might be a mature-temptress cliché, but she can’t be accused of phoning it in: As the couple bonks relentlessly in the woods, on the kitchen table and even among the book stacks, we can almost see Connor’s brain cells dissolve. And, to be fair, “Out of the Blue” is never less than upfront about the familiarity of its setup (the dialogue repeatedly references “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” most recently adapted for the screen in 1981) and its own old-fashioned rhythms. One climactic scene is even preceded by an actual drum roll.Like most of LaBute’s work, “Out of the Blue” is talky, sparsely staged and presented with his signature detachment. The two leads are fine, though Hank Azaria, as Connor’s probation officer, and Frederick Weller, playing a cross sheriff’s deputy, wrestle with lines that are almost cartoonishly hard-boiled. A last-minute twist comes too late to rescue the plot; Connor, sadly, was always beyond saving.Out of the BlueRated R for enthusiastic, multilocational sex. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Good Boss’ Review: Company Man

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      As the titular boss of this dark comedy from Spain, Javier Bardem engages in underhanded tactics to win an award for business excellence.Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem), the boss of “The Good Boss,” is introduced giving a pep talk to his factory employees, with his words underlined by a jaunty, clarinet-infused score.The company is up for an award in business excellence, he says, so they should be on their best behavior when the judges stroll through. Did he mention they’re like family to him — the children he never had? As if an illustration were necessary, a layoff victim, Jose (Óscar de la Fuente), turns up with his two kids and starts making a ruckus. He demands that someone explain to his son and daughter that he no longer has his job.Julio, in fact, is not the good boss his glad-handing manner might suggest. The movie, a dark comedy from Spain written and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, follows him over roughly 10 days as he ensures that everything is set for the awards committee. That means interposing himself into the marital dramas of an ostensible friend (Manolo Solo) at the factory. It means using his influence to undermine the protest that Jose sets up across the street. The company makes scales, and sometimes, Julio says toward the end, you need to trick a scale into balancing.“The Good Boss” provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount. As satire, though, the movie is facile: not quite mean, outlandish or energetic enough in the challenges it imagines for Julio, notwithstanding a bracingly cynical use of an unexpected death. Nor is it especially incisive, unless it comes as news that a magnate’s warm persona might be feigned.The Good BossNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Breaking’ Review: A Bank Holdup by an Ex-Marine, for Benefits

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      John Boyega plays a veteran at the end of his rope in this fact-based story of grievance and hostage-taking.In July, 2017, a former Marine named Brian Easley walked into a Wells Fargo branch in Marietta, Ga., and presented a note saying he was carrying a bomb. Easley had no intention of robbing the bank. Rather, his ill-conceived plan was to air his grievance with the Department of Veterans Affairs. He had come to rely on payments he was due, and they had been withheld.“Breaking,” directed by Abi Damaris Corbin from a script she wrote with Kwame Kwei-Armah (based on an article by Aaron Gell), dramatizes the day when Easley took two hostages and began frantic, often confused conversations with law enforcement and news media. (“I need to be on camera,” he shouts into a phone at one point.)There is a faint, can’t-be-helped echo of Sidney Lumet’s fact-based 1975 “Dog Day Afternoon” in this picture. But one of the more impressive features of “Breaking” is an update of sorts: It depicts in stomach-churning detail how the contemporary militarization of law enforcement creates an atmosphere in which violence is near inevitable. This conscientious attention balances out the movie’s occasional lapses into sentimentality.John Boyega plays Easley, and his voice intonations and eye movements often recall Denzel Washington’s. (Washington played a hostage-taker in the much more hyper drama “John Q.”) He nevertheless creates a credible character here, one both exasperating (as much as one sympathizes with Easley’s plight, his actions are inexcusable) and heartbreaking. Nicole Beharie and Selenis Leyva are outstanding as Easley’s frazzled hostages.This was the final film completed by Michael K. Williams (here billed as Michael Kenneth Williams), who died last fall. He is beyond perfect in the role of a compassionate police negotiator, and the film is, its other virtues aside, an upsetting reminder of how much he will be missed.BreakingRated PG-13 for language and violent content. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Adopting Audrey’ Review: Building a New Home Out of Nothing

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      Jena Malone plays a young woman who’s seeking to be adopted by a gruff patriarch. Deep down, he has, you guessed it, a heart of gold.“Adopting Audrey,” the second feature film from the director M. Cahill (“King of California”), resembles many of the quirky domestic dramas that have populated the film festival circuit since “Little Miss Sunshine.” There’s a wayward young woman (Jena Malone) searching for guidance, and a gruff patriarch, Otto (Robert Hunger-Bühler), in need of human connection to soften his heart. There’s an absurd twist to this stock premise, however: The wayward adult, Audrey, would like to be adopted, which is how she meets Otto and his forlorn wife, Sunny (Emily Kuroda).It’s a little too outlandish to get behind. While Cahill has insisted in interviews and press materials that the film is based on a true story, as a reviewer, I still felt the urge to Google “types of adult adoptions” to double-check the validity of such an arrangement outside of formalizing an inheritance or reuniting with a birth parent. Even if you’re able to suspend disbelief, the bond between Audrey and Otto is weighed down by stilted dialogue and hackneyed attempts at drama.Audrey draws suspicion from Otto’s adult children, John (Will Rogers) and Gretchen (Brooke Bloom), who suspect their relationship is sexual in nature, but that plotline ends abruptly with a sudden freak accident. Sunny’s misery is treated as a shrug at best and a punchline at worst. And Cahill’s attempt to characterize Audrey’s neuroses — her watching puppy videos on her phone for hours on end — might be the laziest effort at capturing millennial malaise.The one bright spot of “Adopting Audrey” is the acting from Malone and Hunger-Bühler, who imbue their characters with more pathos than they probably deserve. Malone especially has made a welcomed return to a protagonist role — hopefully one she can replicate with more substantial material.Adopting AudreyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Alienoid’ Review: Sorcerers, Alien Prisoners and Much, Much More

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      This bonkers Korean movie could not pick just one cinematic genre, so it went for half a dozen of them at once.This Korean film starts in the 14th century with an alien creature trying to escape from the human body inside which it has been imprisoned. Thankfully, a hole in the sky opens and an SUV materializes, carrying the interstellar lawman Guard (Kim Woo-bin) and his robot sidekick.And that’s just the first five minutes: The rest of Choi Dong-hoon’s movie then escalates into even more bananas territory.Hopscotching between the present day and 1391, “Alienoid” somehow works a crystal thingumajig called the Divine Blade into its narrative, as well as car chases, aerial wire-aided fights, medieval gunslinging, time travel, magic battles and Transformers-like mayhem, with dashes of comedy and romance for good measure. This is the rare film that makes going off the plot rails wildly entertaining, even if every half-hour or so Choi drops an info dump to clarify (sort of) the story. Mostly, he stitches together scenes that are almost self-contained and powered by such memorable characters as the bounty-hunting rapscallion Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol), Mr. Blue (​​Jo Woo-jin) and Madam Black (Yum Jung-ah), who go by the Sorcerers of Twin Peaks, and the badass Ean (Kim Tae-ri, in quite a switch from her turn in Park Chan-wook’s gothic thriller “The Handmaiden”)The movie is bursting at the seams, as if Choi, in his first outing since the 2015 historical action drama “Assassination,” was drunk on pure filmmaking pleasure and threw every cinematic genre into a gigantic blender.And there is more to come: as overstuffed as it is, “Alienoid” is only the first installment of a two-movie epic.AlienoidNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Can a Start-Up Help the Film and TV Industry Reduce Their Carbon Footprint?

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      The global entertainment industry generates millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. A Spanish director has set up a company to try to cut that number substantially.This article is part of Upstart, a series on young companies harnessing new science and technology.The Goya Awards — Spain’s equivalent of the Academy Awards, held this year in February in Valencia — are a glamorous, televised affair. At the event, the actors Javier Bardem and Cate Blanchett each collected trophies.Behind the scenes, the organizers were attempting something decidedly less glamorous: cutting the ceremony’s carbon emissions.They did so with help from Creast, an entertainment-industry sustainability company founded in late 2019 by Eduardo Vieitez, a Spanish film and advertising director. Creast, which advised the awards in the run-up to the ceremony, prevented the release of 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of 20 car trips around the world and enough to fill 50 Olympic-sized pools — into the atmosphere, according to a news release from the organizers, the Academia de Cine de España, the Spanish film academy.By having staff members take trains instead of flights and stay in hotels close to the ceremony venue, the Goyas’ organizers said they cut transport-related emissions by 55 percent. And by knocking beef off all menus — for staff and attendees — and serving vegetables, chicken and fish instead, they reduced catering emissions by 40 percent.Mr. Vieitez, who has been in the film business for two decades, working with brands like Sony, Samsung and BMW, established the company and its app during the pandemic. “I have worked in more than 20 countries, and it always struck me how unsustainable our processes were,” he said.He started Creast with 300,000 euros (about $305,000) in seed funding from himself, his relatives and friends. The start-up attracted 100 clients in its first year, he said, including Telefónica, IBM, Nestlé and Amazon Prime Video. It now has a staff of around 30 people, including environmental technicians based in Spain, and software developers based in India, he said.When working to advise award shows or film and TV productions, Creast teams look over scripts, budgets and production designs before shooting starts and assesses the project’s carbon footprint based on information on the number of locations; the transportation and accommodation needs, depending on whether crews are local or flown in; the energy requirements for filming and post-production; and materials used for props, costumes, and on-screen vehicles.Once a production gets under way, Creast team members are physically present to carry out checks on site, including measuring lighting and sound pollution and reviewing the sustainability certificates of vehicles and accommodations for cast and crew.Creast charges 0.1 percent of the production budget as a fee, Mr. Vieitez said. Creast keeps their fee low because rather than gather detailed and granular data for each new production, the company uses data from past productions (compiled using machine learning and artificial intelligence) to partially extrapolate the environmental footprint of comparable film shoots or events.Earlier this year, the San Sebastián Film Festival in the Basque region of Spain, which runs from Sept. 16 to 24, invited Creast to help cut its emissions, said Amaia Serrulla, who leads the festival’s sustainability efforts.Creast teams have already made recommendations, Ms. Serrulla said, including that the festival work with local suppliers, use recyclable and reusable packaging and implement top-down LED lighting (rather than bottom-up, which is not as sustainable). They also advised cutting back on paper, so the festival is printing half as many festival guides as usual — and charging for them.The festival, supported by a region that prides itself on its cuisine, did balk at one piece of the Creast teams’ advice: “They recommended not using meat,” Ms. Serulla said. “We have vegan options and vegetarian options, but we are not going to take meat out of the menu for now.”The global entertainment industry generates millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the Producers Guild of America, a trade organization representing American producers of television, film and new media. That’s more than the aerospace, clothing, hotel or semiconductor industries, the Guild said.“Climate change is the most pressing global issue facing us today,” said a March 2021 report by the Sustainable Production Alliance, a consortium established in 2010 that includes some of the world’s biggest film, television and streaming companies. The report added that a major production from a studio had an average carbon footprint of 3,370 metric tons, or 33 metric tons per day of shooting. Roughly half of that was from fuel consumption generated by air travel and utilities.The British industry has similar issues. A report released in 2020 by the British Film Institute and other organizations found that on average, a major studio production generated 2,840 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of 11 one-way trips to the moon. Air travel alone produced as many emissions as 150 one-way flights from London to New York, or 3.4 million car miles, according to the report.Creast joins an existing effort to gauge the industry’s carbon emissions, which includes guides and tools like online calculators that allow users to measure their industry footprint themselves.One widely known tool is the Green Production Guide, established in 2010 by the Producers Guild of America and the Sustainable Production Alliance to help cut the entertainment industry’s emissions. Its founders include industry giants such as Amazon Studios, Disney, Netflix and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The site offers a calculator with which a production’s footprint can be measured and an international database of sustainable goods and service providers working in the film and TV production industry.In Britain, Wearealbert.org, a consortium of British television industry participants set up in 2011, has a carbon calculator that has been used by more than 1,300 production companies for more than 7,500 productions, according to its website. The calculator adds up the environmental cost of transportation and accommodation, production spaces (offices, studios and sound stages), time spent in the editing suite and the use and disposal of materials used (paint, for example).Most film productions are working with tight budgets, “so the simpler a tool for greening production, the more likely it is to be used,” Sean Cubitt, a professor of screen studies at the University of Melbourne, wrote in an email. He said, though, that he was not familiar with Creast.A challenge, he explained, is that movies and television shows are increasingly doing preproduction, production and postproduction in several places.“Bigger productions will have their virtual sets built in one country, their effects designed in another, and their editing done in a third,” Mr. Cubitt said. “That used to be true only of mega-productions like the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, but the supply chain model is now pretty ubiquitous.”As a result, the environmental costs are generated in multiple locations, making sustainability a much more complicated objective to achieve for companies such as Creast.The Creast app, which calculates total emissions of a production by combining line items like transportation, fuel use and food consumption. Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesMore important, Mr. Cubitt said, the industry remains a huge polluter because of the media servers used by streaming services, which he said were “already responsible for about as much carbon emission as the airline industry before the pandemic.”In other words, production companies that are “flying crews to remote locations and trashing them” aren’t “the really big culprit,” he said.“Let’s share the blame here,” he wrote. More

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      Gary Gaines, Coach of ‘Friday Night Lights’ Fame, Dies at 73

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      He coached the Permian High School Panthers in Odessa, Texas, for four seasons in the 1980s, including the one that became the subject of a best-selling book.Gary Gaines, who coached the high school football team in West Texas that was the subject of “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” the best-selling book that inspired a feature film and a television series, died on Monday in Lubbock, Texas. He was 73.The death, at a memory care facility, was confirmed by his wife, Sharon (Hicks) Gaines, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.The Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas, were a powerhouse team that had won four state championships by the time Mr. Gaines was hired as its head coach in 1986. He had already coached four other high school teams in Texas and had become renowned for his teaching skills.“He was a quiet leader who trusted his coaches to do their jobs and saw the game from all perspectives, not just one side or the ball or the other,” Don Billingsley, a running back for Permian in the 1980s, said in a phone interview. “He was a great coach and a great mentor.”Permian’s high profile in Texas and its prospects for success in 1988 lured the writer Buzz Bissinger to move temporarily to Odessa, follow the team and write what became “Friday Night Lights,” published in 1990. Mr. Bissinger was fascinated to learn that the team played before as many as 20,000 fans on Friday nights.“Twenty thousand,” he wrote. “I had to go there.”He portrayed Mr. Gaines as a man under great pressure to win, in a state obsessed with high school football and a city whose fans demanded success. When the Panthers lost a game by one point late in the season, Mr. Gaines arrived home to find several “For Sale” signs planted in his lawn — “a not-so subtle hint that maybe it was best for everyone if he just got the hell out of town,” Mr. Bissinger wrote.A knee injury wrecked the season for the team’s star running back, James Miles, known as Boobie, and the Panthers did not win a fifth title, losing in a semifinal game of the state playoffs. After the game, Mr. Gaines gathered his tearful players in a circle and led them in prayer.“Father,” Mr. Bissinger quoted him as saying, “it hurts so much because we did so many things good and came up short.”After “Friday Night Lights” was published, Mr. Gaines said he felt betrayed by Mr. Bissinger, because he had not produced a more positive account of how football brought the Odessa community together. Mr. Gaines admitted that he had not read the book, but based on what he had been told, he said he objected most to its description of racism in Odessa, in particular toward Mr. Miles, who is Black and whom an assistant coach at Permian referred to with a racial slur.Mr. Gaines told The Marshall News Messenger of Marshall, Texas, in 2009 that his wife called him sobbing after she read the book, saying it made the community look like a “bunch of racists.” He added: “There’s rednecks all around here just like there is in Lubbock. You can go anywhere you want and hear the N-word.”Mr. Bissinger, in a phone interview, said, “He thought I had betrayed him because it wasn’t a puff piece, but I’m not the one who said what was said about Boobie.” He added, “It’s a tough place to be a coach, and he handled it with great dignity.”Billy Bob Thornton portrayed Mr. Gaines in the 2004 film “Friday Night Lights,” based on Buzz Bissinger’s 1990 book of the same name.Ralph Nelson/UniversalWhen “Friday Night Lights” was turned into a film in 2004 by the director Peter Berg, Billy Bob Thornton was cast as Mr. Gaines. In his review in The New York Times, the critic A.O. Scott wrote that Mr. Thornton, in a “sly and thorough performance,” portrayed Mr. Gaines “as “neither a my-way-or-the-highway autocrat nor a rah-rah motivator.”Two years later, when “Friday Night Lights” was adapted as a television series, it was set in a fictional town — Dillon, Texas — and the high school team was coached by a fictional character, Eric Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler). Connie Britton played the coach’s wife in both the film and the series.Gary Alan Gaines was born on May 4, 1949, in Crane, Texas. His father, Durwood, was a superintendent at a Gulf Oil plant; his mother, Dorothy (Burnett) Gaines, was a homemaker. After playing quarterback in high school, Gary moved to wingback at Angelo State University, in San Angelo, Texas, graduating in 1971.He began his long Texas coaching journey as an assistant at high schools in Fort Stockton and Monahans. He became the head coach at high schools in Petersburg and Denver City before moving to Permian, as an assistant, in time to help the Panthers win a state title in 1980. He was subsequently the head coach at Tascosa High School in Amarillo, Monahans High School and Permian.In 1989, Mr. Gaines led the undefeated Panthers to a state championship. In all, he had a 46-7-1 record as head coach at Permian. But he soon left to join Texas Tech University as an assistant coach.“He loved coaching and he loved the kids,” Ms. Gaines, his wife, said in a phone interview, explaining his peripatetic movements. “When we got out of college, he went after his first job. But after that, everybody came after him.”After four seasons at Texas Tech, he returned to coaching high school in Abilene and San Angelo before being named the head coach at Abilene Christian University. Following a subpar 21-30 record, he resigned and spent two years as the athletic director of the school district in Ector, which includes Odessa, and another two as the athletic director of the district in Lubbock.In 2009, he returned to Permian as head coach, but that run was not as successful as the first had been; over four seasons, the Panthers had a 23-21 record, including one playoff victory. Mr. Gaines resigned in 2012 from what would be his final coaching job.“We’re going to give it to someone else and, hopefully, they can make more out of it than we did,” Mr. Gaines told The Associated Press. “We came here to make some deep playoff runs, and we weren’t able to do that.”In 2017, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Nicole Strader; his son, Bradley; his sisters, Dana Howland and Tamra Reidhead; and five grandchildren.Mr. Bissinger said that he visited Mr. Gaines at Abilene Christian University about 20 years after the publication of “Friday Night Light.”“I went into his office and he looked like he’d seen a ghost,” Mr. Bissinger said. “We had a nice 15-minute conversation, and he couldn’t have been nicer.”But, he added: “He kept saying I had betrayed him. He has the right to think what he wants.” More

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      ‘Katrina Babies’ Review: Hearing From Survivors

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      Edward Buckles Jr.’s intimate documentary sheds light on the experiences of Black children when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.Who gets to use the notion of “resilience”? Survivors? Mental health professionals? People who want to celebrate it but also move on from whatever required that fortitude in the first place?The director Edward Buckles Jr. makes a telling point of these tensions in his first film, the revealing documentary “Katrina Babies,” which features Black people who were children —— some toddlers, others in their early teens — in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. “Since the storm, it seems like everybody just moved on,” Buckles Jr. says. “In America, especially during disasters, Black children are not even a thought.”The director, who is also credited as a writer, knows the subject from his own experience. When he was 13, he and his family evacuated the city before the storm arrived and the levees broke.“Katrina Babies” is deeply personal and thoughtfully political. The filmmaker recounts the pleasures of cousinhood and family before the hurricane. He and his subjects also tussle with the economic and racial inequities that were exposed and exacerbated by the disaster.Buckles Jr.’s cousins — whom he celebrates with evocative mixed-media animation (by Antoni Sendra) and, later, with compassionate interviews — did not get out at the time. And when they did leave, they did not return. So, if you detect in Buckles Jr. a layer of survivor’s guilt, you might be right.But “Katrina Babies” is also the intimate undertaking of a native son creating a space to heal. If the grief (and relief) expressed in the interviews is any measure, Buckles Jr. knows how to listen to people whose experiences may be harrowingly similar but are not identical to his own. He pulls off this dance of self-awareness and empathy with impressive humility.Katrina BabiesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More