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      ‘A Doll’s House’ Review: Jessica Chastain Plots an Escape

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      Jamie Lloyd’s compelling, surgically precise revival of Ibsen’s 1879 drama throbs like an episode of “CSI: Norway.”Many plays end with a breathtaking coup, but Jamie Lloyd’s incisive Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” which opened on Thursday at the Hudson Theater, also begins with one. After all, it’s not every day you find Jessica Chastain rotating on a turntable like an angry bird in a giant cuckoo clock.Yet there she is for 20 minutes as you take your seat and peel off your coat. Nor is she alone: The five other cast members gradually join her, seated on plain wooden chairs nearby. You can’t help seeing them through her steely gaze as she circulates from one to another, her blazing red hair pulled back and her arms and legs crossed as if sizing up suspects.Clearly, this “Doll’s House” is going to be a procedural. The forbidding, throbbing music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto suggests an episode of “CSI: Norway.”But pay attention to something else as you enter: the year 1879 projected on the back wall of the stage. Without it you might forget that’s when Ibsen wrote the play, and never imagine that’s when this production, using a script adapted by Amy Herzog, is set. With one big exception, “A Doll’s House” is that modern.Certainly it’s chic and visually minimal in the manner of Lloyd’s bucket-of-tears “Betrayal” starring Tom Hiddleston and his rapturous “Cyrano de Bergerac” starring James McAvoy. The black and midnight blue costumes by Soutra Gilmour and Enver Chakartash might be worn on 44th Street today, with Chastain in knitwear and kicky zip boots.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.And don’t look for props. Even when specific objects are mentioned — a cookie, a wedding band — no effort is made to mime them or acknowledge their absence. Indeed, except for the chairs, the stage is utterly empty; the set (also by Gilmour) depends on light rails descending ominously from the flies to suggest the contours, and pressures, of a home.The home in question is of course the dollhouse of the title: the place where Nora Helmer (Chastain) is kept as a plaything for her husband, Torvald (Arian Moayed). Even as she tries to understand how she got trapped there, and how she’ll get out, Ibsen’s ingenious plot demonstrates that marriage is not the only cage. Any woman who dares to venture beyond the security of the place society has made for her — who tries to discover herself as a full human — will meet with disaster.Except for wooden chairs, the stage is empty. Instead, Soutra Gilmour’s set depends on light rails descending from the flies to suggest the contours of a home.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s what happened to Anne-Marie (Tasha Lawrence), who left her own child years ago to become Nora’s nanny, and is now the nanny of Nora’s three children. And that’s what happened to Nora’s schoolmate Kristine Linde (Jesmille Darbouze), who shows up at the Helmer home at Christmastime, widowed and in need of a job.Nora’s disaster has been less visible. To the outside eye she has lacked for little, and with Torvald about to become the manager of a bank, she will soon lack for nothing. But unknown to him, that security has come at a terrible price, with more yet to be paid. Having borrowed money secretly to save his life during a health crisis, she finds herself under a new threat from the lender, the disreputable Nils Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan).Deprived of any independent vision of the world, she can imagine only three solutions. One is to tell Torvald the truth, hoping he will offer to do “the most beautiful thing” — take the blame. Another is to ask their best friend, Dr. Rank (Michael Patrick Thornton), who has long been in love with her, to pay Krogstad off. But the first would be to defer again to the supposedly greater moral fortitude of men, and the second to make herself not just Torvald’s doll but Rank’s. The third is suicide.That we see these options so starkly is because everything else is pared away. Herzog’s dialogue, pruning the social floweriness and conversational whorls of Ibsen’s naturalism, gets right to the point of every line, leaving the text raw and red, as if exfoliated. What the first English translation of the play, by William Archer in 1889, rendered as “You see, it is very difficult to keep an account of a business matter of that kind” becomes, for Herzog, “It’s impossible to keep track” — five words instead of 17. The play, usually nosing past three hours, comes in shy of two.But in cutting and modernizing the language, Herzog does not make the mistake of trashing the social conventions that create the drama in the first place. She doesn’t need to; most of them are still too familiar. In Torvald’s presence, Nora remains a recognizable type, the strategically chirpy songbird pursing her lips and cooing in baby talk. Yet in her superb scenes with Kristine and Rank, the only two people she is not afraid of, we see her other side: calculating, callous and kind when she can afford it.Chastain puts this all across beautifully. As Nora begins to understand the cracks in the stories she’s been told about the world, we feel the cold air of knowledge shivering her. Sharply, she asks Torvald why only mothers are blamed when children turn out badly. Outraged, she wonders how a law that punishes a wife for saving her husband can be moral. And when her options shrink almost to none, she short-circuits; the seductive tarantella she dances to keep Torvald from reading a fateful letter becomes a kind of seizure.Jesmille Darbouze, left, as Nora’s schoolmate Kristine Linde, a widow seeking employment. Darbouze and Chastain’s scenes together are superb, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe staging enhances that interiority at every turn. The children are mere voices. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design makes the dialogue sound as if it’s piped direct from the hypothalamus. In rotating each new scene toward Nora on the turntable, Lloyd highlights the transfer of information from character to character as if it were a shuttlecock — or contraband.Exhilarating as the approach is in vindicating Nora, this modern take on “A Doll’s House” does hit a wall with Krogstad and, crucially, Torvald. Casting Onaodowan, a Black actor, as the play’s most obvious villain, and then underlighting him for scary, shadowy effects (the lighting is by Jon Clark), may be a way of provoking and then subverting a racist response. And it’s true that the character is greatly softened here in Onaodowan’s ultimately sympathetic performance.But Moayed, a daring actor, has less leeway with Torvald. If the other characters feel comfortably at home in 2023, his insufferable, inexcusable paternalism leaves him utterly behind, a relic of 1879.It’s worth noting that linguists generally translate Ibsen’s title — “Et dukkehjem” — as “A Dollhouse” instead of “A Doll’s House.” The prison isn’t just Nora’s; she and Torvald are equally trapped in it. My only real quibble with this compelling, surgically precise revival is that it doesn’t seem to be interested in preserving that unity: in keeping our sympathy for both characters as balanced as Ibsen evidently intended. When the astonishing curtain coup finally comes, you should feel his loss no less than her liberation.A Doll’s HouseThrough June 10 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; adollshousebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour and 50 minutes. More

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      ’65’ Review: An Extraterrestrial Adam Driver Lands on Earth

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      Millions of years ago, a guy from another planet landed on this one. Like most survivors, he had a moody little girl with him.To paraphrase an old Monty Python sketch, nobody suspects the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction.Certainly the poor dinosaurs didn’t, though for their more obsessive present-day human fans the fact that this movie is called “65” — as in million years ago — might count as a spoiler. When Mills the space pilot crash-lands on a muddy, reptile-infested Earth after his vessel is hit by an asteroid, you might have an inkling of the larger disaster in store.I don’t mean the movie; that would be unkind. “65,” directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (two writers of the first “Quiet Place” film), is not interesting enough to be truly terrible or terrible enough to be halfway interesting. As Mills, Adam Driver does a lot of breathing and grunting as he runs a gantlet of familiar dangers. In addition to the T. rexes and other saurian menaces, he faces quicksand, large bugs, falling rocks, malfunctioning equipment and the withering judgment of a 9-year-old girl.But let’s back up a second. Who are these people, and how did they get to our planet before (if I may quote the opening titles) “the advent of mankind”? The answer is that they belonged to an ancient extraterrestrial civilization, one sufficiently advanced to have invented not only space travel, but the usual array of futuristic sci-fi technology.Their health care system was pretty bad, though. Mills’s adolescent daughter, Nevine (Chloe Coleman), suffers from a persistent, apparently life-threatening cough, and the only way he can afford her treatment is by taking on a high-paying “long-range exploratory mission.” He’s already grief-stricken when the asteroid hits, cleaving his spaceship in two and killing all of his cryogenically frozen passengers except one, a girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt).The folks on their home planet, realistically enough, speak more than one language, so Koa and Mills — whose native idiom is English — can’t communicate very well. Also, he’s a grumpy, unhappy man and she’s a moody girl, so we’re on familiar survival-story terrain. “65” is a little like “The Last of Us,” but with dinosaurs instead of mushrooms and no obvious sociological theme that would sustain a think piece.Which would be to its credit, if it managed to be a simple, effective action movie. Or science-fiction movie. Or scary movie. Or something. Like Mills’s emotional back story, the special effects seem to have been pulled out of a box of secondhand ideas. Nor is the execution all that impressive. There’s little in the way of awe, suspense or surprise. Just a quickly hatched plan to get off this God-forsaken planet and leave it to its fate.65Rated PG-13. Dinosaur blood and prehistoric curses. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Punch’ Review: Hitting at the Heart

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      Welby Ings’s keenly observant debut feature follows a young, promising boxer whose priorities shift.Sports dramas, perhaps more than movies in most genres, have an ability to cut to the chase when dealing with themes of gender: The fraught tension between the athlete and their arena so often comes down to how well they adhere to traditional notions of their gender identity. This idea is at the forefront in “Punch,” the feature debut of the New Zealand writer-director Welby Ings, which dexterously balances familiar emotional beats and an impressive, nimble approach to form.Jim’s (Jordan Oosterhof) potential as a boxer is a promise, to himself and to his alcoholic father, Stan (Tim Roth). Jim, a high school student, could finally leave his rural life. He could become the boxing star his father never managed to be. The closer Jim gets to a local queer outcast, Whetu (Conan Hayes), though, the more his priorities shift away from being in the ring.Flowing and keenly observant of its characters and setting, “Punch” swings above its weight class. Though it is too often formulaic in its melodrama, Ings’s film is granted an unusual and compelling out-of-time feel. Its production design, by Iain Aitken, features elements both  modern and not: The training gym appears worn and aged, with paint flaking off the walls and faded pictures that look like they’re from the 1950s. But beneath one photo of the boy and his father, a caption reads “Pirau Boxing Club 2014.” Matt Henley’s cinematography gives the movie a dreamlike texture, as if the bonds between father and son, and fighter and lover, transcend time and place.PunchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘99 Moons’ Review: On-Again, Off-Again

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      Instead of an engaging erotic romance, the film delivers a dull narrative of two lovers caught in a cycle of getting together and falling apart.Good erotic films are built on an atmosphere of tension. Maybe it’s repressed desire, or a ticking clock imposed on an affair by external forces, or two people with fundamentally different identities coming together against all odds. Jan Gassmann’s “99 Moons” shoots for all three, and yet the tension hangs limply throughout its nearly two-hour running time.The Swiss film, opening in theaters Friday, stars Valentina Di Pace and Dominik Fellmann as Bigna and Frank, characters representing opposites on a spectrum of sexual agency. Bigna, a young scientist trying to advance in her profession by planning a research study in Chile, is controlling to a fault, hooking up with anonymous men in masks to fulfill an elaborate sexual fantasy that the viewer is thrown into during the opening scene. Frank, a loner, weaves his way through hazy nightclubs in search of something that Gassmann never quite articulates. The two meet up through one of Bigna’s contrived escapades, after which Frank immediately bursts into tears. Bigna is confused, and so are we.What follows is a dull, “When Harry Met Sally”-style narrative in which the protagonists pursue each other, get together, and break up over bizarre misunderstandings, before the film jumps forward in time and the cycle repeats itself. (The film’s title comes from this structure; their time apart is measured pretentiously in “moons.”) Gassmann clearly wants to explore the state of love and sexuality in the 2020s — there are more than a few passing parallels to Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” — but he succeeds only in conveying the pathologies of two people who can’t figure out what they want from each other.99 MoonsNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Unicorn Wars’ Review: Teddy Bears in Battle

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      The contrast between this animated film’s grim subject matter and its bubbly animation style is a big part of what makes it so creepy, our critic writes.In “Unicorn Wars,” a disturbing animated film by the Spanish director and comic book artist Alberto Vázquez, pastel-colored bears are locked in perpetual warfare against the supposedly diabolical unicorns that inhabit a magic forest. Two brothers drafted into service, Bluey (Jon Goirizelaia) and Tubby (Jaione Insausti), are bobble-headed teddy bears with saucer eyes and a penchant for bed-wetting, yet the vainglorious Bluey in particular proves capable of great cruelty.In other words, these Care Bears are not for children. Even some adults will have difficulty sitting through the film’s parade of exposed brains and cartoon genitals. Though, to Vázquez’s credit, the contrast between the film’s grim subject matter and its bubbly, expressive 2D animation style is a big part of what makes the film so creepy.An antiwar and anti-religion fable, “Unicorn Wars” follows Bluey and Tubby as they train for battle in the forest, where they ingest hallucination-inducing worms and eventually slaughter a young unicorn, inciting the herd into horn-goring action. The bear soldiers are nothing like the ferocious grizzlies of lore, so they’re destined to be collateral damage.Naturally, the war is a sham, justified by some dusty religious text that deems unicorns evil, a myth that the repressed Bluey latches on to with notable zeal. Flashbacks to his troubled childhood — his parents’ divorce, his mother’s death — give reason for his power-mongering and jealous ways, his malice metastasizing despite Tubby’s generous supply of brotherly affection.The film has clear touchstones: it draws from the humanism and worldbuilding of Hayao Miyazaki, particularly “Princess Mononoke” and its civilization versus nature allegory — paying tribute as well to that film’s black-sludge-covered demons and ghoulish ape clan. In the brief unicorn sequences, whose animation style leans more toward the expressionistic, there are parallels with the forsaken doe in “Bambi.” But “Unicorn Wars” is forcefully provocative, trying too hard to push buttons at the cost of more nuanced explorations of masculinity and power. For Vázquez, a pile of cartoon corpses makes enough of a point.Unicorn WarsNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Magic Flute’ Review: Mozart Meets C.G.I., With Help From a Tween

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      A young tenor enters a world enlivened by computer graphics at a school devoted to the composer’s works in this Roland Emmerich-inspired film.The key to what this film has in store for you lies not with the name of the director (first timer Florian Sigl) nor the screenwriters (Andrew Lowery and Jason Young, whose respective filmographies elicit a reaction between “meh” and “yikes”). Rather, consider one of its producers, Roland Emmerich. The mastermind behind a variety of elaborate blockbusters with topics running the gamut from alien invasions (you may remember 1996’s “Independence Day”) to who the hell really wrote Shakespeare’s plays (you probably don’t remember 2011’s “Anonymous”), Germany’s insufficient answer to Baz Luhrmann here applies his imprimatur to a Mozart-for-tweens exercise.A young English fellow, Tim Walker (Jack Wolfe), gets shipped off to the fictional Mozart International School in Germany, the overall vibe of which is very Hogwarts for musos. Undercut by an imperious professor (F. Murray Abraham, hoping you remember “Amadeus,” or maybe not), distracted by a female schoolmate and ducking resident bullies, Tim nonetheless determines to earn the role of Prince Tamino in the school’s upcoming production of a Mozart opera. One evening that very opera’s three child spirits, doing something of a Tinkerbell bit, lead Tim to a passageway that drops him in the world of “The Magic Flute” itself. Over rugged terrain, he’s chased by a giant serpent, just like in the opera, only here it’s a CGI beast, just like in a Roland Emmerich movie. In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey.The movie toggles between those two states throughout. But the tunes are nice, and it is novel, one could say, to hear them sung in non-operatic modes. Except in the case of the opera’s Queen of the Night, played by the acclaimed coloratura Sabine Devieilhe, who comes through with that famous high note.The Magic FluteNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Magic Flute’ Review: Mozart Meets CGI, With Help From a Tween

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      A young tenor enters a CGI-enlivened world at a school devoted to the composer’s works in this Roland Emmerich- inspired film.The key to what this film has in store for you lies not with the name of the director (first timer Florian Sigl) nor the screenwriters (Andrew Lowery and Jason Young, whose respective filmographies elicit a reaction between “meh” and “yikes”). Rather, consider one of its producers, Roland Emmerich. The mastermind behind a variety of elaborate blockbusters with topics running the gamut from alien invasions (you may remember 1996’s “Independence Day”) to who the hell really wrote Shakespeare’s plays (you probably don’t remember 2011’s “Anonymous”), Germany’s insufficient answer to Baz Luhrmann here applies his imprimatur to a Mozart-for-Tweens exercise.A young English fellow, Tim Walker (Jack Wolfe), gets shipped off to the fictional Mozart International School in Germany, the overall vibe of which is very Hogwarts for musos. Undercut by an imperious professor (F. Murray Abraham, hoping you remember “Amadeus,” or maybe not), distracted by a female schoolmate and ducking resident bullies, Tim nonetheless determines to earn the role of Prince Tamino in the school’s upcoming production of a Mozart opera. One evening that very opera’s three child spirits, doing something of a Tinkerbell bit, lead Tim to a passageway that drops him in the world of “The Magic Flute” itself. Over rugged terrain, he’s chased by a giant serpent, just like in the opera, only here it’s a CGI beast, just like in a Roland Emmerich movie. In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey.The movie toggles between those two states throughout. But the tunes are nice, and it is novel, one could say, to hear them sung in non-operatic modes. Except in the case of the opera’s Queen of the Night, played by the acclaimed coloratura Sabine Devieilhe, who comes through with that famous high note.The Magic FluteNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Luther: The Fallen Sun’ Review: Psycho Filler

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      A smoldering Idris Elba is no match for the preposterousness of this feature-length Netflix continuation of the popular BBC crime thriller.Movies have never quite figured out what to do with Idris Elba. Imposing, charismatic and dauntingly intelligent, Elba has so far been most memorable on television — his intense, thoughtful style feeding on the intimacy and character-building patience of episodic storytelling.Over five seasons on the BBC show “Luther” (2010-19), he played the titular London copper as a troubled, morally conflicted genius with an aversion to rules and an ongoing infatuation with a slinky psychopath (brilliantly played by Ruth Wilson). All wounded eyes and wool overcoat, Luther lumbered wearily from one grisly crime scene to another, losing loved ones and nabbing a series of increasingly implausible adversaries. Throughout, the character was a magnetic constant; the show’s problem was always finding villains worthy of him.And that’s exactly where “Luther: The Fallen Sun” (directed by Jamie Payne and written by the show’s creator and sole writer, Neil Cross) trips, falls and never recovers. The inexplicable choice of a smirking Andy Serkis as the murderous David Robey, a cyber-sicko with limitless resources and incalculable mental issues, elicits more chuckles than chills. Decked out at one point in a velvet blazer and turtleneck, hair teased into the likeness of a dead stoat, Robey is less demented sadist than disco king. The scene where the diminutive devil — hopping and hooded like the killer in “Don’t Look Now” (1973) — fights the towering Luther on a subway platform is nothing less than ludicrous.Body-mass differential aside, Luther and Robey are further hindered by a plot so dashed-off and indistinct that very little makes sense. Picking up generally where season five ended, with Luther heading to prison for his persistent vigilantism, this feature-length revival (streaming on Netflix) locks him up and gets him out with mystifying, head-spinning ease. Robey, seemingly assisted by a shadowy pod of followers, is busily hacking webcams and smart devices, recording shameful secrets and blackmailing their owners. For those who prefer to die rather than be exposed, Robey stages elaborate kill scenes, live-action tableaus that unfold with a pulpy majesty. In a movie that starts at fever pitch and rarely relents, these grisly interludes, captured by Larry Smith’s glowering camera, offer strangely haunting respites from the plot’s general chaos.Lacking dialogue to deepen the characters or reinforce their motivations, “Luther: The Fallen Sun” whooshes past in a rush of serial-killer clichés: an underground lair, a torture room, a masked maniac. Anonymous losers sit glued to computer screens, but the movie is so headlong and fragmented it’s unclear exactly what they’re watching or how Robey’s sleazy schemes are realized. It’s as if Netflix has tried to shoehorn an entire season of television into a little over two hours.The result might be more richly cinematic, but it’s infinitely cruder, with characters so underwritten that their possible demise excites no more than a shrug. Brief sightings of the wonderful Dermot Crowley, who returns as Luther’s melancholic superintendent, have a steadying effect, as does Cynthia Erivo as Luther’s fed-up superior. But it’s Elba himself, huddled miserably inside that overcoat in a rain-soaked Piccadilly Circus, that elicits a nostalgic thrill. Call me a pushover for tormented heroes and soulful tailoring.Luther: The Fallen SunRated R for flaming bodies, forced suicides and frightful hair. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More