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      ‘Sugarcane’ Is a Stunning, Sobering Look at the Mistreatment of Indigenous Communities

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      “Sugarcane” follows survivors and investigators after the horrifying treatment of Indigenous Canadians was discovered at residential schools.When it comes to stories that hold the potential to slide from sensitive to sensational, documentarians can take several approaches. There’s the talking-head driven journalistic approach, in which the story and its analysis are laid out, beat by beat. There’s also the more lurid approach that films about cults and crime can employ, with re-enactments and ominous musical cues.But a third way — and the one that Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat take in “Sugarcane” (in theaters), to their great credit — is to invite the audience to dwell alongside those affected by the story, letting their experiences and emotions guide the film. This one tells a horrifying story: In 2021 and 2022 in a series of cascading discoveries, unmarked graves were found on the grounds of a number of Indigenous Canadian residential schools. On investigation, they revealed horrifying mistreatment of Indigenous communities, where parents were virtually forced to send their children to the schools as part of the government’s quest to “solve the Indian problem.”The film’s jumping-off point is the graves discovered at St. Joseph’s Mission, a residential school in British Columbia, near the Sugarcane Reserve of Williams Lake. NoiseCat’s father and grandmother were survivors of St. Joseph’s, and his journey to learn their immensely painful stories is one strand of the documentary.There are others, too. Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing are two investigators working with the Williams Lake First Nation to uncover the truth about what happened at St. Joseph’s, and their determination helps fill in many of the disturbing details that were covered up at the time of the abuse. Rick Gilbert, a former chief of Williams Lake First Nation, was also educated at St. Joseph’s but is a faithful Catholic and reluctant to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocity — even when DNA tests appear to confirm that his father was one of the priests. He is summoned to the Vatican as part of an audience with Pope Francis regarding the discoveries. But his own story takes a long time to come out.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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      6 Books Like ‘It Ends With Us’ by Colleen Hoover to Read Next

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      Whether the Blake Lively movie brought you to the Colleen Hoover universe or you’re a longtime CoHo fan looking for more emotional, spicy stories, these novels are for you.In the past few years, no writer has dominated the best-seller list quite like Colleen Hoover. The prolific author was one of the breakout stars of the self-publishing boom over a decade ago, and her global following has only grown with BookTok’s embrace of her novels. Now Hoover — CoHo to her fans — is setting her sights on the silver screen, with the release of “It Ends With Us,” the first film adaptation of one of her books; the movie, starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, opens in theaters Aug. 9.Hoover’s fans adore her books for their emotional intensity: The stories often revolve around themes of trauma, resilience and hope, and the characters’ tragic histories and passionate struggles provide a catharsis that readers describe as not merely heartbreaking, but heart-stomping-into-smithereens. While she is commonly billed as a romance writer, Hoover also mixes in Y.A., thriller and horror, always with plenty of spice and drama. You can see her influence in the ample selection of new books that aim to walk a similar line — or by glancing around your local bookstore, where you can spot many covers that have gotten the “CoHo treatment.”Whether you’re new to Hoover’s work and looking to see what all the fuss is about, or yearning for some more high drama and emotional intensity while you wait for her next book, all of these options will keep you reading way past your bedtime.Book vs. movie, let me be the judgeIt Ends With Us, by Colleen HooverIf you’ve heard of one of Hoover’s book, it’s probably this one, which has spent a whopping 165 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Lily, a florist, is initially dazzled by Ryle, an enigmatic neurosurgeon. But painful moments from Lily’s childhood begin to echo into her present as she slowly realizes that Ryle’s charm belies an explosive temper — and when Atlas, her first love and her last tie to a life she’d left behind, reappears.Take me deeper into the CoHo universeWe 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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      ‘It Ends With Us’ Review: For Blake Lively, Love Hurts and Even Bruises

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      Blake Lively plays Lily Bloom, a flower lover with a thorny personal garden, in this gauzy adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel.Buried under the gauzy romanticism of “It Ends With Us” — under the softly diffused visuals, the endless montage sequences, the sensitive mewling on the soundtrack and the luxuriously coifed thickets of Blake Lively’s sunset-on-Malibu-Beach dyed-red hair — is a tough little movie about women, bad choices, worse men and decisions that doesn’t fit into a tidy box.Lively stars as the improbably named Lily Blossom Bloom, a beauty with a traumatic history, a soulful ex and a passion for gardening. Over the course of the movie, she falls in love with a neurosurgeon who looks like he stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad. She also befriends a wisecracking sidekick, opens a whimsical floral shop, endures heartache and, after much reflection and many plot complications, finds herself. It’s hard going, but Lily takes whatever life throws at her with her meticulously styled head up and a neo-bohemian influencer vibe. She’s a dream of a woman, an aspirational ideal, an Instagram-era Mildred Pierce.You may know Mildred from Turner Classic Movies as the pie-baking survivor played by Joan Crawford in the 1945 noir “Mildred Pierce.” Mildred walks into that classic wearing a mink coat with linebacker shoulder-pads and the kind of stricken look that clouds a woman’s face when she discovers that her no-good second husband is sleeping with her no-good teenage daughter, and the brat has just offed the creep. It’s no wonder that when Mildred stares into the nighttime waters of the Pacific, she seems to be mulling her equally dark past and future, much as Lily does one evening on a Boston rooftop early on in “It Ends With Us.”Lily doesn’t have long to consider her existential options because her rooftop reveries are soon interrupted by the neurosurgeon, Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who directed the movie). A brooding hunk with soft eyes, hard muscles and miraculously unchanging three-day stubble, Ryle has a touch of menace and a gift for cornball lines, and before long he and Lily are flirtatiously circling each other. Love buds and, yes, blooms, and Lily settles down with Ryle. He seems like a ready-made catch (Baldoni gives himself plenty of close-ups), although anyone at all familiar with the conventions of romantic fiction will wonder about the intensity of his attentions. A picture-perfect guy doesn’t necessarily make a picture-perfect life, dig?Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best seller by Christy Hall, “It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long. It’s visually and narratively overbusy, stuffed with flashbacks of Lily as an adolescent (Isabela Ferrer) that create two parallel lines of action. As the adult Lily moves forward with Ryle and opens her store — she gets help from a nattering assistant, Allysa (Jenny Slate), who enters with her luxury bag swinging and motormouth running — images of the past fill in Lily’s history and her high-school romance with another student, Atlas. (Alex Neustaedter plays him as a teen, while Brandon Sklenar steps into the grown-up role.)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 Instigators’ Review: A Star-Studded Boston Heist Movie

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      Casey Affleck and Matt Damon star in a Boston heist that goes sideways.The best joke in “The Instigators” is a crack about the public school curriculum in Quincy, the suburb just south of Boston that outsiders never pronounce correctly. (It’s closer to a “z” than an “s.”) It feels like an inside joke, as do later affectionate jabs at other Greater Boston locales, lingo and corrupt politicians. This is sort of a heist movie, but it is first and foremost a Boston movie, full of Boston guys and Boston accents and (South) Boston places and Boston humor. Heck, “The Instigators” is practically Boston: The Immersive Experience.It will surprise no one to learn that it’s produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and co-stars Damon alongside the movie’s co-writer, Casey Affleck. Its other writer is Chuck MacLean, the creator and executive producer of “City on a Hill,” the three-season Showtime drama about, you guessed it, Boston.The director of “The Instigators,” Doug Liman, is a born and raised New Yorker. But both he and Damon found collaborative success in 2002 with “The Bourne Identity.” This is their first project together since that hit, and it’s studded with stars: Alongside Affleck and Damon, there’s Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, Paul Walter Hauser, Toby Jones, Ron Perlman and the rapper Jack Harlow (in his second feature film role).Somehow, in 2024, all that wattage still only merits a one-week limited theatrical release in the August dead zone and a quick hop to streaming. Given a few weeks in theaters to pick up steam, I can imagine it doing well, mostly because it’s so easygoing. “The Instigators” starts out like an “Ocean’s 11” riff, with a group of petty thieves gathered by a stormy crime boss, Mr. Besegai (Stuhlbarg), to pull off a big job and then never speak of it again. It seems the sitting governor (Perlman, ideally cast) is a crook, which all but guarantees his re-election — and the cash bribes that will be brought to his victory ball make it an ideal job.Some of the group, like Rory (Damon), really need the money; he’s depressed and desperate and late on his child support, and his therapist (Chau) is worried about him. Others, like Cobby (Casey Affleck) and Scalvo (Harlow), are just the kind of guys who do this kind of thing. But Mr. Besegai is not Mr. Ocean, having snagged none of his breezy luck. Everything goes wrong right from the start, and Cobby and Rory find themselves thrown together in a comedy of blunders.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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      ‘Girl You Know It’s True’ Review: Milli Vanilli, Fictionalized. Again.

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      This film, based on the lives of the duo who lip-synced their way to stardom and downfall, fills in many of the details behind the facade.The true story of the 1980s German musical duo Milli Vanilli could be seen by cynical observers to have begun as farce and ended as tragedy. But despite this fictionalized film’s arguably goofy direct-address narration — from the actors playing the duo — it takes its subjects and their convoluted, unfortunate circumstances seriously.The movie, written and directed by Simon Verhoeven (the German director is the son of the filmmaker Michael Verhoeven, and no relation to the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven), depicts the difficult childhood of Rob Pilatus. He was adopted by a white German couple, and he is first seen as a boy whose Afro all the neighbors want to touch.The film follows Rob as he takes up dancing and forms a breaking team with the Paris-born Fab Morvan. They develop an eye-catching longhaired, leather-clad look and are discovered by the producer Frank Farian, a Svengali who convinces them that they don’t need to actually sing to reach the top of the charts.They can just lip-sync, though that isn’t the only illusion: Farian pilfered the track that gives this film its title, from a Maryland R&B group whose outrage at getting ripped off is also depicted in this eventful movie.Those events are consistently eyebrow raising, if not jaw dropping. The worm turns when a backing tape they use for lip-syncing glitches during an ostensibly live concert. Soon the duo is forced to face up to the fact that they were willing — albeit self-deceiving — patsies. In 1998, Pilatus died from a drug and alcohol overdose.The lead actors — Elan Ben Ali is Morvan, Tijan Njie is Pilatus — bear uncanny resemblances to their real-life models and are better-than-capable performers. (Other cast members are put at a disadvantage by bad wigs.) Viewers who press play with intent to scoff may be surprised with how genuinely caught up they become.Girl You Know It’s TrueNot Rated. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dance First’ Review: Beckett Encounters Himself

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      Samuel Beckett’s life is reduced to mommy and daddy issues in a biopic that offers simple explanations for the career of a complex writer.It may well be that the happiest day of Samuel Beckett’s boyhood was when he flew a kite with his father. It may also be that one of his great regrets was not winning the approval of his disciplinarian mother.Even if true, these details argue for printing the legend. “Dance First,” a Beckett biopic from James Marsh (“The Theory of Everything”), offers simple explanations for the career of a writer whose output famously resists explaining. The movie, written by Neil Forsyth, was surely intended as a tribute, but it plays more like an effort to reduce Beckett to easily comprehensible terms — the sort of terms he most likely would have resisted.This largely black-and-white film opens in 1969, with Beckett (played at that age by Gabriel Byrne) receiving the Nobel Prize. Beckett, uncomfortable with the event, climbs a ladder up the proscenium and escapes, only to encounter … himself, also played by Byrne. As a framing device, Beckett will interrogate Beckett. The back-and-forth owes more to Freudian psychoanalysis than “Waiting for Godot.”We meet Beckett’s mother (Lisa Dwyer Hogg), who disdains his writing. In Paris, where Fionn O’Shea portrays the playwright as a young man, Beckett butters up James Joyce (Aidan Gillen) and becomes an unhappy companion for Joyce’s daughter, Lucia (Grainne Good). Beckett’s affection for his eventual wife, Suzanne (Léonie Lojkine, and then Sandrine Bonnaire), is seen as complicated by a long-running affair with the translator Barbara Bray (Maxine Peake), who lies in bed with Beckett praising the genius of that new play in which “nothing happens.”The film attributes its title to advice that Beckett ostensibly gave a student, but the line also appears in “Godot”: “Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards,” Estragon says. This movie — snazzy but empty — embodies those words all too readily.Dance FirstNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      At 50, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Still Cuts Deep

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      Eli Roth, Paul Feig and other directors with movies out this month explain how this gory horror classic has inspired their work.The movies never recovered after “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” hit theaters in 1974. Focused on a family of cannibalistic, butcherous crazies living in a rural house of horrors, Tobe Hooper’s sleaze-oozing film rattled audiences and was banned in some places. It also inspired filmmakers to take horror in new, more brutal directions.Fede Álvarez, director of the forthcoming “Alien: Romulus,” said that the “unapologetic savagery” of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” influenced his work.“It’s a humbling reminder of how a hard dose of unsolicited anarchy onscreen is a key ingredient for any horror movie that hopes to endure the test of time,” he said.Beginning Aug. 8, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will offer a weeklong run of the film timed to its 50th anniversary, and will follow that with a retrospective (Aug. 13-20) of Hooper’s other less shocking but still daring genre films from the 1980s, including “Poltergeist” (1982) and “Invaders From Mars” (1986).MoMA didn’t dawdle in taking “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” seriously: It added the film to its collection two years after the movie came out.“Its power hasn’t dimmed,” said Ron Magliozzi, a curator in MoMA’s film department and the organizing curator for the series. “It has matured.”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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      Food Porn Gets Dark

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      Shots of extravagantly composed dishes have become cliché. “The Bear” and two other summer releases use well-plated food to convey darker themes.We love sexy food: the dressed-up dishes on cooking shows, a camera zooming in on an angelically lit plate. The influencer’s video that’s less about food than vibes. The ambrosial spreads in ads. Food porn titillates the senses to sell an idea, a product or an experience: the memorable opulent meal, the communion of sharing food as a sacred rite. But three recent releases have perverted this approach, offering extravagantly composed plates that traumatize, not tantalize.In “The Bear,” the meaning of the beautiful food that Chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) creates now that he is finally running his own upscale establishment has changed. It represents old grievances, lingering fears and simmering power struggles. Season 3 opens with an expressionist self-portrait: no plot, just scenes of Carmy working, interspersed with flashbacks of him in kitchens run by chefs he’s idolized.Some of the memories evoke a visceral joy: Carmy wistfully strolling among fields of veggies and making vibrantly detailed illustrations of menu ideas. He admires a photo of one successful creation that could be a salad, arranged like a bouquet. A sunburst of something orange lies petaled and sectioned like a flower, resting on a bed of wild greens. Carmy texts a picture of the arrangement to his brother, Mikey, who is baffled. The message is clear to the audience, though. It’s not just sustenance we’re admiring; it’s art.When Carmy shares an artfully curated dish, Mikey isn’t sure what to make of it.FXScenes of present-day Carmy lack this brightness, literally and figuratively. Kitchen shots are harshly lit to match his clinical approach to the work. Instead of loving glances of plated dishes, we get unsatisfying teases of food that fly by in succession. When Carmy’s frustration mounts and his expectations become impossible for anyone — even him — to meet, mouthwatering meals are swept aside. Two juicy-looking strips of Wagyu beef are flung into the trash, the metal kitchenware clanging violently against the lid, because, Carmy says curtly, “the cook is off.”Carmy’s diminishing relationship with food provides the closest thing “The Bear” has to an enticing conflict. As he settles into the early weeks of running a fine-dining hot spot, he’s increasingly haunted by memories of his tutelage under the sadistic David Fields (Joel McHale). In flashbacks we see Chef David craning over Carmy predatorily, ready with a bitter rebuke or challenge. By season’s end, food is no longer a comfort for Carmy; producing the requisite artful plate of food is necessary to his restaurant’s survival.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