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      ‘Rust’ Review: Alec Baldwin Western Hit by Tragedy Is a Hard Watch

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      During every scene of this western, I couldn’t stop thinking about the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, who was killed on set in an entirely preventable tragedy.It’s impossible to watch “Rust,” a period western steeped in death, without thinking about the catastrophe that occurred on set while it was being filmed in New Mexico on Oct. 21, 2021. During a rehearsal, a gun that the star Alec Baldwin was handling discharged a live bullet, fatally wounding the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and injuring the director, Joel Souza. Hutchins was 42; she is survived by a son and her husband, Matthew Hutchins.In March 2024, the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter; she received an 18-month sentence. In July 2024, a case against Baldwin was dismissed after a judge determined that some of the evidence had been mishandled.“There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” the judge said.Those words haunt “Rust,” which is now being released simultaneously in theaters and on streaming. The fact that it is now available to the viewing public isn’t enough to justify a review. And, in truth, this is no longer an ordinary movie; it is, rather, a deeply depressing coda to an appalling and entirely preventable tragedy. In general, live ammunition should never be on any film set, per industry standards. Gutierrez-Reed, who was 24 at the time and an inexperienced armorer, was supposed to load the revolver that Baldwin was holding with dummy rounds. But one of the rounds she loaded into the gun was live.This wasn’t the first time that someone died in a preventable accident while making a movie. In 2014, Sarah Jones, 27, was struck by a train while working as a camera assistant on the drama “Midnight Rider.” The project was never finished, and crews began putting Jones’s name on clapboards as part of a campaign known as “Safety for Sarah.” As the cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who had started another safety initiative for more humane working hours, said: “We are making entertainment, and there’s no reason to risk our lives and our health to get a shot.” His words should have been seared into the minds of everyone in the industry, and anyone who flouts safety protocols should be banned.Three and a half years after Hutchins’s death, the only question that seems worth asking about “Rust,” I think, is what does its release mean to her family. In 2022, some members reached a settlement in a wrongful-death lawsuit against the movie’s producers a few months before production resumed. Hutchins was named as one of the movie’s executive producers, and “Rust,” somewhat queasily, has been dedicated to her. A release from the “Rust” representatives states that its original producers will not gain financially from the movie. The terms of Matthew Hutchins’s settlement were sealed, the release said, but it has been confirmed that he and the couple’s son, Andros, will receive profits from the film.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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      Best Movies and Shows Streaming in May: ‘Poker Face,’ ‘Murderbot’ and More

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      “Duster,” “Summer of 69,” “Overcompensating,” “‘Deaf President Now!” and more are arriving, and “Poker Face” returns.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of May’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Overcompensating’ Season 1Starts streaming: May 15The comedian and social media content creator Benito Skinner both created and stars in this raunchy campus comedy, about freshmen trying desperately to fit in with their peers — while hiding their actual personalities and desires. Skinner plays Benny, a former high school athlete who does not want his family or his classmates (or maybe even himself) to realize he’s gay. On the first day of college, Benny meets Carmen (Wally Baram), who is recovering — poorly — from a bad breakup. The two bond immediately, but while Carmen thinks she just met her next boyfriend, Benny thinks he has found someone who can pretend to be his girlfriend. “Overcompensating” is set in a broadly comic version of university life, where everyone is sex- and status-obsessed. But Skinner also sincerely explores what it’s like for young people to use a new environment to reinvent themselves.‘The Better Sister’Starts streaming: May 29This twisty mini-series stars Jessica Biel as Chloe, a rich and successful New York City media mogul who calls the cops from her family’s summer house after her husband, Adam (Corey Stoll), is found murdered. While the homicide detectives Nancy (Kim Dickens) and Matt (Bobby Naderi) investigate the crime, Chloe seems unusually interested in keeping them from learning about certain aspects of her life — like her strained relationship with her sister Nicky (Elizabeth Banks). Nicky, a reckless free spirit, is also Adam’s ex and the biological mother of Adam and Chloe’s teenage son, Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan). Cocreated by Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado, “The Better Sister” (based on an Alafair Burke novel) is both a mystery with lots of red herrings and the study of a sad sibling rivalry.Also arriving:May 1“Another Simple Favor”May 6“David Spade: Dandelion”May 8“Octopus!”May 20“Motorheads” Season 1May 22“Earnhardt”May 27“The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy” Season 2From left, Tim Rarus, Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Greg Hlibok and Jerry Covell in “Deaf President Now!,” a documentary film directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim.Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Deaf President Now!’Starts streaming: May 16Back in 1988, Gallaudet University’s students drew international headlines when they shut the college down for a week, angrily rejecting the appointment of yet another hearing president — at a time when the institution had never had a deaf one. For the documentary “Deaf President Now!,” the Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”) and co-director Nyle DiMarco (a Gallaudet alum) have collected rarely seen student-shot footage of those protests, and combined them with news clips, re-creations and fiery new interviews with the campus leaders. The film delivers a fascinating look back at a pivotal moment in civil rights history that doubles as a gripping political thriller, piecing together the details of the demonstration and how, day by day, these courageous young adults turned the tide of public opinion.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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      ‘Words of War’ Review: Portrait of a Fearless Reporter

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      The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya is the subject of a film that honors her bravery.The sort of movie in which a story’s inherent power is enough to oil otherwise creaky biopic machinery, “Words of War” dramatizes the life of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who became known for her tenacious reporting on the second Chechen war and for her undaunted criticism of Vladimir V. Putin. The movie opens with an apparent attempt on her life — a poisoning on an airplane — and ends with her death in 2006, when she was murdered in her Moscow apartment building.In between, it recounts the tremendous risks that Politkovskaya (played by Maxine Peake) faced in finding and persuading people to talk. When she travels to Grozny, she has difficulty earning the confidence of Chechens, who believe that no Russian reporter can be trusted. One says that she is trying to illuminate “the black hole of the world.” The Russian military eyes her warily, too (a major threatens to slit her throat), and soon an agent (Ian Hart) visits her while she is getting coffee and a croissant in Moscow — to make it clear he’s keeping watch.The closing credits acknowledge that the filmmakers (James Strong directed a screenplay by Eric Poppen) have taken some dramaturgical liberties, including inventing the Hart character. Politkovskaya’s own description of serving as a hostage negotiator at a Moscow theater in 2002 differs in tenor from the portrayal of events onscreen. Some deviations are inevitable, but the expository dialogue — and the convention of having Russian characters speak English, with British accents — are distractions. Even so, Politkovskaya’s bravery, and Peake’s commitment to honoring it, is enough.Words of WarRated R for violence and descriptions of brutality. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Vulcanizadora’ Review: Guilt Trip

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      Two midlife losers reckon with past mistakes on a despairing and oddly haunting trip into the woods and out of their heads.Midway through “Vulcanizadora,” the fifth feature from the eccentric indie actor and filmmaker Joel Potrykus, his character, Derek, asks his best friend, Marty (Joshua Burge), to consider that hell might be no more than never-ending anxiety.“Can you imagine that? Being nervous forever?” The two are hiking through a Michigan forest en route to a terrible, as yet unrevealed destination, and viewers familiar with Potrykus’s work will feel a stab of amusement: Perpetual unease is a state he has always imagined with exquisite precision.Revisiting the losers we met a decade ago in “Buzzard,” “Vulcanizadora” wonders where slackers go when their adolescent behaviors no longer serve. Nowhere good, is the answer, as these pitiable, middle-aged misfits gradually reveal lives that are likely unsalvageable. Marty, a small-time crook, is facing a second stint in prison and living in his childhood basement. Derek is divorced, estranged from his young son (played by Potrykus’s real son, Solo) and unreliably medicated. Both are depleted from past mistakes and on the verge of making one of the worst imaginable. When everyone thinks you’re a no-count, then nothing you do can ever count.Potrykus, though — an inveterate hand-to-mouth practitioner — persists in treating the lost and the left-behind as if they matter, and his signature empathy is pronounced here. As is his fascination with fire as an arbiter of emotional disturbance: Like the pyromaniac of “Ape” (2014), Marty may be an arsonist, and his emphatic wretchedness finds expression in a lingering, hauntingly surreal close-up of black snake fireworks slowly uncoiling.Spasmodically funny, though hardly a comedy, “Vulcanizadora” is raw, moving and, briefly, horrifying. In the press notes, Potrykus admits to having worried that becoming a father would cause him to soften and “start telling stories of hope and inspiration.” That may be the funniest joke of all.VulcanizadoraNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Alec Baldwin’s ‘Rust’ Gets Muted Release, Years After Fatal Shooting

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      The filmmakers said that they hoped the finished product would honor the work and memory of its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, who was shot and killed on the set.How do you plan the rollout of a film that became notorious for an on-set tragedy?The ill-fated western “Rust” has been trying to figure that out. The movie is finally being released on Friday, three and a half years after its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, was shot and killed by a real bullet fired from an old-fashioned revolver that its star, Alec Baldwin, was rehearsing with on a set in New Mexico.Now that the film is finally coming out after years of lawsuits, investigations and two criminal trials, its rollout has been decidedly muted. Unable to find traction at better-known film festivals, “Rust” premiered last fall at a small cinematography festival in Poland. Now, as it is being released in a limited number of theaters (with none so far in New York City) and on demand, it is forgoing the traditional red-carpet premiere, and Mr. Baldwin has not sat for any splashy interviews.The filmmakers said that their overriding goal in finishing the film and pushing for its release was to showcase the final work of Ms. Hutchins, who was a 42-year-old up-and-coming cinematographer when she was killed. And a legal settlement calls for some of the film’s earnings to go to her husband and son.“If I was to make a direct plea to someone about seeing the movie,” said the film’s director, Joel Souza, “I’d say that a lot of really good people worked really hard on finishing this movie to honor her.”Mr. Souza was injured in the shooting by the bullet that killed Ms. Hutchins, which passed through her and lodged in his shoulder. He said that at first he doubted he would ever want to return to the movie business. But eventually a plan came together to finish “Rust,” with Mr. Souza back in the director’s chair.The plan not only had the blessing of Ms. Hutchins’s husband, Matthew Hutchins, but it was at the heart of a settlement agreement he reached with the movie’s producers, including Mr. Baldwin, after he filed a wrongful-death lawsuit.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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      ‘Pavements’ Blurs Fact and Fiction to Reimagine a Band’s Legacy

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      The director Alex Ross Perry said Stephen Malkmus of Pavement told him to “avoid the legacy trap.” The result is a music documentary with made-up elements that really existed. What?The Bob Dylan Center gathered some 6,000 items from the musician’s archive in an Oklahoma museum. Green Day’s “American Idiot” album was adapted into a Broadway show. The Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” won four Oscars and was nominated for best picture.If these artists could burnish their legacies and become part of a wider cultural conversation outside of music, then why not Pavement, the beloved ’90s indie-rock band that was about to reunite for its first concerts since 2010?That’s the animating spirit behind “Pavements,” the director Alex Ross Perry’s audacious documentary about the band, which opens Friday. Perry did, in fact, write and direct a stage show called “Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical” that played for two nights in Manhattan in 2022. A museum touting “rumored relics of the band’s real and imagined history” popped up in TriBeCa that fall, coinciding with the initial Brooklyn run of the group’s (very real, and very successful) reunion tour. And Perry filmed portions of a fictionalized Pavement biopic — starring Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”), Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker, among others — then staged a “premiere” for it in Brooklyn.“Pavements” covers, clockwise from top left, the band’s reunion tour, a museum of its memorabilia, a made-up Hollywood biopic and a jukebox musical, sometimes presented in split screen.UtopiaIn “Pavements,” all of this is intercut with archival imagery from the band’s history and footage from the reunion tour’s rehearsals and performances, sometimes presented in two-, three- or even four-way split screen. (The plural title is quite literal.) Overall, the effect is about as far from the typical rock documentary as you could get.“I was told, ‘They want nothing traditional,’” Perry said in a video interview last month, adding that the group’s frontman, Stephen Malkmus, texted him, “‘Avoid the legacy trap.’ Possibly in all capitals.” At this point in the life cycle of Pavement or any other band, Perry said, the question becomes: What else do we do with our story? A documentary, a series, an exhibition, what? “So that, for me, became the actual text of the movie,” he said.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 Surfer’ Review: Nicolas Cage Catches Hell at the Beach

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      Nicolas Cage plays the title role in this punishing beach drama, where an aggressive group of surfers advise him the spot is for “locals only.”Some successful actors start to downshift when they hit their 60s, but Nicolas Cage, 61, still works with the frequency of a man who has a hellhound or a collections agency on his trail. Cage is the best reason to watch “The Surfer,” a deliberately punishing drama in which he plays the title role. His character is an apparently successful wheeler-dealer who’s taking a day off to catch some waves at a beach close to a house he hopes to buy. His plan runs afoul of an aggressive group of surfers who advise him the spot is for “locals only.” But he is a local, he protests.That may or may not be true. And the surf gang, who want him gone, don’t care either way, as they demonstrate with mounting violence. Cage has a penchant for characters who take a lot of punishment, like in the “Wicker Man” remake (2006) or the first half or so of “Mandy” (2018), and here his character just keeps coming back for more.Is he crazy? Maybe. But something else is going on. There’s an older man hanging out at the beach handing out fliers about his lost son — and didn’t Cage’s character first come to the beach with his own teenage son? The surfer is increasingly addled by visions that come to him in harrowing split-second blackouts. The director Lorcan Finnegan drops other intimations of a time loop, reminiscent of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée.” But if this movie leaves Cage adrift, he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable about it.The SurferRated R for language and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lavender Men’ Review: Daring to Reimagine ‘America’s Daddy’

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      A writer rethinks queer history through Abraham Lincoln’s political ambitions, but needs a few present-day edits.What if Abraham Lincoln’s presidential pursuit was sparked amid some playful, shirtless roughhousing with his legal clerk Elmer Ellsworth? Now imagine another twist — a tree in full drag regalia is a witness.That’s some of the reinterpreted history in the unconvincingly staged new film “Lavender Men.”The film begins with Taffeta (Roger Q. Mason), the mistreated stage manager of a community theater production about Lincoln, who is fed up with the current state of the play. Taffeta, who is nonbinary, seizes control of the narrative, granting “America’s daddy” romantic agency and his own gay love story.Through this queer lens, Taffeta critiques Lincoln for his role in upholding white supremacy while also connecting with him as another “lonely queen,” using the encounter to reframe Taffeta’s own story. In this act of reclamation, Taffeta inhabits a kaleidoscope of roles — from army cadet to Mary Todd Lincoln to that all-knowing, unseen tree. “This is my fantasia, honey,” they proclaim to the camera. (The queering of Lincoln is also present in “Oh Mary,” Cole Escola’s Broadway hit.)Drawing a line from modern repression to the 16th president’s sexuality is a bold premise, and “Lavender Men,” which was originally a play written by Mason, struggles to fully realize its world onscreen. The director Lovell Holder, who wrote the screenplay with Mason for this adaptation, tackles the idea of inherited trauma by breaking the fourth wall, yet the film remains narratively inert, reaching for profundity with the earnestness of poetic fan fiction.Tonal whiplash — farcical comedy, heavy drama, even a musical number — undermines the film’s emotional stakes. You want a better story for Taffeta, and for Lincoln and Ellsworth, too. “Lavender Men” rewrites the past, but it could use edits in the present.Lavender MenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More