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      ‘Nickel Boys’ Review: Childhood’s Brutal End

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      This visually inventive adaptation of a Colson Whitehead novel follows two boys at an abusive school in Jim Crow-era Florida.The first time that you clearly and truly see the teenage heartbreaker in “Nickel Boys,” he is walking up to a new friend. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) has just arrived at the fictional reform school referenced in the title when he sits down opposite Turner (Brandon Wilson) at a communal table. They’re in a large dining room crowded with children of varying sizes, shapes and bearings, and while some seem to be on the cusp of manhood, many look too obscenely young to be here. Their chatter and laughter obscures the horrors of this place. You only need to look closer to see that some of these children are already ghosts.Different types of kids populate RaMell Ross’s painful, boldly expressionistic adaptation of the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel, “The Nickel Boys.” The children at the school are by turns determined, defeated and stunned, almost hollowed out. Ross cradles them all in a soft, beautiful light. With great sensitivity to the power of the cinematic image — and to the history of abject representations of Black humanity — he keeps on cradling them. Even when the story turns unbearably cruel, Ross insists on beauty as an imperative; it is, among other things, a rebuke to the annihilating ugliness of Nickel and to those who oblige its horrors.Elwood arrives at the Nickel Academy, as it’s called, after he’s unfairly caught up in an injustice. It’s 1962 when a sympathetic teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails) taps Elwood — a sober, studious 16-year-old high-school student in Tallahassee, Fla. — to take a class at a local college. On his first day to the college, Elwood inadvertently hitches a ride with a car thief. Wrongly implicated in the crime, he is taken from the home he shares with his loving grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who, with his parents long gone, is raising him on her own. He’s subsequently sent to Nickel, where his story begins in earnest.“A prison for children” is how a 1903 report referred to the Jim Crow-era emblem, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which had been founded just three years earlier and would inspire Whitehead’s novel. There, for decade after decade, hundreds of ostensibly troubled boys, most Black, were confined, worked, terrorized and killed. (Among their offenses: “incorrigibility.”) Some disappeared. About 100 children are known to have died at the school from fire, disease, blunt-force trauma and gunshot wounds. After Florida shut down the school in 2011 following several investigations, one by the Justice Department, the state ordered a separate inquiry that led to the excavation of 55 unmarked graves.The movie, written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, adheres to the novel’s narrative arc even as it condenses the story. In vivid, dreamy visual bursts, Ross glides over Elwood’s early childhood and explores his growing interest in the civil rights movement, which he carries to Nickel. There, Elwood settles into the racially segregated quarters, surveys the scene — he notes the Black students’ tattered clothing — and meets Turner. He also experiences Nickel’s culture of violence when, after defending another kid from bullies, some adult employees take him to a building called the White House. Inside this hell, he is so brutally flogged by a white supervisor (Hamish Linklater as Spencer) that he ends up in the school hospital.Ross takes an oblique approach to this scene, using narrative ellipses to avoid making a spectacle out of sadistic white violence on Black bodies. To that end, as he does from the very beginning of the movie, he shows you only what Elwood sees, a strategy that pulls you to the character and which Ross sustains for an unusually long time for a commercial movie. Through Elwood’s darting eyes and keen ears, you see and hear what he does. In the White House, you hear the rhythm of the strap and the thunderous roar of a fan that never fully obscures the children’s cries. You see a light, a Bible, another boy’s hand clutching a frantically jittering leg. You also see blood on Spencer’s shirt but not how it got there.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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      ‘Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ Review: Side Quest

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      This anime adaptation, drawn from Tolkien’s appendices, focuses on a shield maiden, but mostly it serves as an excuse to revisit Middle-earth.There’s something so tantalizing about discovering the story within a story — the old tale, the side quest or the bit of lore that is relegated to a brief mention or note. Or, possibly, to a reference in the appendix. That’s the case in “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” a hot-and-cold anime adaptation of a tale mentioned in the appendices of “The Lord of the Rings.”Taking place pre-Peter Jackson trilogy and post-Amazon series, and directed by Kenji Kamiyama (“Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex”), the movie is based on a story from the history of Rohan, a kingdom of men known to be great horse-tamers and riders. Almost 200 years before the War of the Ring, Rohan is facing a mighty rift within its own boundaries, as a Dunlending lord named Wulf seeks a bloody path to the throne held by Helm Hammerhand, voiced by Brian Cox (and, yes, Helm as in Helm’s Deep, the battle site in “The Two Towers,” the second Jackson film). As fighting breaks out, putting both the Helm house and the people of Rohan at risk, Helm’s only daughter, a wild and untamed princess fated for little more than an advantageous marriage, becomes the warrior who defines the battle’s conclusion.Helm’s daughter is unnamed in the appendices, but here she gets both a name — Héra — and a central role in the story, as the eyes through which we see the action unfold. Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), her family’s fastest equestrian, descends from a tradition of Rohan shield maidens, as does her casually badass lady in waiting, Olwyn. The narrator is Éowyn (voiced by Miranda Otto, who played the character in Jackson’s trilogy), another shield maiden who tells the story 200 years after the film’s events. So while “War of the Rohirrim” feels like a noble attempt to expand the number of valiant women characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s canon, Héra doesn’t feel fully realized. Though she’s independent and bonded to nature, the character lacks personality and feels ancillary to the story. Even the film’s bid to add dimension, by, say, including a flashback of Héra’s childhood friendship with Wulf, plays as a forced attempt to weave this character into the larger drama of the movie.Part of the issue here is the built-in constraints to the narrative: The War of the Rohirrim takes up less than three pages in the appendices to Tolkien’s already meticulously detailed and beloved “Lord of the Rings,” so there is, understandably, a bit of reticence to the storytelling in the film. “The War of the Rohirrim” tries to strike the proper balance between remaining loyal to the Middle-earth created by Tolkien and imagined by Jackson while also introducing novel ideas to an adaptation of a lesser-known part of that universe.So although parts of the story feel predictable or familiar — particularly character tropes like the stubborn ruler, the loyal knight exiled from the kingdom and the one-dimensional villain hellbent on revenge — the film does succeed at recreating the fantasy world we know and love, just in a new anime format. It helps that this film shares much of the same creative team that worked on the Jackson films, and the unforgettable music, by Stephen Gallagher (music editor of the “Hobbit” trilogy), immediately sets this world within Jackson’s universe.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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      ‘Endless Summer Syndrome’ Review: Who’s Lying?

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      In this sun-dappled French psychological thriller, a lawyer receives a call accusing her husband of having an affair with one of their children.Every year there seems to be a new book or movie on the subject of incest in France — most recently Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer.” Extending from this tradition, in which a sunny French bourgeois family is secretly rotting from the inside, is “Endless Summer Syndrome,” a promising debut feature by the Iranian director Kaveh Daneshmand that frames the crime as a twisty detective story.As Delphine (Sophie Colon), a lawyer, enjoys her final days of vacation in her family’s country villa, she receives an anonymous call from one of her husband’s co-workers telling her that Antoine (Matheo Capelli), a novelist, drunkenly confessed to having an affair with one of his children.Suddenly, Delphine’s blissful vacation turns into a paranoid inferno as she obsesses over her family’s dynamic and each member’s behaviors. Could the child in question be their coquettish 17-year-old daughter, Adia (Frédérika Milano)? Or Aslan (Gem Deger), their brooding college-bound eldest? Both Adia and Aslan were adopted, and Delphine and her husband’s bohemian parenting style (a topless Adia sunbathes in front of them, and Aslan at one point shares a joint with mom) now adds to Delphine’s suspicion that she’s surrounded by strangers.The luxe pastoral setting and slow-burning suspense recall the psychological thrillers of Patricia Highsmith and Claude Chabrol, while the magnetic Colon anchors the plot’s more sensational turns. The focus on Delphine’s mental state is a reminder that this is a story about betrayal, and the human cost of abandoning reason in the name of desire.The script falters when it attempts to pinpoint the dysfunctions of a modern family in the age of fluid sexual identities and multiculturalism. But none of these potentially intriguing avenues play out with much thought, diminishing the emotional effect of a tragedy that winds up seeming like an exercise in style.Endless Summer SyndromeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Sundance Film Festival Unveils a Lineup Heavy on Politics

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      The annual event also makes room for a remake of the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and the return of Justin Lin.There is a point during every Sundance Film Festival, usually as movie fans are trudging through the cold, slushy snow in Park City, Utah, when they wonder, why do they hold this in January? And yet, so often current events — most often of the political nature — are reflected not only in the films being screened on the mountain but also in the happenings around town.In January 2009, huge crowds gathered to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration. In January 2017, 4,000 festivalgoers, including Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart and Chelsea Handler, marched down Main Street the day after President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. The following year, amid a considerable snowstorm, Jane Fonda, Gloria Allred and Tessa Thompson gathered protesters with fiery speeches to coincide with the one-year anniversary of his presidency.The 2025 edition of Sundance will debut on Jan. 23, three days after Trump is inaugurated a second time, and the Sundance lineup suggests politics are on the mind of this year’s filmmakers.In the five-part documentary series “Bucks County, USA,” Barry Levinson and Robert May take a close look at two 14-year-old girls, best friends despite their opposing political beliefs, living at the epicenter of the nation’s political divide.The documentarian Sam Feder was shooting in Washington as recently as last week for “Heightened Scrutiny,” about the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio and his battle before the Supreme Court for transgender rights.“The Librarians,” from Kim A. Snyder, tracks the efforts of workers in Texas, Florida and other states to protect democracy amid a wave of book bans, while “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” from Mstyslav Chernov (“20 Days in Mariupol”) follows a Ukrainian platoon on a mission to liberate a strategic village.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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      ‘Maria’ Review: A Diva in Decline

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      Angelina Jolie plays the opera star Maria Callas in a movie that can’t figure her out.There is a moment, a little way into “Maria,” when you realize it shares a cinematic universe with another of the director Pablo Larraín’s recent films. This movie’s main character is the celebrated opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie). In a flashback rendered in monochrome, we see the night she met the absurdly wealthy business magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) — and he’s the future husband, we know, of Jackie Kennedy, who was the subject of Larraín’s 2016 film “Jackie.” Onassis, still married to his previous wife, claims he’s fallen in love with Callas through his opera glasses and invites her and her husband aboard his yacht; she seems lightly amused and a little irritated. “There’s a point where self-confidence becomes a kind of insanity,” she tells him.Obviously that “cinematic universe” is just reality: Famous people know other famous people and go to the same parties and fall in love with one another. Callas and Onassis spent nine years together before he left her for the widowed Jackie Kennedy. But in this case, the link reminds the viewer that Larraín has made a better movie in his so-called diva trilogy — two better ones, actually. In “Jackie,” Natalie Portman played the bereaved first lady as she carefully crafted a legend out of her assassinated husband’s legacy. “Spencer,” which came out in 2021, was not good — but it was interesting, starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in the throes of a Christmastime existential crisis.Yet “Maria” is a bit of a slog, even for an opera lover (like me). Callas here is at the end of her life, and she is not well. She lives in Paris with her long-suffering butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housemaid (Alba Rohrwacher), lies to them about how many pills she’s taking, and hallucinates enough of her day that she qualifies as an unreliable narrator. Her longing for Onassis, or perhaps her visions of him, is one narrative thread in “Maria.” Here are some others: her need for adulation; her fading voice; her addiction to various prescription drugs; her obsessive proclivity for ordering her butler to move the piano around her home; her slip-sliding memory; her refusal to listen to anyone’s advice other than her own; her almost pathological insistence on dying for her art.This is, in other words, about the sun setting over a once-shining prima donna, a woman who wowed the world with her voice and then faded from view. The movie skips over most of her scandals, flashing back to performances on the world’s great stages and, even earlier, in her youth (Aggelina Papadopoulou plays the young Callas). Those performances are sumptuously staged, as are several dreamlike sequences involving choruses and orchestras on the streets of Paris, in one case performing “Madama Butterfly” in the pouring rain. There’s no lack of effort here. Jolie trained for seven months to sing some of the music, and while she is lip-syncing to some of Callas’s famous performances, she is completely immersed in all of it.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 Best Genre Movies of 2024

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      We look at the finest in science fiction, horror, action and international films, all available to stream.Science Fiction‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’It’s been an odd year for science fiction. One of the best such narratives was the Broadway musical “Maybe Happy Ending,” set in 2064 Seoul and in which two obsolete robots fall in love. Streaming series gave us an astounding range of stories and aesthetics, from “Sugar” to “Fallout” to “Dune: Prophecy.”Feature films, on the other end, tended to be split between insipid or downright inept mega-budget productions and indies that often recycled similar premises.Thank God, then, for George Miller, whose “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” reminded us what cinema can do. This prequel to “Mad Max: Fury Road” recounts how Furiosa (Alyla Browne as a kid, Anya Taylor-Joy as a young woman) ended up in the Citadel run by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), and how she lost an arm.The movie is in a constant escalation of one-upmanship, though Miller is only competing with himself at this point. Why settle for one madman, for instance, when you can stick your heroine in a power struggle between two of them? So the director introduces the warlord Dementus, played by a Chris Hemsworth unabashedly flirting with camp. While it is operatically berserk, “Furiosa” also has a stylish, virtuosic classicism. Miller did not wreck his legacy.— ELISABETH VINCENTELLIStream “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” on Max.Horror‘In a Violent Nature’Ry Barrett in the film “In a Violent Nature.”Pierce Derks/IFC Films/ShudderIn a year of humdrum haunted houses and soulless spirits, Chris Nash’s slasher film “In a Violent Nature” was a brutal knockout — a surprise too, considering that it’s as placid as it is gruesome.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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      Nicole Kidman on Watching ‘Babygirl’ and the Loss of Her Mother

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      Nicole Kidman’s eyes widened. “Haven’t you been to the Rockettes?” she asked. “I go every year. Oh yeah, I’m obsessed!”Over celery root soup at the Empire Diner in Manhattan last week, the 57-year-old Oscar winner regaled me with stories about the high-kicking Christmas spectacular, which she had attended the night before with her children and husband, the singer Keith Urban: “I was saying to my husband, ‘Why do we love it so much?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s a memory. You’re remembering the kid in you.’”Lately, Kidman has been thinking a lot about this sort of thing, tracing her life and career as part of a continuum. Her new film, “Babygirl,” is one such reconnection: Though she has recently been seen in splashy streaming series like “The Perfect Couple” and “Lioness: Special Ops,” it marks a return to the kind of risky, auteur-driven filmmaking she used to be acclaimed for.Directed by Halina Reijn, “Babygirl” stars Kidman as Romy, a put-together chief executive with a doting husband (Antonio Banderas) but an unsatisfying sex life: Afraid to explore her desire to be dominated, Romy finds her kink fulfilled by a young intern (Harris Dickinson) with whom she embarks on a tumultuous affair. “It’s very exposing,” Kidman admitted of the sexually charged film. When she watched it for the first time with an audience, she felt so naked and vulnerable that she buried her head in Reijn’s chest.Nicole Kidman said she was able to shoot the intimate sex scenes by telling herself, “Don’t think of this being seen by anybody.”“Babygirl” could earn Kidman her sixth Oscar nomination and has already won her the prestigious Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival in September, though Kidman had to miss that ceremony after the death of her mother, Janelle, at 84. The two were quite close and her passing has put Kidman in a contemplative mood: Over the course of our conversation, she discussed not just “Babygirl” but also her mother’s unrealized ambitions and the difficulties that thwart female fulfillment, tackling those topics in a surprisingly unguarded way.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 Bibi Files’ Review: The Case Against Netanyahu

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      This documentary about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel looks at the corruption investigation and his enduring grip on the government.“The Bibi Files” opens by promising to show viewers leaked videos from the police investigation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel (ubiquitously known as Bibi), who is currently standing trial on corruption charges. The videos, a title card says, “are being shown for the first time in this film.”But in some ways the interrogation footage is the least interesting part of this documentary, directed by Alexis Bloom (“Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes”). After decades in the public eye, Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, are both practiced stonewallers, while their son Yair accuses the officers questioning him of being “a police force of Mafiosos” and participating in a “witch hunt.” More surprising are the snippets from the investigators’ interviews with Miriam Adelson and husband, Sheldon, the hotel and casino magnate who died in 2021. These longtime Netanyahu allies here sound, in admittedly brief clips, like they’re trying to distance themselves from Bibi and Sara.Beyond the videos, the movie takes a thorough, methodical approach to laying out the case against Netanyahu, even if few of its arguments are new. Bloom and her camera subjects trace, over decades, his strengthening grip on the Israeli government, his apparent taste for luxury items and his aggressiveness in stifling criticism. Avi Alkalay, the former editor in chief of the news website Walla, owned by a Netanyahu associate, recalls being pressured to make the publication’s coverage less critical. (The code words, he says, were “less paprika.”) Netanyahu is described as expending precious political capital with John Kerry, then the U.S. secretary of state, to get a visa renewed for the producer Arnon Milchan, who, according to prosecutors, had given the Netanyahus hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts.And if claims about back-scratching, cigars and champagne may seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of Netanyahu’s rule, the film furthers the oft-made case that his methods of avoiding accountability have jeopardized Israel’s security. The documentary examines his alliance with far-right politicians and his continued pursuit of the war in Gaza, which, multiple interviewees argue, no longer has any achievable objective.Many of the most potent statements come from Raviv Drucker, an investigative reporter and a producer of the documentary, and Uzi Beller, a childhood friend who began speaking out against the prime minister. (The first time we see him, he makes clear that he wants to distinguish between two men: He calls them “my kind of Bibi,” rather than “the crowd kind of Bibi,” and “Netanyahu.”)Less persuasive is the film’s portrayal of Sara Netanyahu as a kind of Lady Macbeth figure. (“I think Bibi is afraid of Sara,” says Hadas Klein, a former assistant to Milchan.) That may or may not be accurate, but the characterization has the effect of making excuses for Netanyahu’s own maneuvering. “He knows what he’s doing,” Beller says. “It’s not that he doesn’t know.”The Bibi FilesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More