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      Sonny Chiba, Japanese Star With a ‘Kill Bill’ Connection, Dies at 82

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      His martial arts movies appalled some with their extreme violence, but the director Quentin Tarantino was a fan and gave him a late-career boost.Sonny Chiba, a Japanese action star who was known for ultraviolent martial arts movies and then, in 2003, was elevated to a whole new level of cinematic trendiness when one of his superfans, the director Quentin Tarantino, gave him a role in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” died on Wednesday. He was 82.His manager and friend, Timothy Beal, said the cause was Covid-19. Oricon, the Japanese news service, said he died at a hospital in Kimitsu, Japan.Mr. Chiba, who was trained in karate and other martial arts, began turning up on Japanese television in his early 20s. He was soon making movies as well, amassing more than 50 TV and film credits in Japan before the end of the 1960s. In the ’70s, with martial arts movies enjoying broad popularity thanks to the American-born Chinese star Bruce Lee, Mr. Chiba became widely known in Japan and beyond, especially because of “The Street Fighter” (1974) and its sequels.“The Street Fighter,” in which his character battled gangsters, was so violent that when it was released in the United States it was said to have been the first movie given an X rating for violence alone.“If nothing else,” A.H. Weiler wrote in a brief review in The New York Times in 1975, when the movie played in New York, “this Japanese-made, English-dubbed import illustrates that its inane violence deserves the X rating with which it has been labeled.” In 1996, when a DVD of the film was released, The Los Angeles Times said it was being “presented complete and uncut in all its eye-gouging, testicle-ripping, skull-pounding glory.”“The Street Fighter” and other Chiba movies made an impression on Mr. Tarantino. In the homage-filled “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” he cast Mr. Chiba as the sword maker Hattori Hanzo, who provides Uma Thurman’s vengeful character with her weapon. A.O. Scott, reviewing the movie in The New York Times, got the reference but wasn’t enamored of it.“Check it out, Mr. Tarantino seems to be saying, Sonny Chiba’s in my movie,” he wrote. “How cool is that? Way too cool? Not cool enough? As I said, it depends. The movie-geek in-jokes are sometimes amusing and sometimes annoying.”In any case, Mr. Tarantino brought Mr. Chiba back the next year for “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” and he enjoyed a late-career resurgence.He was a Yakuza boss in “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” in 2006 and a sushi chef in the noir thriller “Sushi Girl” in 2012, among other roles. Mr. Beal said that before the pandemic, Mr. Chiba had been lined up for a role in a zombie movie called “Outbreak Z.”Mr. Chiba, who also acted under the name Shinichi Chiba, was born Sadaho Maeda on Jan. 23, 1939, in Fukuoka, Japan. His acting career received a boost when he was signed by Japan’s Toei studio in the early 1960s.Mr. Chiba made numerous movies, mostly samurai dramas, with the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku, who gave him some of his earliest roles. He came to distance himself from the violence-drenched “Street Fighter” films — “That sort of performance is not the performance I am particularly proud of as an actor,” he told The Times in 2003 — but he looked more kindly on his work with Mr. Fukasaku.“Mr. Fukasaku was very sensitive to violence,” Mr. Chiba said. “His constant question was, ‘What is violence? What is authority? What is power?’ Ultimately, he denied violence, and always sided with the weak.”Martial arts, Mr. Chiba said, was not that different from acting.“Martial arts is part of the drama — it’s performance,” he said, “It’s a way of expressing emotions.”Information on Mr. Chiba’s survivors was not immediately available. More

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      ‘Flag Day’ Review: Daddy Dearest

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      Sean Penn directs and stars with his daughter, Dylan Penn, in this intimate yet bumpy family drama.As a director, Sean Penn seems drawn to stories featuring lost children of one sort or another, a proclivity that has resulted in some of his strongest work. His latest film, “Flag Day,” tills similar soil: the awakening of a daughter whose adored father is not the demigod she believes him to be.Set mainly in Minnesota and adapted from Jennifer Vogel’s 2004 memoir, “Flim-Flam Man,” Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth’s screenplay constructs a broken-family melodrama mired in sentimentality. The flowery narration that Jennifer (played as a teen and adult by Penn’s daughter, Dylan Penn) uses to describe her father’s electrically disruptive comings and goings in her life doesn’t help; though it does enable a gauzy, ethereal mood that the cinematographer Danny Moder runs with, lending his picturesque prairie landscapes the softly blurred quality of old photographs.The film opens in 1992 with Jennifer finally learning that her father, John (Penn, directing himself for the first time), has been concealing a violent and colorful criminal past. Flashbacks reveal him to be a complex, charismatic scoundrel whose reckless schemes leave his wife (Katheryn Winnick) and children — a brother, played by Penn’s son, Hopper Jack Penn, is barely seen — to fend for themselves.Heavy-handed and more than a little pretentious, “Flag Day” seems to view John’s volatile fortunes as a metaphor for those of his country. (Close-ups of worn, anonymous faces drift across the screen, symbols of heartland struggle.) Yet Penn gives him a vivid, wheedling desperation that’s weirdly moving, and the younger Penn has clearly inherited the emotional expressiveness of her mother, Robin Wright. Maybe that’s why “Flag Day” feels as much a love letter from Penn to his own daughter as the story of someone else’s.Flag DayRated R for drinking, thieving and a bloody reckoning. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Reminiscence’ Review: Out of the Past, Into the Future (and Back)

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      In her feature debut, the co-creator of HBO’s “Westworld” toys with time, space, clichés and conventions in a narrative hall of mirrors.Highfalutin, lightly enjoyable mush, “Reminiscence” is one of those speculative fictions that are at once undernourished and overcooked. It makes no sense (despite all the explaining), but it draws you in with genre beats, pretty people and the professional polish of its machined parts. It’s shiny and pricey and looks good on the big screen; it is also the newest addition to what now plays like the Nolan Family Extended Universe.The writer-director of “Reminiscence” is Lisa Joy who, with her husband, Jonathan Nolan, created the HBO series “Westworld.” Jonathan Nolan has helped write some of his brother Christopher’s films, notably “Memento” and “Interstellar,” and served as a producer on “Reminiscence.” Although these entertainments have their obvious differences, including in quality, the family DNA is evident in their embrace of narrative elasticity and interest in the labyrinths of the mind (also: gunplay and hot women). With degrees of success, they play with time and space, storytelling conventions and human consciousness. “It’s all a construct,” a character says in “Westworld.” “None of it is real.”That character is played by Thandiwe Newton, one of the stars of “Reminiscence,” a kinked tale in which the divide between reality and its facsimiles is blurred. Here, Newton plays Watts, a crusty, no-nonsense veteran with a booze problem and an obvious thing for her boss, an old war buddy, Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman in squinty tough-guy mode). Set in a fairly benign-looking dystopia — Miami is partly underwater but jumping — they run a business where customers can recover favorite and forgotten memories. After clients strip and lie semi-immersed in a tub, Nick plugs them into a machine that renders their memories into lifelike or, rather, movielike 3-D projections.Trouble arrives in the form of a slinky redhead, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), who can’t find her keys. Struck dumb, seriously dumb by her mere and unremarkable presence, Nick falls fast and hard, and soon tumbles into the kind of complicated trouble that inevitably bedevils noir heroes with granite jaws and bleeding hearts. A great deal ensues, some of it nonsensical, some of it diverting. For a short while, the movie drifts along agreeably as Nick and Mae’s gauzy romance heats up, and then Joy shifts gears, flexing her action-genre muscles with violence and rampaging villains. And, much as in “Westworld,” the movie uses memory to explore its characters’ humanity or lack thereof.Like Nick’s clients, “Reminiscence” oscillates between the past and the present, which fits a thriller nestled at the intersection of film noir and science fiction. Yet while Joy has handsomely kitted out her future world with ominous cascades of water and other apocalyptic flourishes — the rich live on dry land while the poor struggle to keep from drowning, literally and figuratively — the past exerts a stronger pull on her. She treads a lot of familiar genre ground, which is expected (and fine!), but she also stuffs “Reminiscence” with so many cinematic allusions that the movie itself soon feels like a very thin copy. Pastiche comes with the neo-noir territory but can also inundate it.When Nick walks down a mean street, the dark city gleaming, the image sets the scene. For some viewers, it will likely unleash a chain of associations: Raymond Chandler, Humphrey Bogart, Harrison Ford. Certainly the vision of another lonely man of honor piques your interest as you wait for Joy to clarify her intentions, revealing whether she’s having fun, rethinking golden Hollywood oldies or both. One problem with citing favorites is that the imitations often wither when set against their dazzling influences, which is what happens when Mae sings a Rodgers-and-Hart standard in a strapless, side-slit gown clearly modeled on the one that Rita Hayworth immortalized in “Gilda.”Ferguson is an attractive if regrettably wan presence in “Reminiscence,” though it’s hard to imagine who, other than a cartoon femme fatale à la Jessica Rabbit, could even approach the devastating charms of Hayworth’s Gilda. It’s equally difficult to think of many actors who could handle Joy’s cliché-ridden, melodramatically engorged dialogue, which consistently trips up her actors. Joy has a feel for spectacle and can handle bodies and bullets flying through space. When she’s not narrowing her focus on big heads, she fills the frame with strong, clear images — a bed on a roof, a city in water — that have a solidity that helps anchor the movie, which is generally better seen than heard.ReminiscenceRated PG-13 for action-movie violence, including gunplay and immolation. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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      ‘The Outsider’ Review: Inside the Making of the 9/11 Museum

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      A new documentary focuses on one man involved in the museum’s creation. But it’s not clear why his voice deserved to be heard above others’.Documentaries often cast their subjects in a congratulatory light, but “The Outsider” portrays Michael Shulan, the first creative director of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, as in effect the last honest historian of Sept. 11, 2001 — a man who wanted to pose “big questions,” per the voice-over, that America might not have been ready to ask.As the directors Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder tell it, Shulan was hired by the museum because he had become an inadvertent expert in Sept. 11 images. Shortly after the attacks, he helped turn a SoHo storefront he owned into a crowdsourced photo gallery. (The movie is weirdly vague about his background, but a New York Times story from 2001 described him as a writer.)The documentary — shot from 2008 to 2014, the year the museum opened — follows Shulan and several others involved in creating the museum as they decide what to exhibit and how to present it. Different goals (remembrance, education, preservation) are in tension. Shulan prefers an open-ended approach, in which visitors might come away with individual impressions of every photograph. The filmmakers cast Alice M. Greenwald, who came from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is now the 9/11 museum’s chief executive, as Shulan’s adversary: “Michael wanted to engender questions,” the narrator says. “Alice wanted to provide answers.”Both perspectives have their purposes, but the filmmakers never clarify why they find Shulan’s vision more valid than Greenwald’s or the other curators’ — or why Shulan deserves some sort of monopoly on the memory of Sept. 11. Arguments will continue over the propriety of transforming Ground Zero into a tourist attraction. But it’s grotesque to turn that process into a monument to one man’s professional advancement.What’s especially peculiar about the focus on Shulan is that, in other respects, “The Outsider” is an ensemble piece, distributing screen time among a half a dozen people planning for the museum’s opening. (In another miscalculation, the film relegates families of the deceased to the periphery.) During a scene in which Shulan argues with a colleague, Amy Weisser, about a particular photograph, it’s even harder to see why the filmmakers tilted the scales toward him.The press notes suggest that Shulan emerged as the hero in the editing stage, which means the apparent self-aggrandizement shouldn’t necessarily be blamed on him. “The Outsider” might have unfolded as a dispassionate, Wiseman-esque institutional portrait, without the bizarre personality-based angle or amateurish, true-crime-doc voice-over. The Times reported last month that lawyers for the museum had requested changes for “inaccuracies and distortions.” The filmmakers demurred, but a complete overhaul is nevertheless in order.The OutsiderNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Wildland’ Review: Loyalty Makes You Family

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      A teenage girl is roped into her estranged aunt’s criminal activities in this psychodrama by the Danish filmmaker Jeanette Nordahl.In “Wildland,” by the Danish filmmaker Jeanette Nordahl, the 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) is roped into her mysterious aunt Bodil’s family business after a car accident kills Ida’s mother. Still in mourning, our soft-spoken yet observant protagonist is eased into the family circle, coming-of-age, so to speak, as the violent reality of their criminal affairs come into view.This intentionally restrained debut feature is just shy of an intriguing study about the power dynamics of a disturbed family. So committed to maintaining an enigmatically sinister atmosphere, the film fails to build out the many compelling issues it raises about toxic masculinity and familial gaslighting.Nevertheless, some inspired confrontations, and a commanding performance by Sidse Babett Knudsen, who plays the hot-and-cold matriarch, Bodil, makes “Wildland” an absorbing and highly watchable psychodrama.When Ida arrives at her aunt’s abode, she’s suddenly surrounded by her male cousins, two temperamental, maladjusted dudes and an eerily composed third. Eventually, the guys accept their shy cousin into their ranks, allowing her to tag along on their boozy, late-night outings to the club. Ida, for better or worse, comes to love her new family, even as she witnesses some questionable exchanges, as when the eldest brother gives a ride to a nervous schoolgirl under the guise of being friends with her father.Ingeborg Topsoe’s mostly unremarkable script does, however, hint at a more compelling angle: the sidelined role of women in these criminal enterprises. It’s not often in films about thugs that we get the female perspective, yet through Ida’s gaze a more expansive portrait is achieved, bringing to the fore the tragic fates of those who bear the burden in such macho proceedings.WildlandNot rated. In Danish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Under the Volcano’ Review: Making Music in Paradise

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      This documentary looks at the recording studio George Martin created in the Caribbean that nurtured the stars of the MTV era.Between this film and “Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm,” there seems to be a minor vogue for documentaries about recording studios this year. The pretext for doing “Under the Volcano” — about the short-lived AIR studio on Montserrat in the Caribbean — is better than solid: The state-of-the-art facility, built by the Beatles producer George Martin, was in the immediate vicinity of the Soufrière Hills volcano.Sure, it was supposedly dormant, but it wasn’t always. Sting notes that the volcanic ash from prior eruptions made the ground on the island unusually fertile and lush.Martin’s desire to create an ideal environment for musicians is touching. Although a certain patrician colonialism did seem inherent in the idea. Jimmy Buffett relates how he and his helpmates were flummoxed by the slow service at a local bar, and how he solved the issue by buying the place. Buffett seems to think it’s a charming story.Fortunately, Earth, Wind & Fire shows up for a session, and the director, Gracie Otto, switches the film’s perspective to the Montserrat residents who worked at the studio and their interactions with various stars of what became the MTV era.Filmed separately, the three members of the Police relate how the environment could both exacerbate and ameliorate tensions between the musicians during recording sessions. Almost 40 years later, it’s hilarious to see Stewart Copeland speak of Sting with still-fresh feelings of exasperation, irritation and admiration. Fans of Elton John will find the manic work ethic he applied to the album “Too Low for Zero” fascinating.It wasn’t the volcano but a hurricane in the late-80s that killed the dream. The volcano did spew a few years later, further devastating the island. Martin, to his credit, sponsored charity concerts to aid in the island’s rehabilitation.Under the VolcanoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Night House’ Review: Mourning Becomes Her

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      A sensational Rebecca Hall plays a grieving widow besieged by potentially occult forces in this superior creepout.The scares land like blows and the eeriness is pervasive in “The Night House,” David Bruckner’s hyper-focused, unnervingly sure follow-up to his 2018 wilderness frightener, “The Ritual.”Fully owning every one of her scenes, Rebecca Hall plays Beth, a New York schoolteacher whose husband of 14 years, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), has just taken his own life. Now Beth wanders around the modernist lakeshore home Owen built, guzzling brandy and tortured by the mystery of his death. The only darkness in their marriage, she confesses to her best friend (Sarah Goldberg) and co-workers, was hers, the result of a traumatic experience years before.From among Owen’s things, baffling clues emerge. A creepy suicide note; architectural drawings that appear to reverse the layout of their home; pictures of strange women on his phone, all resembling Beth. Petrifying sights and sounds haunt her nights and inchoate shadows hover around her. A kind neighbor (Vondie Curtis-Hall) tries to help, but it’s clear he can’t see the bloody footprints straggling from the couple’s rowboat and heading toward the house.As the screenplay teases natural explanations for these sinister goings-on — Extreme grief? Nightmares? Mental illness? — Bruckner maintains a death grip on the film’s mood while his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, turns the home’s reflective surfaces into shape-shifting puzzle pieces. The ending is the least daring of the possible options; but Hall is spectacular, flinty and fraying in a role that leaves her often alone and, in one chilling scene, requires her to contort in disquieting ways. As Beth’s skin undulates to an unseen touch and her throat arcs alarmingly backward, Hall shows us a woman for whom terror and desire have become one.The Night HouseRated R for buried bodies and bumps in the night. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Paw Patrol: The Movie’ Review: Young Dogs, Old Tricks

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      In their first big-screen outing, the frisky rescue pups of the popular animated series “Paw Patrol” stay forever young.While many franchises aimed at children smuggle in some adult-appeal added-value — you know! for parents! — “Paw Patrol” is not one of them. The adventures of the squad of anthropomorphized rescue puppies, set in the environs of Adventure Bay, are entirely toddler-friendly and irony-free.In segments on TVs or tablets, these anodyne tales are effective babysitters. In a movie theater, they require adult oversight. To its possible credit, “Paw Patrol: The Movie” (also streaming on Paramount+) shrugs off this reality and offers only a few feeble internet-mocking japes for the entertainment of grown-ups.Yes, the computer-generated colors, overseen by the director Cal Brunker, are bright, the pups have soulful eyes (they include a newbie, named Liberty, a street-smart dog eager to join the team, which would add another female to the boy-heavy crew, yay), and the story line — in which the megalomaniacal Mayor Humdinger hijacks a cloud-storage machine to ensure blue skies over Adventure City (it’s near the bay) while the head pup Chase undergoes a crisis of confidence — is, um, a story line.To pass the time, viewers over the age of 6 may ponder some questions. Chase (voiced by Iain Armitage) hates Adventure City, where he was abandoned as a young pup. He was adopted and trained by Ryder (Will Brisbin), the little human who I guess you could call the Patrol’s Nick Fury. And Chase remains a pup, as do his colleagues. Is Adventure Bay the opposite of M. Night Shyamalan’s beach that makes you old, only for dogs? Also: The streets of Adventure City are so immaculate that the Patrol could eat kibble off them. So while Mayor Humdinger is indeed a creep, surely someone in municipal government is doing something right, no?By the time one has figured this stuff out, or not, the trim movie has ended, and the kids will have learned simple lessons about courage, team spirit and how it’s OK to fail every now and then, provided you have adequate backup.Paw Patrol: The MovieRated G. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters and on Paramount+. More