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    ‘White Hot’ Review: A Retailer Whose Reputation Went Down in Flames

    This documentary, subtitled “The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,” is a new film that dresses up old headlines about the clothing company.Pitching yesterday’s fashions as today’s news, the documentary “White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch” charts the onetime popularity and subsequent public disgrace of the clothing retailer, which in the 1990s positioned itself as the avatar of aspirational frattiness. In the early aughts, the brand came under fire for selling racist T-shirts and for its hiring practices. Sued for race and sex discrimination, the company settled a class-action case in 2004. In 2015, the Supreme Court revived a lawsuit against Abercrombie in another case, which involved a Muslim refused employment because she wore a head scarf.In this documentary from Alison Klayman (“The Brink”), the “rise” part of the story is patronizing and tedious. Subjects offer inflated descriptions of Abercrombie’s centrality in American life and explain the ’90s in comically condescending terms. “MTV, the Video Music Awards and the ‘House of Style’ television show gave flyover country access to the things that they wouldn’t see ordinarily,” says Alan Karo, a marketing executive. Patrick Carone, a former editor at Abercrombie’s quarterly magazine, enlightens viewers on the concept of a mall: “Imagine, like, a search engine that you could walk through.”The documentary gets more substantive when the “fall” component kicks in. Former employees share descriptions of encountering more or less open racism working at the company, whose advertising courted white, wealthy consumers. But these stories aren’t new (multiple interviewees were among the class-action plaintiffs). And while the movie provides encouraging evidence of how much societal sensibilities have changed, it is fundamentally dressing up well-worn material.White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & FitchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘See You Then’ Review: The More Things Stay the Same

    Former lovers reconnect, litigating the past and present, in this drama from Mari Walker.The golden glow that halos around the two former lovers reconnecting in “See You Then” is tinged with melancholy. More than a decade has passed since the sudden breakup of Kris (Pooya Mohsen) and Naomi (Lynn Chen). Some things have changed, some things stayed the same. That such an aphorism is easily applied to any number of “Before Sunrise”-style movies of people reminiscing and litigating what once was sets Mari Walker’s film at a disadvantage. But the chemistry of its stars gives the movie a curious magnetism that is almost enough to forgive its flaws.In the time since the two parted, Kris has transitioned, has a job in network security and is visiting Los Angeles from Phoenix. Naomi is an art professor at their alma mater and is married with two children. After a nervous start, they ease into a familiar rapport. Dinner turns into drinks, small talk gives way into how they really are, becoming a vortex of past and present.The script, co-written by Walker and Kristen Uno, ebbs and flows in the specificity of its central characters’ lives and the rhetorical approach to their conversation topics. But while this screenplay lacks a verve or poetry in its language, Mohsen and Chen are able to work through it and find gestures that make their awkward and erotic energy feel sincere.Chen gives Naomi an easy naturalism, her sense of regret textured and real. Mohsen’s line readings feel, at first, presentational, but her gaze is astonishing in its ability to convey longing and a mask of contentedness. Through their performances, they make it known, with brittle clarity, why the two were together and why they broke apart.See You ThenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. Rent or buy on Vudu, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    How ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Helps to Heal Generational Trauma

    For me, it was a scene about two rocks. For the actress Stephanie Hsu, it was taking her mom to the Los Angeles premiere.When I was 13, I asked to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.I was racked with debilitating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (O.C.D.), forced to write each individual letter against a straightedge, hellbent on perfection. It was messing with my seventh grade mojo.The perfectionism, in turn, shredded my sleep schedule. I spent countless hours, belly on the floor, struggling with my math homework, pressing mechanical pencil to ruler. Parabolas? Forget about it. O.C.D. combined with sleep deprivation and overmedication led to an angsty, early teenage flavor of nihilism — arguably the worst kind.When my mom came to visit, we sat in her car in the hospital parking lot and I told her about it. Head swirling with brain fog, I tried to explain that nothing mattered and how that was pressing me toward a mental brink. She got it.She told me, for the first time, that when she was 25, close to the age I am now, life was too much for her, too, and she tried to leave it. She saw me, understood me and sat there with me — a golden moment between generations.That incandescent memory surfaced a couple of weeks ago, when my roommate and I went to see “Everything Everywhere All At Once” — a sci-fi action adventure about the emotional implications of the multiverse — at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Manhattan’s Financial District.Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert narrate a sequence from their film starring Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan.Allyson Riggs/A24Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) is a Chinese American immigrant who just wants to host a Chinese New Year party at her family’s failing laundromat, but a suave alter ego of her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), arrives to warn her that the multiverse is in danger. So Evelyn learns to “verse jump” — hop between parallel universes to access skills from other versions of herself — then realizes that the dark force threatening the multiverse is inextricably linked to her estranged daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu).Evelyn follows a nihilist alter ego of her daughter through infinite universes, trying to figure out why she’s hurting. Then she’s transported to a cliff. Two rocks — one tan and one dark gray — sit side by side, overlooking a ravine and mountains in the distance. It’s silent for a while. Then captions appear — white for Joy, black for Evelyn. This, apparently, is one of the many universes where the conditions weren’t right for life to form.“It’s nice,” reads Evelyn’s text.“Yeah,” reads Joy’s text. “You can just sit here, and everything feels really … far away.”“Joy,” Evelyn’s rock says, “I’m sorry about ruining everything —”“Shhhh,” Joy’s rock says. “You don’t have to worry about that here. Just be a rock.”Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown. Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy. The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves. Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blanding action and drama. Anatomy of a Scene: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the film’s directors, discuss an action sequence built around … a fanny pack.“I just feel so stupid — ” Evelyn says.“God!” Joy says. “Please. We’re all stupid! Small, stupid humans. It’s like our whole deal.”Later, Joy asks Evelyn to let her go. Evelyn nods slowly and whispers, “OK.” In our universe, Evelyn lets go of Joy’s waist. In the rock universe, the tan rock slides off the edge of a cliff, rolling down it. But then, in one world, Evelyn turns back to face Joy.Maybe there is, Evelyn says, “something that explains why you still went looking for me through all of this mess. And why no matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always want to be here with you.” The dark gray rock scoots to the edge of the cliff and tips off over it, rolling after her daughter.The scene shattered me, then glued the pieces back together. And it reminded me of the importance of understanding intergenerational trauma — when the effects of trauma are passed down between generations — and addressing it.“Everything Everywhere All At Once,” wrote its directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, on Twitter, “was a dream about reconciling all of the contradictions, making sense of the largest questions, and imbuing meaning onto the dumbest, most profane parts of humanity. We wanted to stretch ourselves in every direction to bridge the generational gap that often crumbles into generational trauma.”When the 31-year-old breakout star Stephanie Hsu took her mom to the L.A. premiere, her mom cried. Then her mom, who is from Taiwan, pointed to the screen and said, “That’s me.” For Hsu, it was an aha moment: Her mom related to Evelyn’s character, who faces her own trauma in her relationship with her father, Joy’s grandfather, or Gong Gong (James Hong).“Life is so messy, and life is more than a two-and-a-half-hour movie,” Hsu said in a video interview from New York. “Life is a long time, if you’re lucky. We don’t get a script that helps us succinctly metabolize our sadness.”When she first saw the screenplay, Hsu couldn’t believe what she was reading: The mother-daughter relationship was that poignant and relatable. She knew in her bones how complicated and precious that relationship was. And the transference of energy from the screen to the audience, she said, is very real.“When you break open like that, you can’t help but look into yourself and say, ‘OK, that pained me, and I need to look at that,’” Hsu said. “‘Something in me is wanting to heal, and something in me is wanting to take that leap of faith.’”Hsu thinks that’s what art is for: to hold space for trauma and offer catharsis. There’s a generation of women, she thinks, whose idea of strength hinges upon toxic masculinity, bravado and impenetrable toughness.“Our generation and the younger generation is now exploring different types of strength and what it means to be strong when you’re compassionate,” she said. “And how, actually, empathy and radical empathy and radical kindness are also a tool.”Peggy Loo, a licensed psychologist and the director of the Manhattan Therapy Collective, saw the movie on the Upper West Side. She believes that the film can serve as an exercise in imagination for those who have experienced trauma.Trauma can shrink the imagination, she said, if your main reference points for life’s possibilities emerged out of traumatic experiences. To heal, we need to be able to see farther than what we’ve known and been exposed to.“There’s this, ‘We know who we are, we know who we want to be,’” Loo said by phone. “And then the gap between the two. How do we get there?”To Loo, part of the strength of the movie lies in its sci-fi genre, which requires the viewer to suspend reality simply to keep up with the plot. It’s the perfect counterpoint, she said, and a great way to flex the imagination.Rather than neatly tying up loose ends, as movies typically do, “Everything Everywhere” mimics realistically what change can look like, by letting its protagonist make mistake after mistake. Wil Lee, 31, is a software engineer based out of San Francisco. “Not to be reductive,” he tweeted, “but Everything Everywhere All At Once is the generational trauma slam dunk film this season.”The way it fluidly weaves three different languages — Cantonese, Mandarin and English — he continued, is a spot on reflection of how many immigrant households actually communicate.“It shows the linguistic barrier as a core component of this intergenerational misunderstanding,” Lee said in a phone interview, adding, “The divide is so huge that you struggle to even find the right words to explain yourself to your family.”Hsu as Joy with Tallie Medel, who plays her girlfriend, Becky, in the film.Allyson Riggs/A24In one early scene, when Gong Gong arrives at the laundromat, Joy tries to introduce her girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel), to him for the first time. Joy fumbles with her Mandarin, and Evelyn jumps in in Cantonese, introducing Becky to Gong Gong as Joy’s “good friend.” Joy’s face falls.When Shirley Chan, a 30-year-old freelance illustrator based in Brooklyn, watched the movie in Kips Bay, it felt like the universe deliberately sent it her way, she wrote in a Letterboxd review, to let her know her own efforts were seen and to give her the courage to live as her most authentic self.A week before she saw the film, Chan came out to her immigrant mother in Cantonese and spoke honestly for the first time about how her upbringing affected her. Some of the Cantonese dialogue, Chan wrote, was uncannily almost word for word what she said to her mom.“But in my actual life, where this verse jumping doesn’t happen,” Chan said in a phone call, “I can see the moments in which she is trying, like asking me if a friend that I’m talking about is my girlfriend or telling me that she’s happy for my career.”The sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, who specializes in pop culture, sees the universality in the specificities of “Everything Everywhere.” Everybody can relate to a dysfunctional family, regrets, transformation, laundry and taxes.Evelyn is “like our parents, but seen through our lens,” Yuen said by phone. “If our parents could evolve, that’s who Evelyn would be.”I asked my own mom to see the movie, and she did, in Chicago’s West Loop — her first time in a movie theater in two years. She texted me a screenshot of an explainer (I needed an explainer, too) with one line circled in black:“When Evelyn reveals she always wants to be with Joy, no matter where they are, it is the start of a healing process for both characters.” More

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    ‘Choose or Die’ Review: Press Start. Or Not.

    In this horror movie, a vintage computer game forces players to make gruesome decisions.“Choose or Die” almost sounds like a marketing slogan for Netflix’s scroll of mediocrities — but no, it’s just another horror movie on the streaming service. As horror movies go, you could choose better.The source of the horror here is a 1980s computer game with a curse embedded in its coding. The game forces players to make gruesome binary decisions. In a prologue, the first player we see (Eddie Marsan), a collector of Reagan-era knickknacks, must choose whether he wants his son’s tongue or his wife’s ears cut off. If he doesn’t choose — well, you get the idea.Soon the game falls into the hands of Kayla (Iola Evans), an aspiring programmer who lives in a housing complex with her drug-addicted mother (Angela Griffin), and Kayla’s friend Isaac (Asa Butterfield), who has a vast knowledge of analog hacking techniques and whose dwelling looks to have been decorated by the makers of “Seven.” Robert Englund of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is prominently billed for lending his voice to an answering machine (and the game).The game is omniscient, so it knows what’s written on a menu next to Kayla’s laptop, and the choices it offers are largely no-win. (Would you prefer that a flesh-hungry rat charge a door or chew through it to get to your mom?) It also has the ability to manifest “Solaris”-like visions, the better to torment Kayla with the memory of her brother’s death. If any creativity went into “Choose or Die,” a by-turns creepy and hacky feature debut from Toby Meakins, it appears to have been directed solely toward nastiness.Choose or DieNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    David Cronenberg and Claire Denis Will Compete at Cannes Film Festival

    Organizers announced a lineup of nearly 50 movies for the event’s 2022 edition, including 18 in the running for the top honor, the Palme d’Or.LONDON — Movies by David Cronenberg, Claire Denis and Park Chan-wook will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced on Thursday.Films by previous winners Ruben Ostlund, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Cristian Mungiu will also be among the 18 titles in the running for the festival’s top award, as will a movie by the high-profile Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov.An initial lineup of nearly 50 movies that will play in this year’s festival was announced on Thursday by Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, in an online news conference.The event will open its 75th edition on May 17 with a comedy called “Z (Comme Z)” by Michel Hazanavicius, a French director best known for “The Artist.” The festival runs through May 28.Cronenberg’s competition entry, “Crimes of the Future,” is his first movie since “Maps to the Stars,” which also premiered at Cannes, in 2014. “Crimes of the Future” stars Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen, and Frémaux noted that it would bring some glamour to the red carpet.Denis’s “Stars at Noon” will be the director’s fifth movie at Cannes. Set in Nicaragua, it tells the story of a blossoming romance between an English businessman and an American journalist.Park is presenting a detective movie, “Decision to Leave.” Although he has never won the Palme d’Or, he won the Grand Prix, the festival’s second-highest award, for his violent thriller “Oldboy” in 2004.Most of the highest-profile movies that will play out of competition at Cannes were known before Thursday’s announcement. Baz Luhrmann will return to the Croisette to present “Elvis,” his biopic of the singer, starring Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as his manager, Col. Tom Parker.On May 18, Tom Cruise is set to appear for the premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick,” the highly anticipated, and repeatedly delayed, sequel to the fighter pilot movie that helped make Cruise a superstar.Frémaux on Thursday announced a few more out-of-competition titles by high-profile directors. Ethan Coen will present his first movie directed without his usual collaborator, his brother, Joel: a documentary called “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” about the rock ’n’ roll pioneer.George Miller, the creator of the “Mad Max” franchise, will also return to Cannes with “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” a fantasy romance starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, that Frémaux said was a philosophical “reflection on the history of the world.”In the days leading up to Thursday’s announcement, there were suggestions that the lineup would include a new movie from David Lynch, his first feature since “Inland Empire” in 2006. But on Tuesday, Lynch laughed off the suggestion in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I have no new film coming out,” he said. “That’s a total rumor.”Of the 18 movies in competition, only three are directed by women, Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Les Amandiers” joining Denis’s “Stars at Noon.” Cannes has faced criticism in recent years for the dearth of female contestants for its top prize. Julia Ducournau took last year’s Palme d’Or for “Titane,” her violent horror movie about a woman sexually obsessed with cars. Yet she was only the second woman to win the prize, following Jane Campion’s 1993 win for “The Piano.”The war in Ukraine will also cast a shadow over this year’s event. Since Russia’s invasion, some of Ukraine’s leading movie directors have called on film festivals to boycott Russian directors as a sign of support for Ukraine. Cannes said in a statement in March that it would no longer “welcome official Russian delegations, nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government,” but added that it would not ban Russian directors, several of whom have faced difficulties operating in their home country.Serebrennikov, who is presenting a competition film about the marriage of a Russian cultural icon, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” spent almost two years under house arrest in Russia because of fraud charges. His conviction was widely seen within Russia as an attempt to crack down on artistic freedom.Frémaux announced that two movies by Ukrainian directors would appear in the festival, including Maksim Nakonechnyi’s “Butterfly Vision” playing in the “Un Certain Regard” sidebar.The jury for this year’s festival has not been finalized, Frémaux said on Thursday, adding that the movie lineup wasn’t entirely complete, either. The list of films would be “fine tuned” next week, he added, because “many films came in late” to the selection committee. More

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    ‘To Olivia’ Review: Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal Cope With Tragedy

    This drama about the author and the actress is poignant, elegant and aggravating.A child’s outstretched hand ignored as she stands at her sister’s grave makes an indelible image in “To Olivia.” This drama, often touching but also vexing, recounts the lives of the children’s book author Roald Dahl and the actress Patricia Neal when their 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, died of complications from measles in 1962.Dahl and Neal — portrayed by Hugh Bonneville and Keeley Hawes — are raising their children Olivia, Tessa and Theo in rural England. The book “James and the Giant Peach” has little traction and Dahl is at work on “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Neal has a Tony and impressive film credits. Soon she’ll be mulling the script that will lead to her Oscar, “Hud.” There is tension.How parents mourn a child’s death together — or apart — is among life’s aching mysteries. The director John Hay plumbs the poignancy well but avoids any tussling with Dahl’s legacy, tarnished by antisemitic statements. In 2020, Dahl’s family posted a public apology for the author’s bigoted comments, many of which occurred after the period covered here. That a film intent on depicting Dahl’s humanity — made jagged by grief — might steer clear of his antisemitic views disappoints but hardly surprises. So it’s dumbfounding that the filmmakers take the opposite tack with another famous figure.When Neal and Paul Newman (Sam Heughan) meet before the “Hud” shoot, Newman is reminded that Neal lost a child. His reply — a cinematic fabrication — is terse, coarse and cruel enough to make one think less of a legend. Just the wrong one.To OliviaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 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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    ‘The Tale of King Crab’ Review: In Exile, Both at Home and Abroad

    This fiction feature debut follows a scandalous son of a physician turned adventurer in spite of himself.The two Italian filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, who make their fiction feature debut with “The Tale of King Crab,” are clearly attracted to loners. Their 2015 documentary feature “Il Solengo” explores the world of a real-life contemporary hermit. “King Crab” begins in the same hunting lodge that figured in “Il Solengo” and their 2013 documentary short “Belva Nera.” Here, a group of aging men share a meal and talk about an old story, one of “princes and poor people.”The movie shifts to an unspecified time in the late 19th century, and a small town, where Luciano, the adult son of a local physician, is a prominent scandal: He guzzles wine at a local tavern and talks back at the cops who sit at his table and needle him. He lazily courts the daughter of a dyspeptic farmer. “Here’s a coin,” he says to a tavern owner. “It’s worthless to me. I want to live as I please.”Luciano is played by Gabrielle Silli; in the movie’s first half, he has an outgrown beard that draws out, rather than obscures, his doleful blue eyes. His mien can sometimes remind one of Donald Sutherland or Peter Dinklage. Even when he’s offscreen, his presence cloaks the movie.After Luciano commits a destructive act, the movie’s action shifts to the tail end of South America. The exiled Luciano is here, spruced up and on the hunt for treasure, aided, perhaps improbably to some, by — yes — a king crab. The movie’s depictions of landscapes both sere and fertile, and its all-but-palpable portrayals of isolation, have echoes of the best work of Werner Herzog and Lucrecia Martel. But de Righi and Zoppis here show more genuine affinity than affected influence; they’re moviemakers worth keeping an eye on.The Tale of King CrabNot rated. In Italian and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Dual’ Review: Seeing Double, Inviting Trouble

    A woman prepares to battle her clone in Riley Stearns’s imprecise satire that invites questions about the self and then leaves them unexplored.The premise of “Dual,” which hinges on a woman feuding with her clone, feels as if it were cooked up after skimming a book of Jungian psychology. It takes place in a woodland dystopia where cloning is an option for terminal patients seeking to replace themselves. The pair cannot coexist, however; should the sick person recover, he or she must duel the clone to decide who lives on. It’s ego death, literalized.The movie follows Sarah (Karen Gillan), who learns that she suffers from an unidentified, rare and incurable illness. Considering her loved ones, Sarah pays for a clone and begins priming her to fill her shoes. But dual identities are tricky. It turns out that Sarah’s double is less a sponge for her sensibilities than a lovelier, livelier foil, and even once Sarah goes into remission, her boyfriend (Beulah Koale) and mother (Maija Paunio) inexplicably snub her for the substitute.Talk about stellar material for psychotherapy. Yet Sarah — not to mention the movie’s writer and director, Riley Stearns (“The Art of Self-Defense”) — seem nearly indifferent to issues of the self and psyche. Instead, the movie dedicates its run time to Sarah’s training for the obligatory battle against her clone. Aaron Paul, playing Sarah’s solemn and supportive combat coach, offers by far the most effective performance among a cast devoted to deadpan enunciation and blank stares.There is something insincere in this movie’s manner, an aloofness that masquerades as satire but repels inquiry or emotion. “Dual” takes a worthy idea and throws a smoke bomb in its middle, leaving the audience to squint through the haze.DualRated R. She beats herself up. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More