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      ‘Oddity’ Review: Twisted Sister

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      A haunted house, a blind psychic and a suspicious death fuel this flawed yet fun supernatural thriller.Coolly executed and seductively simple, “Oddity,” the second feature from Damian McCarthy (after the unsettling, underseen “Caveat” in 2021), is a fun, back-to-basics supernatural thriller that cares more about making us jump than making us cringe.To that end, most of the violence remains offscreen, leaving us to ponder its bloody aftermath. Set largely inside a rambling, barely habitable house in the Irish countryside, the movie opens with a terrifying encounter between Dani (Carolyn Bracken) and a crazed visitor (Tadhg Murphy) who claims to have seen someone enter her home. Disturbed by the man’s agitation and milky glass eye, and unable to reach her husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee), a doctor working the night shift at a nearby psychiatric hospital, Dani hesitates. Fatally.One year later, Ted and his new girlfriend (Caroline Menton) are dismayed by the arrival of Dani’s blind twin sister, Darcy (also played by Bracken), a psychic who owns a curio shop in the city. Darcy plans to unearth the truth about her sister’s death, and she has brought a companion: a hideous, life-size wooden figure with a gaping mouth and a head full of holes. This might be viewed by some as a metaphor for the plot; but for “Oddity,” economical to a fault, entertainment trumps enlightenment.Joining a thriving cohort of Irish filmmakers working in horror or on its fringes, McCarthy has a cheeky sense of humor and a clear love for genre traditions. Colm Hogan’s photography is clean and calm, his God’s-eye shots rich with icy foreboding, while Aza Hand’s sound design is lush and at times almost bestial. These ensure an atmosphere that’s rarely less than creepy and occasionally jolting, helping us forgive the underwritten characters and vague jiggery-pokery. How can you chastise a movie that so clearly wants to leave you smiling?OddityRated R for a mashed head and chewed tootsies. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Crossing’ Review: Stories to Tell

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      In Levan Akin’s fascinating drama, two strangers connect in Istanbul.“Crossing,” by Levan Akin, is a marvelous travelogue about two Georgian strangers who team up for a trip to Turkey where neither speaks the language nor knows how to get around.Lia (Mzia Arabuli) is a retired history teacher; Achi (Lucas Kankava) a young fast-talker who barely seems to have gone to school at all, although he’s picked up a bit of English on YouTube. Achi has made the trek to find his mother, while Lia is looking for her estranged niece, a trans woman. In a city of 15 million, the odds are against them.“Istanbul is a place where people come to disappear,” Lia sighs. (Arabuli, with her hawkish cheekbones and disappointed mouth, has one of the best screen faces of the summer.) The unlikely companions instead encounter a balladeering street urchin (Bunyamin Deger) with an extraordinary voice, and a 30-something trans social worker (Deniz Demanli) who impressively scales the calf-crippling hills in a pair of heavy heels. Sounds cutesy, but Akin keeps his mood piece feeling natural and breezy, allowing only a few camera flourishes on his own quest for tiny moments of connection, including a nod of recognition between Lia and one of the city’s famous street cats, two wanderers wiling away an afternoon.The setting is half the story, although the cinematographer Lisabi Fridell avoids anything you’d see on a postcard. One image worth pinning to the fridge is a tilt up a teetering apartment exterior where almost all the windows have a head poking out.In this town, in this movie, you feel absolutely certain each face has its own fascinating story to tell.CrossingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hollywoodgate’ Review: Inside the Taliban

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      In a frustrating documentary, the journalist Ibrahim Nash’at shows the Taliban after American troops left Afghanistan.There is no question that the director Ibrahim Nash’at faced tremendous danger in shooting “Hollywoodgate,” but the risks required to make this documentary also highlight its limitations.Nash’at, an Egyptian journalist based in Berlin, traveled to Afghanistan in 2021 shortly after American troops had left. He negotiated a tenuous arrangement with Mawlawi Mansour, the new commander of the country’s air force, to film him and a lieutenant named M.J. Mukhtar.In a voice-over at the outset, Nash’at explains the terms. He has been forbidden to film anyone who is not Taliban, he says, and he is under constant surveillance. In return for access, he adds, “I must show the world the image of the Taliban that they want me to see.” But he hopes simply to show what he saw.Nash’at, who handled his own camera and sound, is, to his credit, transparent about some gaps. When going to inspect a group of aircraft, Mansour doesn’t want the filmmaker to show them. (Nash’at nevertheless zooms in toward a few planes across the tarmac.) During a nighttime operation in which Mukhtar apparently hopes to root out people hostile to the Taliban, Nash’at is instructed, “The cameraman stays here.”What remains are Mansour and Mukhtar presenting themselves with varying degrees of self-consciousness (it is amusing when Mansour, after trying out a treadmill at a former American gym, asks that one be sent to his home so he can lose belly fat), and the Taliban’s public pageantry. Nash’at notes at the end that he was kept from filming the daily suffering of regular Afghans. The frustration of “Hollywoodgate” is that it could only ever feel incomplete.HollywoodgateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One.

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      Keanu Reeves doesn’t know exactly where the idea came from, but one day — sometime around the release of “John Wick: Chapter 2,” starring Keanu Reeves, and before he started shooting “The Matrix Resurrections,” also starring Keanu Reeves — he imagined a man who couldn’t die.“It became a series of what ifs,” he said. “What if they were 80,000 years old? Where did this character come from? What if they came from a tribe that was being attacked by other tribes and wanted to ask the gods for a weapon, and what if a god replied, and what if that birthed a half-human, half-god child?”From there, Reeves added, “It went from this simple premise and gained in complexity and continued to grow.”For a while, the character only existed in Reeves’s head. Then he wondered, What if this immortal warrior became the basis for a comic book? An action movie? An animated series?“And then, there’s another what-if,” he said. “What if it became a novel?”Reeves’s ancient warrior has since become the anchor of a growing multimedia franchise. The comic he imagined and co-wrote, BRZRKR (pronounced “berserker”), grew into a 12-issue series that has sold more than two million copies. A live-action film, starring and produced by Reeves, and an animated spinoff are in development at Netflix. More

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      ‘Twisters’ Review: When the Monster Is Real

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      Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones lead a stand-alone sequel to the 1996 hit — and times sure have changed.The 1996 mega-blockbuster “Twister” is pleasing in its almost childlike simplicity. It’s a monster movie where the monster is a tornado, which neither knows nor cares about the people chasing it down. A tornado does not have a vendetta. It’s not even hungry, like a zombie is. Its path is erratic but its behavior is predictable: It forms, it destroys and then it simply collapses.That means the real intrigue comes from the human side of things, and on that point “Twister,” with a healthy dose of mid-90s style tropes and an absurdly stacked secondary cast (including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Jami Gertz and Todd Field, the future director of “Tár”), delivers mightily. The movie’s enduring status as a classic is due in no small part to its continual appearance on cable TV — and it works so well in that medium because you can flick it on at virtually any moment and know basically what’s going on. The estranged lovers Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton chase a tornado, hoping to deploy a device cheekily named “Dorothy” that will help them understand it better and save lives. No complicated back stories, no lore necessary.Nearly thirty years later, “Twisters,” billed as a stand-alone sequel to “Twister,” has a bit of a tougher hill to climb. For one, the era of straightforward original blockbusters ended a long time ago, swallowed up by superheroes and franchises. “Twister” has its fans, but the only character “Twisters” shares with its predecessor is the tornado.And tornadoes aren’t what they used to be either. When I left my screening of “Twisters” and turned on my phone, I saw a text from my mother, who lives in a region known more for its blizzards than tornadoes. The National Weather Service, as it turned out, was warning residents to look out for thunderstorms, flash flooding and … tornadoes.The words “climate change” are never uttered in “Twisters,” but as anyone in the path of extreme weather knows, things have been getting worse. This hurricane season is predicted to be an unusually bad one. If you tried to travel over Memorial Day weekend, you felt the real effects. And tornadoes now tend to rove in packs. There’s a reason the title of this movie is plural.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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      ‘Great Absence’ Review: A Mystery of Disappearance

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      A skillfully directed Japanese mystery dips into the strangeness of dementia for those who stand by and watch.We tend to think of absence as lack, and, in a literal sense, it is. But absence can be as real and looming as presence. Someone’s absence, after all, implies that they once were there — and so we feel the emptiness, whether we’re glad or in mourning.The notion of a weighty emptiness hovers over “Great Absence,” a moving drama from the director Kei Chika-ura, who wrote the screenplay with Keita Kumano. This is a film about dementia, a topic filmmakers keep tangling with, probably because extended life spans mean that more of us experience these conditions in aging family members, or our own. Chika-ura interprets dementia as a gradual, spreading absence, a sense that something once lodged in the brain — the mechanics of how to answer a phone, or the knowledge of where you are physically — has disappeared, leaving behind a vacuum. Yet for the characters in “Great Absence,” the feeling of longing for something that once existed goes far beyond a memory loss condition.Absence has structured the life of Takashi (Mirai Moriyama), an actor in Tokyo whose father, Yohji, left him and his mother when Takashi was small. He’s barely seen his father in the intervening years, only having a general sense of where he lives and what he’s up to. Yet one day, he gets a call to go to Yohji’s house, and brings his wife, Yuki (Yoko Maki). Yohji, it transpires, has been taken to a care facility. What Takashi finds in his father’s house is worrying, notes stuck to all surfaces with instructions for performing simple actions.What he doesn’t find there is Naomi (Hideko Hara), the woman for whom Yohji left his family decades earlier. Yohji doesn’t seem to have any idea where she is, telling conflicting stories. This is no surprise: Yohji doesn’t even know where he is. It’s clear he’s been in decline for a long time.The story of “Great Absence” is something of a mystery, as structured quite magnificently by Kumano and Chika-ura, directing only his second feature. The film moves freely between timelines, marked largely by Yohji’s lucidity and Naomi’s presence. Small clues dropped early in the film later help fill in the story as if they’re brush strokes, the full picture of this family’s painful absences emerging only near the end. Furthermore, Yutaka Yamazaki, the film’s revered director of photography, shot it on 35 mm film, which gives “Great Absence” a grainy, weighty feeling, as if we’re peeking into some past memory. To follow it all requires close attention, but it’s an attention that’s rewarded.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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      Why Donald Glover Is Saying Goodbye to Childish Gambino

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      “Bando Stone & the New World,” his new album due Friday, tells a story about the potential end of the world — and the conclusion of his pseudonymous musical project.Donald Glover had been walking a New York City street only a moment when a young man, perhaps in his early 20s, called out to him from several yards away.“Yo, Donald Glover, bro, I love you, man!”Glover nodded and said thank you.“I listen to Childish Gambino like every day,” he continued.“I appreciate it,” Glover replied.“You’re seriously my favorite, bro,” the man shouted, seemingly struggling for something else to say. Finally, he added, “Since I was a little kid!”Glover chuckled to himself. “A ‘little kid’?” he said, after a beat. “That doesn’t make me feel old, I just know that I am old.”Time comes for everyone. It has mostly been kind to Glover, the multiple Emmy- and Grammy-winning actor, musician, writer and director, who turned 40 last September. He has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years, since his college sketch comedy troupe, Derrick, found an audience on early YouTube in 2006. And he has been famous for 15, since starring in the hit NBC comedy series “Community.”Childish Gambino, his rap alter ego, caught the attention of the hip-hop blogosphere in 2010, making it old enough to be sent off to high school. And now, after the release of his sixth album, “Bando Stone & the New World,” on Friday, he’s officially retiring the moniker.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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      ‘Rust’ Armorer Asks for New Trial After Dismissal of Alec Baldwin’s Case

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      Lawyers for the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, are seizing on a judge’s dramatic dismissal of the actor’s case to argue for her release from prison.The armorer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for loading a live round into a gun on the “Rust” movie set, resulting in the fatal shooting of its cinematographer, asked a court in New Mexico on Tuesday for a new trial following the collapse of the case against Alec Baldwin.On Friday, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer halted Mr. Baldwin’s manslaughter trial and dismissed the case against him permanently after determining that the state had intentionally withheld new evidence that could have shed light on how live rounds ended up on the movie set, leading to the death of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.Now lawyers for the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, whose case was handled by the same prosecutor and who was sentenced to 18 months in prison by the same judge, are seizing on the problems exposed during Mr. Baldwin’s case to seek a new trial.“This court stated on July 12 that the integrity of the judicial system demanded that the court dismiss Mr. Baldwin’s case with prejudice,” the lawyers wrote. “How can it be any different with Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s case, with this proven litany of serious discovery abuses?”The dramatic dismissal of the case against Mr. Baldwin followed a hearing in which the judge herself examined the new evidence in the Santa Fe County District Courthouse: a batch of live rounds that someone had dropped off to the local sheriff’s office around the time the armorer’s trial ended in March.Law enforcement officials acknowledged during testimony that when the ammunition was turned in, it was put in a separate case file from the rest of the “Rust” evidence. Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers said they had never received it despite asking the state for all ballistics evidence.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