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      ‘Incoming’ Review: Not Another Teen Movie

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      Freshman engage in some fairly predictable debauchery in this routine high school gross-out comedy streaming on Netflix.“Incoming,” a bawdy teen comedy from the directors Dave and John Chernin, opens with a familiar gag: an awkward adolescent boy (Mason Thames) delivers a speech to the camera professing his love, only for a cut to reveal that he’s actually rehearsing in the mirror. In a genre rank with cliché, this is not a very promising start — it suggests that the Chernins, who also penned the screenplay, are satisfied with whatever joke is closest to hand.The rest of the movie does little to dispel that impression. Its story of high school freshmen navigating a libertine house party follows exactly the trajectory you would expect, with few laughs and even fewer surprises. If there’s a cute girl incoming, she’ll be introduced in a slow motion montage. If a couple leans in for a kiss, they’ll be interrupted by a lewd gag. Will the dork score with the hottie? Will the rowdy teacher get out of hand? Cue the record scratch sound effect!A generous interpretation is that “Incoming” is derivative as an act of loving homage. In practice, it just feels old hat. The movie is heavily indebted to the teen gross-out comedies of the late 1990s and early 2000s, like “American Pie” and “Van Wilder,” which were themselves indebted to the teen sex comedies of the 1980s, like “Porky’s” and “Screwballs,” and it’s so far from an original idea or point of view that it’s hard to see the point.All it offers is ribald escalation: Instead of beer bongs, there are lines of ketamine; instead of fart jokes, there’s diarrhea in a Tesla. Maybe that’s progress. But I’d say the filmmakers flunked.IncomingRated R for strong language, drug use, sexual innuendo, mild violence and “Porky’s”-style shenanigans. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Killer’ Review: John Woo With a French Twist

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      Woo’s new version of his Hong Kong action movie “The Killer,” starring Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy, may be a remake, but it’s not a retread.When he started a run of contemporary action movies in the early 1980s, the Hong Kong director John Woo forged a personal mode influenced by the stylized violence of American directors like Sam Peckinpah and Don Siegel (see the shootouts in “The Getaway” and “Dirty Harry”), and the mentholated cool of the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (à la the existential assassin of “Le Samouraï”). Before taking up in Hong Kong again in 2008, Woo created some galvanizing work in the United States: “Face/Off” (1997) and “Mission: Impossible 2” (2000).It is exhilarating, then, to see him set his sights on Paris with a remake of his 1989 Hong Kong classic, “The Killer.” He depicts the City of Lights with a loving, romantic eye.Woo’s original starred the incredibly charismatic Chow Yun-fat as the title assassin, a hired killer with an ethos who makes some sacrifices on behalf of a young woman he accidentally blinded during a shootout. (Woo has more than a touch of Chaplin’s “City Lights” in him, too.) One challenge for a remake would be finding a younger lead actor to match Chow’s magnetism. There is none, and Woo knows it as well as we do; hence, the film’s rather delightful surprise of gender-switching the title character.The British actress Nathalie Emmanuel plays the soulful marauder Zee, and man, does she cause a ruckus. The film’s first big blowout, in a cabaret-bar, features quarts of spilled blood, a skyscraper’s worth of shattered glass and mirrors, slow-motion flying bullets and, yes, a mishap in which a cabaret singer named Jenn (Diana Silvers) is blinded. Zee is a little more coldblooded than Jeffrey was in 1989; at first she tries to get rid of the singer rather than help her.Zee’s contractor, Finn, played by Sam Worthington, isn’t pleased that the singer was allowed to live. Zee is confused — she always asks before taking a job whether her future victims deserve to die. Finn tells her that this one had it coming. But Zee insists on keeping Jenn alive, despite the shadowy forces trying to wipe her out.Omar Sy plays Sey, a French cop who will, of course, form an uneasy alliance with Zee. (Woo’s world is like the one Mick Jagger’s devil envisions: Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints. Sort of.) Sy projects assuredness and vulnerability in almost equal measure.Emmanuel, best known as Missandei, the trusted adviser to Daenerys in “Game of Thrones,” conveys a smooth, chameleonic expertise. As in the first film, the killer spends a lot of time in a moody, deconsecrated church, which is, of course, kitted out with a complement of doves — Woo’s favorite symbolic animals. The direction is energetic, incorporating frantic flashbacks and resourceful split-screen perspectives, and the plot adds several new twists not found in the first movie. Rest assured, this may be a remake, but it’s not a retread.The KillerRated R for — guess — violence. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

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      ‘The Crow’ Review: Resurrected and It Feels So Bad

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      Hoping to skate by off moody vibes, this revamp of “The Crow” comic book series seems derived from a flattened, Hot Topic image of the hero.In the long and winding road it took to finally get to “The Crow” — with some 15 years of recasts, rewrites, and director switches — the one constant that has remained is that this version would not be a remake of the 1994 film of the same name. It would, the mantra went, instead be a reimagining of the original comic book series by James O’Barr about a man, resurrected from the dead, enacting vengeance on the small-time gangsters who killed him and his fiancée.It’s a sensible distinction to make for any movie revamp, but here is a particularly important and likely futile disclaimer to evade existing in the shadow not only of a cult classic, but also of a tragic and storied legacy — the accidental on-set death of its star, Brandon Lee — that shrouded and ultimately fueled the original film’s beloved status. “The Crow” of 2024 was never meant to be, couldn’t ever be, a version of that movie, a grittily stylized, rough-edged gothic melodrama whose pain and grief was so deeply absorbed by fans because those very things bled beyond the frame.That, of course, is fine and all. But ultimately what this version, directed by Rupert Sanders, is spiritually derived from is neither the film nor the comic, but rather the flattened popular image that the film produced — a Hot Topic-style version of alternative consciousness.“Do you think angsty teens would build shrines to us?” Shelly (FKA twigs) asks Eric (Bill Skarsgard) about their love story, the film’s central romance, whose edgy sensitivity is packaged with as much real feeling as a perfume ad starring Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox. You might think of Shelly’s line as a kind of wink at how Lee’s image became a beacon for brooding cynicism for an entire generation.But the real punchline is that the film itself is the embodiment of that kind of hollow emo teen worship, throwing vague echoes of “Joker,” “John Wick” and “Constantine” into a laundry machine and hoping faded shades of black eyeliner remain.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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      ‘Between the Temples’ Review: A Widower Walks Into a Bar

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      And meets his former music teacher, upending his life, in Nathan Silver’s touching comedy, starring Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane.Ben Gottlieb — the touchingly soulful hero of the soulful, delightfully tetchy “Between the Temples” — is a mess. He needs a haircut and a shave; he could do with better-fitting clothes. He’s having problems at work. He also lives in his family’s basement, that much-derided refuge of the eternal man-child and terminal loser. Yet because the filmmaker Nathan Silver has an appreciation for life’s ironies and likes putting a topspin on his comedy, Ben lives with both his mother and stepmother. He lives, in other words, in his mothers’ basement.Ben — a perfect Jason Schwartzman — is a sad sack, but he’s also just sad and for a very good, excruciating reason, too. His wife died not long ago, leaving him bereft and, increasingly, without an evident sense of self or purpose. He seems to have lost his bearings, but he’s also lost his singing voice, which proves a problem given that he’s the cantor at a local synagogue. He still teaches there, working out of a cramped, shambolic classroom in which he helps boys and girls prepare for their bar and bat mitzvahs, the traditional Jewish coming-of-age ceremonies that formally announce the passage from childhood to adulthood.Set in the present in an upstate New York hamlet, this coming-of-middle-age story follows Ben during an eventful time in his life, which takes a turn after he runs into his former elementary-school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor (Carol Kane, divine). They reconnect in a bar, where she helps the soused, deflated Ben, a kindness that takes an unexpected turn when she shows up at the synagogue. Carla wants to take his class, explaining that she never had a bat mitzvah. Ben is reluctant because, well, she isn’t a child, but after consulting with his boss, Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), Ben relents. A friendship blossoms and perhaps something deeper does, too, and the movie gets its blissfully offbeat groove on.Silver, who wrote the movie with C. Mason Wells, introduces Ben without preamble, immediately dropping you into a conversation that started before the movie did. Ben and his mothers, Meira and Judith (the nicely synced Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon), are in the family’s dining room having an apparently serious heart-to-heart. Judith says they think he “needs to start seeing a doctor,” a suggestion that Ben says he’s open to. As the camera zooms out, Ben keeps talking only to be cut off by the doorbell. The moms jump up, and a pretty female doctor enters and almost immediately begins hitting on Ben, a shift that abruptly gives new meaning to the advice the moms have just voiced.With the doctor’s entrance, the movie turns straightaway from the plaintive to the humorous. The scene is characteristic of how Silver changes up the tone and mood, creating an unexpected pacing that’s complemented by Sean Price Williams’s agitated cinematography and the jumpy rhythms of John Magary’s editing. The movie is laced with absurd setups, slapstick and some silly props, all of which converge in a scene at a restaurant called the Chained Duck (the name of a satirical French newspaper). There, Ben and Carla have dinner with her belligerent son, Nat (Matthew Shear), a hostility that Silver slyly deflates when the waiter hands everyone menus as large as battleground shields.The outlandish menus undercut the son’s disproportionate, clenched-jaw anger at Carla without draining the scene of its tense realism or turning the son into the butt of the joke. Silver is a sharp, cleareyed observer of human nature, and while he pokes at his characters, including Ben, it’s more teasing than cruel. If there’s a mean joke in “Between the Temples,” I missed it, which helps explain where Silver is coming from. He and Schwartzman make Ben’s pain palpable without sentimentalizing it; you see the hurt in the sag of Ben’s shoulders and in the melancholy that clouds his eyes. Yet there’s a fundamental resilience to the character who, while he’s sometimes off on his own, is never really alone.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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      Sarajevo Film Festival, Born in War, Turns 30

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      The Sarajevo Film Festival, now 30 years old, grew out of underground screenings during the siege of the city. Those roots still define the event’s character.From 1992 to 1996, Serbian forces laid siege to the city of Sarajevo, relentlessly bombarding it and cutting off electricity, heat, running water and regular food supplies. Because of snipers perched on hillsides and constant shelling, going outside was a life-threatening act.Yet these were the conditions under which the Sarajevo Film Festival came to life. Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the festival, which runs through Friday, has grown to become the premier movie industry event for the Balkan region. But its roots still define its character.After the breakup of Yugoslavia, ethnic tensions in Bosnia deepened, resulting in a violent nationalistic campaign led by Bosnian Serbs targeting Bosniaks and Croats. When war broke out in Sarajevo, Mirsad Purivatra, the festival’s founder, was living in a cellar with other members of what he called a “punk” collective — artist types who worked in theater, music and film, many of whom were involved with the University of Sarajevo’s Academy of Performing Arts.“After a few months, we figured out how to survive physically, but then we asked ourselves: ‘How are we going to survive mentally?’” Purivatra said over coffee in a downtown square. Purivatra and his collaborators began staging performances in the cellar and inviting artists to create installations in the underground passages that Sarajevans used to move around the city.The first office for the Sarajevo Film Festival, in 1995.Obala Art CentarEventually, word of these efforts got around to the international press, which inspired writers and artists from outside of Bosnia to visit Sarajevo and raise awareness of the city’s plight through acts of cultural solidarity. Susan Sontag, for instance, brought a candlelight production of “Waiting for Godot” to life with Bosnian actors and theater experts.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 Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat’ Review: Hungry for Drama

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      You’ll want to pass the ketchup, and the hankies, for this buffet of tear-jerking deep-fried decadence.“The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat” is a melodrama sampler platter of adultery, alcoholism, cancer, teen pregnancy, derailed careers, heckled memorial services and accidental electrocution, plus a phony psychic, a heartbroken ornithologist and a double helping of murder. This wisecracking, tear-jerking, deep-fried decadence is plenty satisfying if you’re in the mood to indulge.Directed by Tina Mabry and set between 1950 and 1999, it’s the rousing saga of three friends. Clarice (Uzo Aduba) is the image-conscious pushover; Barbara Jean, (Sanaa Lathan) the fragile beauty; and Odette (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) the bigmouth who narrates the film and ignites most of the confrontations. As girls, they’re played by Abigail Achiri, Tati Gabrielle and Kyanna Simone, who do a fine job establishing the tone. In a movie crowded with faces (including Mekhi Phifer, Russell Hornsby and Vondie Curtis-Hall) and more plot twists than a plate of curly fries, Simone and Ellis-Taylor make a feast of the flashiest role. Young Odette impulsively strips off her dress to throw a punch at a slimeball. Later, when her adult incarnation announces she’s going to finally speak her mind, both the audience and her fellow characters are agape. What else has she been doing for two hours?The script, adapted by Mabry and Cee Marcellus from Edward Kelsey Moore’s novel of the same name, takes a few liberties, tweaking the titular hangout into a retro-chic diner, blurring the location to Anytown, America and scrapping a cameo from Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost. No one seems to believe this is Michelin star cuisine — the score is clatteringly whimsical, the scene transitions teeter toward the absurd — but it’s a treat to watch these believable pals hoist each other back up, taking the occasional breather to clink milkshakes in slow motion.The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-EatRated PG-13 for adult themes, as well as strong language including racial slurs. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Strange Darling’ Review: Assume Nothing

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      In this cheeky, cunningly assembled thriller, a serial killer gets a satisfying and surprising comeuppance.A movie that’s best experienced stone cold, “Strange Darling” is so dependent on its surprises — one head-snapping twist, with several judiciously spaced lesser shocks — that to reveal any one of them would be critical malpractice.A crawling onscreen text, read by Jason Patric, informs us that what we are about to see is the dramatization of a spree killer’s final, vicious acts. Thus primed, we’re thrown into the middle of a frantic car chase as a terrified young woman in scarlet scrubs races to escape a shotgun-wielding man in a pickup truck. She is known only as The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), and she is bleeding from a head wound; he is The Demon (Kyle Gallner), his sleazy mustache and snorts of cocaine familiar bad-guy signifiers. We’ve got this, we think, settling in for some serial-killer comfort viewing. We could not be more wrong.Playing out in six, ingeniously scrambled chapters, this headlong thriller transforms a simple cat-and-mouse premise — and maybe even a toxic love story — into an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions. Flexing back and forth in time, the writer and director, JT Mollner, bets the house on a mechanism that repeatedly asks us to reassess what has gone before. Cunning as it is, structure is not the movie’s sole strength. Both Z Berg’s haunting, otherworldly pop songs and Giovanni Ribisi’s eloquent photography (it’s the actor’s first stint as a feature cinematographer) bathe the film’s violence in an unexpected dreaminess. In one pivotal scene, shot with shadowy intensity, flirtation and threat alternate so frequently that the flickering power dynamics are completely destabilizing.Less complicated by far are Ed Begley, Jr. and Barbara Hershey as a pair of doomsday preppers who think the bleeding woman at their door has been attacked by a Sasquatch. They will soon learn that there are some problems even bear spray can’t solve.Strange DarlingRated R for cutting, ketamine and lots of killing. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ Review: A Mourning Journey

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      This visually elegant indie follows a soft-spoken Swiss widow visiting Japan.A visually elegant drama by the writer-director Bradley Rust Gray, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” spins a gossamer-fine story about grief — about the struggle to live fully again when the tragedies of the past still exist in your bones.Chloe (Carla Juri) is a soft-spoken Swiss widow visiting Japan for work, though we first learn about her husband’s passing indirectly. She can’t speak Japanese, which gives her an excuse to keep her feelings private and remain trapped in her own head. In the beginning of the film, against a breezy pastoral backdrop, a Japanese friend, Toshi (Takashi Ueno), discusses Chloe’s misfortune in front of her with his grandmother. Chloe smiles, unaware.The moment encapsulates the film’s delicate dynamics, shifting between Chloe’s unspoken hurt (there are occasional flashbacks to her husband that bleed into the main narrative) and the concerned friends orbiting around her, both wary of upsetting her but also, because of the language barrier, naturally at a remove.The static camerawork by the cinematographer Eric Lin gives Chloe’s stilted but openly vulnerable encounters a fluttering poignancy; particularly lovely is a ferry-ride conversation with an older man, Yatsuro (Issey Ogata).The meandering nature of the film creates a special kind of intimacy with Chloe, one that relies almost entirely on Juri’s subtly heartbreaking performance. Chloe’s mourning isn’t always legible, and we often see her engaging in banal activities like shopping, eating and playing with Toshi’s young daughter, Futaba (Futaba Okazaki); her awkward banter with friends is endearing though it also grows rather dull, and the constant obliqueness draws some power and believability away from the developing romance with Toshi. There’s an implication that repressed emotions are simmering beneath the mundane, but that doesn’t always come across.I’ll Be Your MirrorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More