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      ‘Black Friday’ Review: Killer Sales Bring Killer Customers

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      In this horror-comedy, a group of resentful retail workers struggle to survive as shoppers overtaking their toy store are ravaged by a zombie plague.“Black Friday,” a horror-comedy directed by Casey Tebo, is as chaotic as its characters. The premise goes like this: As an alcoholic single father, Ken (’90s horror vet Devon Sawa), and a hypochondriac, Chris (Ryan Lee), join their neurotic co-workers on Thanksgiving night to prepare for the Black Friday onslaught at a big-box toy store, they have no idea that alien zombies are overtaking the human race. Once the carnage reaches their registers, the workers must band together to make it out alive. That harrowing journey yields a lot more goofiness than it does character development.This film would be perfectly delightful if it only strove for absurdity. Andy Greskoviak’s script lampoons corporate apathy and retail-work ennui with the same swiftness as his voracious zombies. Unfortunately, “Black Friday” also tries to make viewers root for its characters, who are mostly delightful because they are such wildly mediocre people. At one moment while hiding from the monstrous horde, each character explains what brought them to retail. It’s an excellent sequence that offers back story without forcing these misfits to bond. Yet at the end, the film seems to apologize for its refreshing misanthropy by tying these dynamics up with a Christmas bow.Unapologetically low-budget, “Black Friday” makes great use of prosthetics, practical effects and some very game actors to deliver its zany scares. This is exactly the kind of thing horror lovers should watch with like-minded friends as the holidays roll around (probably pre-meal, though, thanks to copious amounts of zombie puke). But it would be more memorable if it delivered a bitter end.Black FridayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Procession’ Review: Art as Exorcism

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      In this experimental documentary streaming on Netflix, six survivors of abuse within the Catholic Church use filmmaking to confront traumatic memories.Robert Greene’s two most recent documentaries pondered the ethics of re-enacting traumatic events, with an interest in immersion’s psychological effects on performers. “Kate Plays Christine” followed an actress as she prepared to play a newscaster who killed herself on the air. “Bisbee ’17” watched the residents of an Arizona town as they recreated a large-scale deportation that had occurred there a century earlier.With “Procession,” Greene pushes the concept of staging-as-exorcism to an extreme: Can men who endured childhood sexual abuse within the Catholic Church confront painful memories through filmmaking — and perhaps gain some solace from that process? The movie is billed as a three-year collaboration among six abuse survivors, a professional drama therapist and the director and his crew. In an expansive “film by” credit, Greene gives the victims top billing.“Procession” follows the men as they help one another brainstorm and shoot five scripted scenes based on their experiences. Various elements of the production process (casting, costuming, finding locations the subjects haven’t visited since youth) become means for coping and reckoning. A sixth survivor, Tom Viviano, says he cannot tell his story because it’s still before the courts. His contribution is to act — playing predator priests, in what must be agonizing feats of impersonation — in two segments.“Procession” is exceptionally difficult to watch, as it should be. It’s also difficult to assess as art, given how it collapses lines between collaboration and co-option and between cinema and supportive treatment. To judge Greene’s experiment, not least because of its visible salutary effects, feels like intruding on private breakthroughs. But the discomfiting power of “Procession” comes from its ability to show and, to all appearances, facilitate them.ProcessionRated R. Discussions of childhood trauma. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Out of the Blue’: When Dennis Hopper Cast Himself as a Dad

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      As the director and star, Hopper delivered some wildly self-indulgent moments. But it’s Linda Manz, playing a troubled teenage girl, who stole the show.One of the weirder episodes in the long, strange trip of Dennis Hopper’s career, “Out of the Blue,” from 1983, was intended as a cautionary after-school special about a troubled teenage girl. It mutated mid-production when Hopper, cast as the girl’s father, became the director and, scarcely less violently than his character, threw caution to the wind.The movie, which looks great in a new 4K restoration, is at Metrograph in Manhattan through Nov. 28.Set amid the impressive vistas of the Canadian northwest, “Out of the Blue” is a boldly feel-bad film about punk rock, lunatic driving and deranged family values. A disgraced trucker, Don (Hopper) returns home after five years in prison to find work in the town dump. Meanwhile, his malleable wife, Kathy (the veteran TV actor Sharon Farrell), shoots up in the bathroom and their Elvis-obsessed daughter, the hard-faced urchin Cebe (Linda Manz, fresh from her attention-grabbing turn in Terrence Malik’s “Days of Heaven”), plots to escape high school.Cebe has already run away to Vancouver for a short-lived idyll involving an Elvis impersonator; a degenerate cabdriver; a house of sin; a rowdy punk performance in which she got to play drums; a stolen car; and a session with a stern social worker, played by the Canadian actor Raymond Burr whose fleeting presence sealed the project’s status as a Canadian tax-shelter production. “Out of the Blue” takes its title and several songs from Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 1979 LP, “Rust Never Sleeps.” It’s a pop culture assemblage not unlike Cebe’s boudoir which, in addition to an Elvis shrine and several punk rock posters, contains a teddy bear, a model truck, a car-top flashing light, various road signs, a decapitated Barbie and a framed picture of a pink poodle.Many scenes have a semi-improvised feel. Hopper, who gives himself some spectacularly self-indulgent moments, is often riveting, but the movie ultimately belongs to Manz, introduced in Halloween clown-face makeup happily riding in Daddy’s rig. “Am I as sexy as Elvis?” Hopper demands, eyes off the road, heading for a particularly horrendous collision with destiny.“This father and daughter may not resemble any other father and daughter you’ve ever seen,” Janet Maslin wrote in her appreciative New York Times review, adding that “whatever wavelength Mr. Hopper is on here, she’s on it, too.” Indeed, unfazed by the antics of her director-father, Manz doesn’t appear to be acting.At one point, Cebe goes with friends to a movie that, less than likely, is Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” “I hate happy endings,” she announces. It’s a foregone conclusion that “Out of the Blue” won’t have one, but Hopper uncorks a closer far beyond mere unhappiness.Reviewing the movie for The Village Voice, I observed that “Out of the Blue” is just that: “You rarely know what will happen next and you scarcely believe it when it does.” That still holds true.Out of the BlueThrough Nov. 28 at Metrograph, Manhattan; metrograph.com. More

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      'Rust' Script Supervisor Sues Alec Baldwin and Others

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      A lawsuit filed by the supervisor, Mamie Mitchell, said an injury or death on the set was “a likely result” of the production’s failure to follow safety protocols.A script supervisor for the movie “Rust” recalled Wednesday how she had been watching the actor Alec Baldwin practicing a move with a gun on the set in New Mexico last month, holding her script and checking photos on her iPhone to make sure that he was wearing the right shirt and vest, when she heard a loud blast.“Then, an explosion,’’ the supervisor, Mamie Mitchell, recalled at a news conference in Los Angeles. “A deafening, loud gunshot. I was stunned. I heard someone moaning and I turned around and my director was falling backward and holding his upper body.”Then, she said, she turned and saw the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, sink down to the ground. Law enforcement officials have said that Ms. Hutchins, 42, was shot and killed, and the film’s director, Joel Souza, 48, was wounded, when the gun that Mr. Baldwin had been practicing with, which he had been told did not contain any live ammunition, discharged, firing a real bullet that struck them both.Ms. Mitchell, who said that she ran out of the wooden church set and used the phone in her hand to call 911, announced Wednesday that she had filed a lawsuit against the producers on the film, including Mr. Baldwin, and several members of its crew.“Alec Baldwin intentionally, without just cause or excuse, cocked and fired the loaded gun even though the upcoming scene to be filmed did not call for the cocking and firing of a firearm,” the lawsuit, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, said.The script supervisor, Mamie Mitchell, at the news conference Wednesday announcing the lawsuit. Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images“The fact that live ammunition was allowed on a movie set, that guns and ammunition were left unattended, that the gun in question was handed to Mr. Baldwin by the assistant director who had no business doing so, the fact that safety bulletins were not promulgated or ignored, coupled with the fact that the scene in question did not call for a gun to be fired at all, makes this a case where injury or death was much more than just a possibility — it was a likely result,” the lawsuit said..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}A lawyer for Mr. Baldwin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The lawsuit was announced at a news conference with Ms. Mitchell’s lawyer, Gloria Allred.It claims assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and deliberate infliction of harm, and requested unspecified damages. It said Ms. Mitchell, who was standing less than four feet from Mr. Baldwin when the revolver discharged, “sustained serious physical trauma and shock and injury to her nervous system and person” and “will in the future be prevented from attending to her usual occupation as a script supervisor.”The shooting took place Oct. 21 on the set of the film on Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe County, N.M., as Mr. Baldwin prepared to film a close-up of him drawing a .45 revolver from a shoulder holster. According to Ms. Mitchell’s lawsuit, Mr. Baldwin failed to check the gun himself to see if it was loaded before handling it.They were preparing for three tight camera shots, according to the lawsuit: one of Mr. Baldwin’s eyes, one of a blood stain on his shoulder, and one of his “torso as he reached his hand down to his holster and removed the gun.”According to court papers filed by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department, the movie’s first assistant director, Dave Halls, had called out “cold gun” before handing the revolver to Mr. Baldwin, using a term indicating that the gun did not contain live ammunition. A lawyer for the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, said that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed had loaded the revolver with what she believed to have been dummy rounds, which do not contain gunpowder and cannot be fired.The lawsuit charges that Mr. Baldwin knew that it was typical protocol for an armorer or prop master to hand a gun to the actor after demonstrating that it is empty — not for the first assistant director to do so — and that Mr. Baldwin failed to follow those rules. It also charges that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed allowed guns and ammunition to be left unattended on the set that day. The lawsuit accuses the production of hiring Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, 24, who had just started out her career as a lead armorer in the film industry, as part of a series of “cost-cutting measures.”Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyer, Jason Bowles, has said that his client noticed that day the gun was left unattended for several minutes after she had asked other crew members to watch the firearms and ammunition. Mr. Bowles has defended Ms. Gutierrez’s qualifications for the job, saying that she was dedicated to ensuring safety on set. Previously lawyers for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed said that she had been hired to two positions on the film, “which made it extremely difficult to focus on her job as an armorer.”Mr. Halls, Ms. Gutierrez-Reed and Sarah Zachry, the movie’s prop master, are all named as defendants in Ms. Mitchell’s lawsuit. Ms. Zachry and a lawyer for Mr. Halls did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Bowles said he had not yet reviewed the lawsuit.Last week, Serge Svetnoy, the film’s gaffer, or chief lighting technician, filed a lawsuit accusing the movie’s producers, Mr. Baldwin and several other crew members of failing to follow appropriate firearm safety protocols that would have prevented the fatal shooting. Mr. Svetnoy said he was standing just six or seven feet away from Mr. Baldwin and said that he was injured by discharge materials from the gun and traumatized by seeing his friend die, trauma that had left him unable to work. More

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      ‘Prayers for the Stolen’ Review: Coming of Age Among the Poppies

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      Tatiana Huezo’s feature film is based on a novel about girls growing up in Mexico in communities terrorized by opium cartels.In “Prayers for the Stolen,” the first narrative feature by the Mexican-Salvadoran documentarian Tatiana Huezo, young 8-year-old girls weep as their mothers chop off their long tresses under the pretext of preventing head lice. In reality, their boyish haircuts are meant to disguise their true genders from the cartel members who terrorize their rural Mexican town.Soon the girls will grow hardened to the reality that plagues the sparkling and verdant highlands surrounding their remote village. These criminals kidnap, sexually assault and often leave for dead any girls they can get their hands on.Loosely based on Jennifer Clement’s 2014 novel of the same name, “Prayers for the Stolen” is on the one hand a meandering coming-of-age film, sensitively charting the evolution of Ana and her two girlfriends, Paula and Maria. The girls covertly apply makeup behind their mothers’ backs, fantasize about their schoolteachers and eventually embark on small flirtations of their own. But violence circumscribes their every whim.The threat posed by the cartel, which runs a poppy harvesting operation using the townspeople’s cheap labor, undermines any sense of normality. Black SUVs can come charging from across the valley without warning, forcing the girls into hiding, and helicopters spraying toxic pesticides to preserve the opium-producing crop often invade during playtime.A leap forward in time turns the girls into young women. A new set of older actresses steps in to play the girls at 13, and their masculine hairdos aren’t fooling anyone.The film swings back and forth from scenes of pastoral bliss to brutality, generating a narrative that, while unfocused, is nevertheless anchored by the tender and wounded performances by its adolescent cast.In the end, tragedy arrives abruptly, an unsurprising turn given the unchanging circumstances, yet one that imparts a girl with a sudden awakening to the monumental bleakness of her fate.Prayers for the StolenRated R. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Netflix. More

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      ‘Aulcie’ Review: Love and Basketball, in Israel

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      This melodramatic documentary chronicles how Aulcie Perry, a basketball center from New Jersey, became a celebrity in Israel after he joined the Maccabi Tel Aviv team.You may not know the name Aulcie Perry, but in Israel, the former basketball center is a legend — like “Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rolled into one,” as a sports journalist in the documentary “Aulcie” puts it. Through interviews, archival images and illustrated sequences, the movie, directed by Dani Menkin, offers a treacly biography of the overseas celebrity athlete whose career was ultimately derailed by an addiction to heroin.Born in Newark, N.J., the 6-foot-10 Perry always saw basketball as his calling. Hoop dreams propelled him to the N.B.A., but after he was promptly cut from the Knicks, Perry took a chance: He accepted a spot with Maccabi Tel Aviv. The team proved a solid fit, and Perry led Maccabi to European Champions Cup victories in 1977 and 1981, before drug addiction and a trafficking charge forced him to shelf his remarkable career.
      There is a contagious thrill to the movie’s portrait of its subject’s achievements, especially his whirlwind romance with the Israeli supermodel Tami Ben Ami. But when it comes to Perry’s moments of struggle, “Aulcie” trips up. Schmaltzy music and fuzzy pictures give a hard tug at the heartstrings, and footage of Perry missing shots on an empty court is frequently deployed as a superficial visual metaphor for hardship. The movie also declines to engage with Israel’s evolving politics or culture and where Perry fit in, opting instead for a melodramatic portrait of a star that fell too soon.AulcieNot rated. In English and Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks’ Review: Defining Portraits

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      This documentary celebrates how the work of the great photographer Gordon Parks brought a nuanced fidelity to Black experience.John Maggio’s “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks” shares a title with the great photographer’s 1966 autobiography, which voiced his need for a camera that was mightier than the sword. Parks was born in 1912 as the last of 15 children on the family farm in Kansas. He went on to tell defining chapters in America’s story through the establishment pages of Life magazine, with a nuanced fidelity to Black experience.Maggio’s documentary moves through Parks’s rich photo essays on a Harlem gang leader, the segregated South, Muhammad Ali and a boy in a Rio de Janeiro favela, as well as bold early work on Ella Watson, a janitor at the Farm Security Administration. A line is drawn from Parks’s legacy to the cultural narratives being charted by the current photographers Devin Allen and LaToya Ruby Frazier.This helps avoid a portrayal of Park — an avuncular sage in sweater and pipe — as a stand-alone figure. He also made history as the first Black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film (“The Learning Tree,” from his own book), directed a pop-culture monument in “Shaft,” composed music and wrote several books. Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay and curatorial critics sound valuable but similar points about his empathy and point of view.Perhaps no one documentary can do justice to Parks. But “Choice of Weapons” ends up streamlining his complexity, and its wind-down looks past his other audiovisual output (screening soon in a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives). Still, as Parks once said, “I consider this my world,” and we’re all still living in it.A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon ParksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More