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      From ‘IF,’ to ‘Imaginary,’ Exploring Imaginary Friends Onscreen

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      Multiple films this year, including the new family comedy “IF,” explore the concept of imaginary friends on the big screen.In the new family comedy “IF,” Ryan Reynolds plays a frazzled matchmaker who, with help from a young girl (Cailey Fleming), unites humans with imaginary friends.John Krasinski, who wrote and directed the film, said the idea took shape as he watched his daughters’ lights dim during the pandemic.“They were playing fewer and fewer imaginary games and I could see they were letting the fears of the real world in and I thought, this is the definition of growing up,” he explained in an email.He said he decided to make the movie, now in theaters, to show his kids that the “magical world they’ve created, that place of such joy and hope and magic, exists. And you can always go back.”Krasinski isn’t alone in bringing imaginary friendships to life this year. “IF” is one of five new movies that explore imaginary friends, in a variety of genres: supernatural horror (“Imaginary”), adult comedy (“Ricky Stanicky”), children’s animated fantasy (“The Imaginary”) and documentary (“My Secret Country”).Why the convergence? Marjorie Taylor, professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon and an expert on imaginary friends, wasn’t sure. But she said she wasn’t surprised, considering that pretend friends, as she calls them, have long been artistic catnip.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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      ‘Taking Venice’ Offers a Glimpse at Conspiracy Theories Around the 1964 Biennale

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      The documentary offers a glimpse of how the arts were treated very differently in midcentury America.Something about “Taking Venice,” Amei Wallach’s new documentary about the 1964 Venice Biennale (in theaters), feels almost like science fiction, or maybe fantasy. Imagine the U.S. government taking such a keen interest in the fine arts that there may or may not have been an attempt to rig a major international prize for an American artist. A painter, no less!History buffs already know that during the Cold War, American intelligence agencies were heavily involved in literature, music and the fine arts, seeing them as a way to export soft power around the world and prove U.S. dominance over the Soviet Union. “Taking Venice” tells one slice of that story: a long-rumored conspiracy between the State Department and art dealers to ensure that the young painter Robert Rauschenberg would win the grand prize at the event sometimes called the “Olympics of art” — and a “fiesta of nationalism.”So … did they conspire? “Taking Venice” does not exactly answer that question, though various people who were involved give their versions of the story. But that question is far from what makes the documentary so interesting. Instead, it’s a tale of Americans crashing what had been a European party in a moment when American optimism was at its height. Artists like Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain and Jasper Johns were making work that exploded ideas about what a painting should be and do. As one expert notes, they dared to make art that suggested the present was important, not just the past.And they had support from their government in ways that were weird and complicated. In a 1963 speech a month before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy declared, “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.” Then again, as several people note, the freedom of expression that American art was supposed to illustrate on the world stage — often without the artists’ full realization of the government’s involvement — was subject to its own kind of censorship. Government entities like the House Un-American Activities Committee and intelligence agencies decided who was allowed to represent the country and whose voices were unwelcome.Yet it’s still fascinating to imagine a time, not all that long ago, in which painting, sculpture, jazz, literature and more were considered keys to the exporting of American influence around the world. It’s a cultural attitude that’s shifted tremendously in the years since, at least on the broader scale, away from seeing art as embodying a culture’s hopes and dreams and toward something more crass.But with this year’s edition of the Biennale underway, the question of what it means to be an American artist (or an artist from any country) is still one worth wrestling with, and something “Taking Venice” explores, too. “Art is not only about art,” Christine Macel, the curator of the 2017 Biennale, says at the start of the film. “It’s about power and politics. When you have the power, you show it through art.”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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      Are We in a New Golden Age for the Movie Soundtrack?

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      Between “Barbie,” “Across the Spider-Verse” and now “I Saw the TV Glow,” directors are making the case for the film album experience.After watching “I Saw the TV Glow,” the new film from the director Jane Schoenbrun, I felt a sensation I hadn’t felt in a while: I need this soundtrack.The genre-defying movie is a surreal story about two high schoolers in the 1990s who become obsessed with a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a rich film that draws on horror, ’90s television and Schoenbrun’s experience coming out as transgender. But it also boasts some incredible tunes, like a hypnotic cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by the artist yeule and performances from King Woman, Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, who appear onscreen as musicians at a club the characters visit.The full soundtrack has more to love: The swelling emotion of Caroline Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed” and the throwback rock of Proper’s “The 90s,” with lyrics about the TV show “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Listening, I felt like a kid again.That was just Schoenbrun’s intention. The director thought the film needed a “great teen angst soundtrack.” But they were also nostalgic for the idea of soundtracks in general. They remembered thinking, “‘Wait, where did those go?’ You know, because the soundtracks of my youth were such a huge part of what brought me to movies,’” they said in a video call.Citing soundtrack “canon picks” like “Donnie Darko,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Garden State,” which turns 20 this year, they admit these are “pretty obvious slash perhaps a little embarrassing” choices. I relate. I also had an iPod in the early 2000s filled with soundtracks, and one of the most frequently played was “Garden State.” The accompaniment to Zach Braff’s indie breakout — about a man in the midst of a quarter-life crisis who goes home for his mother’s funeral — was as much a cultural moment as the actual film, going platinum and elevating bands like Frou Frou and the Shins.Indeed, the beginning of the aughts felt like the last great heyday for the soundtrack. Think of the indie vibes of “Garden State,” the bluegrass foot-stompers of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” or even the pop rock of “Shrek.” (If you want embarrassment, just ask me how much I loved that soundtrack.)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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      ‘Megalopolis’ Premieres at Cannes: First Reaction

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      Francis Ford Coppola’s first movie in more than a decade reveals a filmmaker not content to rest on his laurels.Late in “Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s plaintively hopeful movie about — well, everything under the sun — a character speaks to the power of love. It’s a wistful moment in a fascinating film aswirl with wild visions, lofty ideals, cinematic allusions, literary references, historical footnotes and self-reflexive asides, all of which Coppola has funneled into a fairly straightforward story about a man with a plan. It is a great big plan from a great big man in a great big movie, one whose sincerity is finally as moving as its unbounded artistic ambition.“Megalopolis,” which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, is Coppola’s first movie since “Twixt” (2011), a little-seen, small-scale horror fantasy. “Megalopolis” is far larger in every respect, though at this point it’s an open question whether it will reach an audience of any kind. The industry, never a welcoming place for free-ranging and -thinking artists, is in the midst of another of its cyclical freakouts. Business is terrible and the sky is definitely, absolutely falling. Fear, panic and timidity rule the day, as they generally do.And then there is a recent report in The Guardian with anonymous sources alleging that Coppola tried to kiss female extras. The executive producer Darren Demetre has said, “I was never aware of any complaints of harassment or ill behavior during the course of the project” and described the contact as “kind hugs and kisses on the cheek to the cast and background players.”I thought about these allegations every so often while watching “Megalopolis,” particularly during one of the bacchanals that punctuate the story and especially when yet another semi-covered breast waggled onscreen. I didn’t find the breasts scandalous or remotely offensive; for one thing, the movie is a speculative fiction about a city that more or less looks like New York, if one modeled on ancient Rome. There the city’s wealthy citizens scheme, the poor suffer and a visionary architect, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), dreams of a “perfect school-city” in which everyone can become who they were meant to be.The movie follows Catilina pondering his mortality atop what looks like the Chrysler Building. After gingerly crawling outside on a ledge, he gazes over the city and raises a foot in the air, then freezes as if contemplating the abyss. This apparent to-be-or-not-to-be moment initiates a story that finds him wrestling with imponderables, having anguished meltdowns and trying to realize his utopian project using a building material he has invented as he navigates assorted hurdles. Among the most persistent is the imperious mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who has a beautiful daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a party girl who can quote the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius by heart.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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      Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Debut at Cannes: What to Know

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      After its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, we can answer your many questions, though some details still puzzle us.“Megalopolis,” the first film from the director Francis Ford Coppola in 13 years, premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival. Self-financed by Coppola, the $120 million passion project has earned headlines about a reportedly chaotic shoot, allegations of misconduct and questions about the film’s commercial prospects.But what exactly are we dealing with here? Now that I’ve seen “Megalopolis,” let me try to answer the questions you might be asking.What is “Megalopolis” about?Any attempt to sum up “Megalopolis” will impose more narrative onto this movie than it actually contains, but here goes. Adam Driver plays Cesar Catalina, a visionary architect who dares to ask: What if a major city looked like an Iris Van Herpen dress? Like so many great men in movies, he is Haunted by Visions of a Dead Wife, but still finds himself falling for Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the daughter of Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), mayor of the city that is sometimes called New Rome but that resembles New York.Cicero, who despises Catalina for his reckless idealism, is one of many characters trying to bring the architect to heel. Other rivals include Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), a party boy turned politician, and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a financial reporter determined to bed or plot against every powerful man in her orbit.Wait, her name is Wow Platinum?Yes, you read that correctly.What exactly is the tone of this movie?Despite the big budget, huge sets and scenes soaked in special effects, “Megalopolis” finds Coppola in the same experimental-filmmaker mode he employed for his two most recent movies, the indies “Tetro” (2009) and “Twixt” (2011). Few scenes are shot or edited in a conventional manner: Coppola employs split screen, projection techniques and artsy montage at will, and the pacing of any given sequence can change on a whim.Sometimes, that anything-could-happen approach is beguiling: Midway through the Cannes press screening, a spotlight shone on a man in the front of the theater who asked questions that Driver’s Caesar would answer onscreen. At other times, though, it feels like the filmmaker is just throwing things at the wall and hoping that something will stick.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 Strangers: Chapter 1’ Review: Crowded House

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      A reboot of the 2008 home invasion film “The Strangers” brings back masked assailants and brutal violence but leaves originality behind.The key to a terrific scary home invasion horror movie is not just how domesticity gets breached but why. It’s great to have a determined aggressor, sympathetic victims and a brutal invasion that’s contained and sustained. But to what end?Yet some of the best home invasion films — “Funny Games,” “Them” — don’t supply easy answers. “The Strangers,” Bryan Bertino’s terrifying 2008 thriller starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a couple under siege, didn’t either. It kept the invaders’ motives and their identities mysterious, amping up the devil-you-don’t-know terrors with a sense of randomness that was despairing. The premise and execution were simple. The payoff was a gut punch.On its face, “The Strangers: Chapter 1,” the first of three new films in a “Strangers” reboot from the director Renny Harlin (“A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master”), checks all the same boxes. But the hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series, especially when Bertino’s formidable film is streaming on Max.This new tale begins with Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and her boyfriend, Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), taking a fifth anniversary road trip through the Pacific Northwest. When their car breaks down in a rural Oregon town, they meet a seen-it-before who’s who of horror movie yokeldom: unsmiling boys, sweaty bumpkin mechanics, a diner waitress whose eyes scream “run, if you know what’s good.”As Maya and Ryan wait for their car to be fixed, they decide to spend the night at a secluded rental cabin. Under darkness there’s a knock at the door and, true to the home invasion formula, our leading sweethearts get terrorized until dawn inside the cabin and through the woods by a trio of assailants with big weapons and indefinite end goals. They have face coverings too, making menace out of the same blank-faced creepiness the villains embodied in the original film and its 2018 sequel.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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      ‘Film Geek’ Review: A Cinephile’s Guide to New York

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      The director Richard Shepard details his lifelong obsession with movies in this enthusiastic video essay.Richard Shepard, the director of the black comedies “Dom Hemingway” and “The Matador,” is a lifelong cinephile with a voracious appetite for movies.“Film Geek,” a feature-length video essay composed primarily of footage of films that Shepard saw growing up in the 1970s in New York City, delves deep into his obsession. In a voice-over, he recounts his childhood, when he was “addicted to movies, to watching them, to making them.” He is enthusiastic, and the movie aspires to make that enthusiasm infectious.I appreciate Shepard’s affection: I also grew up loving movies, and I found his wistful reminiscences of being awed by “Jaws” and “Star Wars” relatable. But Shepard’s level of self-regard can be stultifying. For minutes at a time, he simply rattles off the titles of various movies that he saw as a child. I appreciate that seeing “Rocky” made a strong impression on him. I did not need to know that he lost his virginity in the apartment building where John G. Avildsen, the director of “Rocky,” once lived.“Film Geek” has been compared to Thom Andersen’s great documentary from 2003, “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” and on the level of montage, they share a superficial resemblance: “Film Geek,” like Andersen’s essay film, is brisk and well edited.But “Los Angeles Plays Itself” is also a thoughtful and incisive work of film criticism, whereas Shepard describes movies in clichés, when he describes movies at all. More often he is talking about himself, a subject of interest to far fewer viewers.Film GeekNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Hong Sang-soo’s Film ‘In Our Day” Meditates on the Spice of Life

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      The Korean director Hong Sang-soo winds together the slenderest strands of two intersecting stories to make a tender film about simple pleasures.In another world there’s a Hong Sang-soo Cinematic Universe, where a rabid fandom celebrates the one or two movies every year featuring a revolving door not of familiar superheroes but of poets, filmmakers and actors, each of them contending with questions of life and love rather than planetary threats. Those elements, of artists in quotidian scenarios, drinking soju and smoking amid everyday conversation, are present in many of the small humanist gems that make up this South Korean auteur’s filmography, and the same goes for his latest, “In Our Day.”The film, as warm and wise as it is simple and languid, follows two separate parties (diptychs are another Hong trademark) across a single afternoon. One involves Sangwon (Kim Min-hee, Hong’s frequent collaborator and offscreen partner), an actress pondering retirement, as she spends the day with her friend and her younger cousin; the other involves Uiju (Ki Joo-bong), an old poet dispensing life lessons in his apartment to two university students, one of whom is filming him for a documentary.The two story lines don’t cross paths, as they often do in Hong’s films; they are united only by the deployment of a culinary hack: mixing hot pepper paste into ramyun. His gochujang-inflected noodles provide a simple pleasure made all the more satisfying in recent days for Uiju, who, on doctor’s orders, is abstaining from drinking and smoking. But he can’t quite resist on either front, reflecting a sentiment from early in the film when Sangwon, offering up treats to a friend’s cat, says, “What’s the point of living, anyway? Eat your fill.”It’s a glimmer of existential wisdom buried in the mundane, if you look at it the right way. Most of the film is made up of these moments. Isn’t life like that, too? To search for or expect more would be to court disappointment. “Don’t look for meaning. That’s cowardice,” Uiju tells a young pupil searching desperately for grand answers. “Just jump in the water. Don’t try knowing it all before jumping, like a coward.”In Our DayNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More