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      Ynairaly Simo Reps the Bronx (and Tweenage Zest) in ‘Vivo’

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      The 14-year-old Dominican American actress makes her big screen debut in the animated musical on Netflix, with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda.Every time Ynairaly Simo’s mother asks her what she wants to eat at home, Simo tells her the same thing: moro de guandules con bistec, or rice with pigeon peas and steak.But if they’re dining out? It’s got to be the mofongo — a Puerto Rican dish made with fried plantains — from a shop two blocks away from where Simo lives with her family in the West Bronx.The rich food culture in Fordham Heights is a piece of what makes their life so full there.“We are proud to live in the Bronx, and we are proud that we are Latinos,” Ynairaly’s mother, Ydamys Simo, said in an interview. “And we always encourage that to her: Always be proud of who you are. And never change the essence that makes you you.”Ynairaly (pronounced ya-NAH-ruh-ly) Simo, 14, is the voice of Gabi, an energetic and eccentric preteen, in the animated musical “Vivo” on Netflix. Though Ynairaly was born and raised in New York, both sides of her family are Dominican.“I’m very glad to be playing Gabi and be Dominican,” Simo said in a video interview, in front of a canary yellow wall in her mother’s room. “Because girls my age — or younger — can be like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s Dominican! And she’s an actress? I could be an actress. I’m Dominican.’”Simo felt a similar spark when she saw Zoe Saldaña as Gamora in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy.” She instantly loved the green warrior character, and looked up who played her.When she realized Saldaña played Gamora — and that the actress was Dominican — it hit her: She could be in a Marvel movie someday, too.Four years later, Simo and Saldaña would end up working together. Saldaña plays Rosa, Gabi’s mother, in “Vivo.” Since their recording sessions took place separately, the two have never met, but Simo still hopes to meet her idol.“I’m very glad to be playing Gabi and be Dominican,” Simo said.Josefina Santos for The New York Times“Vivo” is Simo’s first major role — although she’s been acting for years — and she worked alongside a cast of “icons,” as she put it, including Saldaña.Lin-Manuel Miranda voices the titular Vivo, a singer-musician kinkajou; the Buena Vista Social Club legend Juan de Marcos plays Andrés, Vivo’s owner; and Gloria Estefan plays Marta, Andrés’s old musical partner and unrequited love.Because of the nature of voice performance, Miranda was the only cast member Simo met in person. She was more than familiar with his work — she had, in fact, auditioned for a role in the film version of “In the Heights” — and was eager to collaborate with him.Miranda spent one-on-one time with Simo in the recording studio, helping her pin down high notes in her head voice and low notes in her chest voice. (Simo attends the Celia Cruz Bronx High School of Music, where she learned she is naturally an alto.)The actress sings on five songs on the movie’s soundtrack, including “My Own Drum” — an earworm rap about being true to yourself — and its remix with the Grammy winner Missy Elliott. Miranda, known for his signature rapid-fire rapping, guided Simo along her first time in the genre.“He taught me: Get a deep breath,” Simo said. “And then learn the words, spit them out and make sure to say them, pronounce them very sharply.”Onscreen, “My Own Drum” unfolds in Gabi’s tween tornado of a bedroom (her backpack is full of slime) in Key West, Fla. It features, in the words of the director Kirk DeMicco, “almost like a Busta Rhymes, fisheye lens, fun-house scene,” intended to shake Vivo out of his comfort zone. Here, the role fit the actress.“There was this exuberant unpolished-ness to her that she just had, and this moxie that you can’t even act,” DeMicco said in an interview. “The way she delivered her lines” and “the little improvs that she did, the way she filled things in, the texture was just her.”Simo’s father, Joseph Simo, is a big fan of the scene, the song and the soundtrack. It’s his “No. 1 pick” whenever he’s at work, he said: He flips on the soundtrack and listens straight through from beginning to end.“One of the things that she always wanted to do is inspire kids: Latinos — and all the kids that are into acting and into music — to follow their dreams,” Joseph said in an interview. “And I told her the other day, ‘You see, your dreams are coming true.’”Simo’s parents are, of course, her biggest fans: Two weeks into August, they had already watched the movie 16 times. (The film began streaming on Aug. 6.) They’re not planning on stopping anytime soon.Ynairaly, center, with her parents, Ydamys and Joseph Simo.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesThey have supported their daughter’s career in the arts since it began. At age 3, Simo started modeling. At 5, she started acting — doing smaller gigs, like commercials. “Vivo” was her first singing role (although since its premiere, she’s performed the national anthem for the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Gotham Girls and the New York Liberty).But the road here was by no means easy. In July 2019, while “Vivo” was in production, Ynairaly underwent an almost 10-hour surgery to correct advanced scoliosis. Twenty screws and two metal plates later, doctors told her parents she might not be able to “move the way a normal child could” — at least for a while.The day after the surgery, the physical therapist asked her to take a couple of steps, one step at a time, her father said. She walked 20. That same summer, she learned how to swim. She danced. A month after the surgery, she convinced the doctors to let her go back to Los Angeles to record.Her family called her “Ynairaly la guerrera,” or Ynairaly the warrior. “Because that’s who she is,” her mother said. “She’s really determined.” More

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      ‘Candyman’ Review: Who Can Take a Sunrise, Sprinkle It With Blood?

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      The new take on the 1990s cult horror film returns the story to its old stomping ground, this time with Jordan Peele as a producer.The first time Candyman, the hook-wielding ghoul, hit the big screen it was 1992 and he was making mincemeat out of people in Cabrini-Green, the troubled public housing development in Chicago. Since then, residents have left (or been moved out), and more than a dozen buildings have been razed. Forgettable sequels have come and gone, too, yet Candyman abides, cult film characters being a more enduring and certainly more prized commodity than affordable housing.The original “Candyman,” written and directed by Bernard Rose, is more icky than scary, but it has real sting. It centers on the son of a formerly enslaved man — Tony Todd plays the title demon — who, once upon a time, was punished by racists for loving a white woman. Now he wanders about slicing and dicing those who summon him. Just look in a mirror and say his name five times (oh, go ahead), and wait for the blood to spurt. Among those who did back in the day was a white doctoral student who becomes a red-hot victim. The pain wasn’t exquisite, as Candyman promised, but it had its moments.In the sharp, shivery redo directed by Nia DaCosta, Candyman seems on hiatus. The time is the present and the place is the bougie community that’s sprung up around Cabrini-Green. There, in sleek towers with designer kitchens and walls of windows, the gentrifying vanguard sips wine, enjoying the view. Beyond, the city sparkles prettily and its ills are at a safe distance (if not for long). As the restless camera clocks the scene, Sammy Davis Jr. — a Black civil rights touchstone turned Richard M. Nixon supporter — belts out his sticky 1970s hit “The Candy Man” (“Who can take tomorrow/dip it in a dream.”) It’s a sly reminder, and warning, that the past always troubles the present.Sometimes the past also bites the present right where it hurts, and before long the opening calm has been violently upended. As the blood begins to gush and the body count rises, the story takes shape, as does the somewhat tense domestic life of a painter, Anthony (a very good Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), and a curator, the pointedly named Brianna (Teyonah Parris). They soon learn that Candyman never left (well, he is a valuable franchise property). Enter the scares and shrieks and anxious laughs, and the dependably indispensable Colman Domingo, who pops up with a Cheshire cat grin. There are also flashing police lights that aren’t as welcoming as they might be elsewhere.“Candyman” is the second feature from DaCosta, who made her debut with the modest drama “Little Woods.” She might have seemed a counterintuitive choice for this horror rethink, but while her first movie didn’t fully hold together, it was clear that she could direct actors and make meaning visually. She didn’t just clutter the frame with talking heads; she set (and exploited) moods and created an air of everyday, prickling unease, demonstrating a talent for the ineffable — for atmosphere — that she expands on here. It’s easy to shock viewers with splatter but the old gut-and-run gets awfully boring awfully fast. Far better is the slow creep, the horror that teases and then threatens.The dread inexorably builds in “Candyman,” which snaps into focus after Anthony learns of the boogeyman. Intrigued, he seizes on the tale of a Black spirit who stalked the area’s disadvantaged residents as grist for his art, which could use a creative kick. DaCosta — who shares script credit with Win Rosenfeld and Jordan Peele, who’s also a producer — nicely fills in the texture, stakes and emotional temperature of Anthony’s milieu with its cozy domesticity, artistic frustrations, gnawing jealousies and crossover dreams. The banter is believable, as are the pinpricks of disquiet and the weird suppurating wounds that increasingly mar this otherwise ordinary scene and its genial hero.It takes nothing away from DaCosta to note that “Candyman” is of an intellectual and political piece with Peele’s earlier work, including “Get Out” and “Us.” Like those movies, “Candyman” uses the horror genre to explore race (Peele gets under the skin), including ideas about who gets to play the hero — and villain — and why. Peele isn’t interested only in what scares us; he’s also asking who, exactly, we mean when we say “us.” As a form, horror is preoccupied with the unknown and ostensibly monstrous, a fixation that manifests in visions of otherness. Much, of course, depends on your point of view. (The series’ genesis is Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden,” set in a presumptively British slum.)DaCosta plays with perspective, shifting between Anthony’s and the intersecting, sometimes colliding worlds of more-successful artists, urban-legend propagators and, touchingly, profoundly scarred children. Throughout, she intersperses bits of shadow puppetry that work as a counterpoint to the main narrative, a reflexive device that emphasizes that “Candyman” is also fundamentally about storytelling. We tell some fictions to understand ourselves, to exist; others we tell to turn other human beings into monsters, to destroy. In “Candyman,” those who summon up this ghoul, thereby allowing him to tell his tale, first need to look at their reflections. When they do, they see innocence staring back at them — that, at least, is the story they tell themselves.CandymanRated R for horror-movie violence. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lily Topples the World’ Review: What Goes Up

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      A gifted YouTuber gets a superficial profile in this lackadaisical documentary.If you’re not one of the more than 3 million subscribers to Lily Hevesh’s YouTube channel, then you may be unaware of what it takes to become a world-famous domino artist. “Lily Topples the World” aims to enlighten you; but this undisciplined, curiously shallow documentary from Jeremy Workman might leave you with more questions than answers.Blessed with a subject who is charmingly open and seemingly devoid of ego, Workman mostly keeps out of the way. Adopted from China as an infant, Hevesh, now 22, has been designing, building and toppling fabulously intricate contraptions since the age of 9, posting her efforts to YouTube. This passion requires patience and a certain obsessiveness, as well as a willingness to learn the basics of geometry and physics. The results are a divine fusion of engineering and aesthetics; so why are no engineers or artists invited to comment?In place of knowledgeable contributors are irritating music and blandly repetitive interviews as we follow Hevesh from convention appearances to meetings with ecstatic fans and collaborative projects with fellow topplers. With no real structure, the film becomes a blur of collapsing plastic rectangles. It’s all very pretty, but it’s also indulgent and uninformative — terms like “column technique” are dropped, without explanation — teaching us little about the effort and skill behind the shapes.Similarly, we see Hevesh ponder the worthlessness of a college degree to a career in toppling, but are never apprised of her possible long-term professional options. No arguments, frustrations or consequential disappointments mar the film’s unvaryingly upbeat tone. This leaves us with a movie that feels more like a marketing tool for her self-designed brand of dominoes than a nuanced portrait of an unusual talent.Lily Topples the WorldNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      ‘Isabella’ Review: Audition of a Lifetime

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      The Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro, who riffs on Shakespeare, expands his ambition with this drama.The New York-based Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro has carved out an exclusive niche: Each of his fractured, low-stakes narratives is tied to a different Shakespeare play. His last feature, “Hermia & Helena,” involved a Spanish translation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” His latest, “Isabella,” revolves around two actresses, Mariel (María Villar) and Luciana (Agustina Muñoz), auditioning for the part of Isabella in “Measure for Measure.”If Piñeiro’s Shakespeare citations have sometimes freighted slight stories with unearned significance, “Isabella” finds him expanding his formal ambition. The movie courts confusion, at first: Sorting out the characters and timeline isn’t easy. Piñeiro sometimes shoots dialogue with the actors (or their faces) offscreen. The chronology is scrambled, with Mariel’s state — she is shown visibly pregnant or not, or else with her young son after he’s been born — providing an important marker.While the pieces more or less fall into place, trying to solve the mysteries of “Isabella” may be missing the point. The opening voice-over concerns a ritual in which a person must decide whether to cast stones into water, and the film itself seems to exist in a suspended state. The pivotal color is purple (somewhere between red and blue). A motif of rectangles that evokes Josef Albers’s “Homage to the Square” suggests infinite regress.Rhymed scenes and repeated lines contribute to the sense of indeterminacy. Both women are capable of stepping into the same part; acting is presented as, for some people, the same thing as living. Everything in “Isabella” unfolds in parallel — measure for measure, if you will.IsabellaNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘American Sausage Standoff’ Review: Order the Salad

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      This misbegotten satire about bigotry and mysterious pork products is unfunny and maladroit.The far-fetched but hardly distinctive tale told in “American Sausage Standoff” is prefaced by a title card reading “This story is based on fact.” The opening shot is of a man sitting in his car while addressing the audience directly, his soothing, honey-toned voice setting the scene.The writer-director Ulrich Thomsen nods at Joel and Ethan Coen here, specifically to “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski.” The unfunny and maladroit scenes that follow make one wonder if “the anxiety of influence” also can apply to artists who are, through no fault of their own, doing the influencing.“American Sausage Standoff” is set in a nearly deserted town called Gutterbee. This self-proclaimed “Cabaret Capital of the West” is overseen by a guitar-picking rabid racist named Jimmy Jerry Lee Jones Jr. As indicated by character names like that, this is a movie that delivers its sociocultural observations with a sledgehammer.Starr (who, with Thomsen, starred on the TV series “Banshee”) plays Mike Dankworth McCoid, a one-time confederate of Jones who has tired of grotesquely humiliating Asian Americans and running them out of town. (These humiliations are depicted in some detail; the film’s ostensible objection to such actions is sorely undercut by the relish with which they are staged.) Instead, he forms an alliance with the newcomer Edward, a connoisseur of both German sausage and its lore.Edward is played gamely by Ewen Bremner, but his efforts, like those of the character actor Clark Middleton (who died last year) as a truculent, corrupt preacher, merely demonstrate that commitment will only get you so far with a nothing part. What ensues when Edward and the town’s reactionaries clash cannot be properly called hilarity, and the end product of this dismal film is mostly befuddlement.American Sausage StandoffNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Mosquito State’ Review: Bugging Out

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      A Wall Street genius becomes the willing host to a colony of mosquitoes in this dreamily surreal horror movie.Borne along on the whine of insects and a lead performance of surpassing strangeness, “Mosquito State” is a disquieting merger of body horror and social commentary.It’s the summer of 2007, a global financial meltdown is imminent and Richard Boca (a disconcerting Beau Knapp), a wealthy Wall Street analyst, is attending a black-tie party. When he leaves, he will have a stunning young student (Charlotte Vega) on his arm and a female mosquito on his neck; he will fully bond with only one of them.From its gorgeous opening credits to a peculiarly poignant and lyrical finale, this mesmerically slow-moving tale (directed by Filip Jan Rymsza and written by Rymsza and Mario Zermeno) works to forge a fragile link between psychic and societal breakdowns. Richard may be an algorithm savant, but his colleagues refuse to listen when his computer model warns of looming market instability. Holed up in his cavernous penthouse, all brutalist décor and dim lighting, he fumes, consoled only by the buzzing mosquito whose bites are transforming his body and whose offspring are rapidly colonizing his home.Arranged in chapters named for the insect’s stages of development (egg, larva, pupa, imago), “Mosquito State” has a dreamlike, almost dazed quality, pierced by moments of disturbing beauty. Admirable for its total refusal to ingratiate, the movie nurtures an unapologetically hostile vibe that gradually relents alongside Richard’s deterioration. Like Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly” (1986), he’s a grotesque alliance of two species; yet watching him in his apartment, the mosquitoes a milky cloud above his head or a black swarm feeding off his supine body, we see a man who has chosen the bloodsucking life form he prefers.Mosquito StateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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      ‘The Colony’ Review: Fertile Ground Goes to Waste

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      In this science fiction film, set generations after humans have destroyed Earth, an astronaut returns to the planet to see if it is habitable.“The Colony,” a new sci-fi drama directed by Tim Fehlbaum, posits an Earth once rendered uninhabitable by climate change, pandemics and war. Years later, though the ruling elite has fled to another planet, they must reinvestigate Earth after their society becomes infertile.The astronaut Louise Blake (Nora Arnezeder) leads the latest such mission — not for herself, but, as she has been taught to eerily chant since she was a little girl, “for the many.”Therein lies the problem with this sprawling, ambitious movie: Though it centers on one woman, anything we might stand to learn about her own developing values is quickly swallowed by overcomplicated narratives about secondary characters, corrupt colonizers and family secrets. When Blake lands back on Earth — and smack in the middle of another conflict between warring parties — “The Colony” interrogates who, in this dystopian portrayal of humanity, is really worth saving. But it could be asking far more interesting questions about its own main character.For instance, Blake uses herself as a fertility test subject and dazedly notes the arrival of her menstrual cycle, but is she personally interested in repopulating her society? Given her androgynous appearance, her preference for her masculine surname and the fact that she has the most on-screen chemistry with another single woman, this character could, at the very least, have complicated feelings about heterosexual reproduction.“The Colony” has big ideas about class, colonialism and who should inherit the earth. But in developing them, it sidelines its own perfectly compelling protagonist — and wastes a magnetic lead performance from Arnezeder. It can dress itself up in political intrigue all it wants; this existential narrative is really begging to be a character study.The ColonyRated R for violence and an attempted sexual assault. Running time: 1 hour 44 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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      ‘Together’ Review: Love and Loathing in London

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      Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy play a battling couple trapped in lockdown in this theatrical pandemic drama.Like an awful herald of what could lie in wait as future filmmakers grapple with our ongoing viral nightmare, Stephen Daldry’s “Together” is an almost punishing watch. That it’s bearable at all is entirely because of the superlative acting skills of James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan as an unnamed couple forced to endure an extended London lockdown. In place of a plot, we get a setup: They can’t stand the sight of each other.A yearlong pandemic diary embedded in a prickly domestic negotiation, the movie is essentially a two-person play set in the upscale kitchen of the couple’s comfortable middle-class home. Repeatedly breaking the fourth wall — perhaps to avoid breaking the crockery — the two address the camera in earnest monologues. While these can range from confessional to explanatory (like a lengthy ponder on the meaning of “exponential” when tallying Covid infections), they are almost always suffocatingly self-absorbed.An agonizing opening scene lays out the pair’s practiced hostility (“I hate your face!” “I think of you as a cancer!”) and the bickering state of their union. She’s a Liberal of some privilege; he’s a Tory from a poor background. She works with a refugee charity; he has a highly profitable consulting business. Floating somewhere on the periphery is a young son, Artie (Samuel Logan), who’s supposedly the glue that keeps the couple quarantining together. A monologue from him might have gone a long way toward explaining his parents’ dysfunction.The movie’s persistent squabbling is bad, but its too-raw reminders of pandemic trials are almost worse. The reports of denuded grocery stores and mask refuseniks; the paeans to an overworked Somali caregiver and a saintly nurse standing watch over a relative’s hospital bed. And by intermittently stamping the movie with a date and a U.K. death count, Daldry seems to chide us for caring about his characters at all, the fussing and fighting of the living rendered even more trivial alongside the bodies piling up off screen.An awkward and uncomfortable experiment, “Together” unfolds with a staginess that rebuffs our involvement. Political lectures are never fun, and the movie’s bitterly angry attacks on government ineptitude and nursing-home deaths made me wonder if the writer, Dennis Kelly, needed a back rub. So it’s a relief when McAvoy’s character starts growing asparagus and an uneasy détente is reached: No one needs a plague tale whose arc refuses to bend toward hope.TogetherRated R for cruel language and cringeworthy sex talk. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More