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      ‘Stuntman’ Review: A Big Leap

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      This documentary follows the stunt performer Eddie Braun as he attempts to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon in a rocket.“I’m the face you never see,” Eddie Braun says, even though he’s racked up more than 250 film and TV credits. Braun’s hot rod greaser hairdo and battered jumpsuits signify that he’s either a “Stuntman,” hence the title of Kurt Mattila’s simplistic documentary, or an aging astronaut pressed into service for one last mission, which also turns out to be close to the truth. Now in his 50s, Braun is bored of barrel-rolling exploding cars, as are his wife and four kids whose ho-hum response to his latest fireball implies they think of their pops as indestructible.Yet, Braun seeks his own immortality — the chance to nail a stunt that eluded his idol Evel Knievel — and commits to jumping Idaho’s Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket. And Mattila, a car commercial director itchy to shift gears in his own career, tracks the nearly four year process of getting Braun across a leviathan gorge with a boost from the son of the original rocket’s engineer who wants to prove that his dad’s design would have worked, if not for a pesky parachute malfunction.This is a documentary for kids, a point made in the introduction where Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson tells tykes not to try this at home. (“This” meaning fusing a steam whistle to a lawn dart and vaulting three and a half football fields.) Braun is in hero mode, repeatedly assuring the camera, and the guitar player Slash who’s agreed to record him an anthem, that he’ll be fine. Lacking deep emotions, the film cuts over and over to American flags. The only drama comes when the stunt’s TV sponsors back out — twice — forcing Braun to put his money where his life is. There’s something morbid about a world where a brave man is more scared of financial, than physical, risk. But that’s a leap this doc can’t take.StuntmanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘Playing With Sharks’ Review: Intrepid Journeys Undersea

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      This documentary plunges into the life of the diver and marine conservationist Valerie Taylor, but her compassion for sharks is muddied by the film’s insistence on a tense mood.The chipper documentary “Playing with Sharks” celebrates the life of the diver Valerie Taylor, who dedicated her career to marine photography and conservation. The film (on Disney+) plunges into Valerie’s work with sharks, which she and her husband Ron Taylor captured in a trove of close-range undersea footage.As a young woman, Valerie was a champion spearfisher in Australia. But she soon renounced the sport in favor of less disruptive underwater activities. Alongside Ron, Valerie began capturing remarkable ocean images: whack-a-mole eels, rippling squid, a shiver of sharks noshing on a whale carcass. The Taylors were the first to film great whites from the open water without the shelter of a cage, and the couple’s trust in the intimidating creatures (or maybe just their audacity) made them master ocean reef videographers.The documentary, directed by Sally Aitken, draws heavily from the underwater footage taken by Ron and others. Aitken intercuts these sequences with archival clips of Valerie’s chipper efforts as a shark advocate. Horrified by what she saw as a collective misunderstanding of a majestic animal, Valerie made it her mission to show that sharks — while requiring caution — have personalities and respond ably to training, like dogs.But while Valerie’s compassion for sharks is contagious, Aitken insists on a tense mood, with a suspenseful score and unnerving editing straight out of a man-versus-beast blockbuster. “Playing With Sharks” would like to position Valerie as both intrepid diver and valiant activist, but with its focus on thrills and gills, the film goes light on the context needed to reconcile these two identities. Are we meant to recoil from sharks or care for them? Likely some of both, but the documentary comes out looking unsure.Playing with SharksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      HBO and HBO Max Subscribers Seen Reaching 73 Million in 2021

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      AT&T may not want HBO Max anymore, but the streaming platform is gaining traction with customers.HBO and HBO Max, home to genre-bending franchises such as “Game of Thrones” and “The Sopranos” and Hollywood blockbusters like “Wonder Woman 1984,” have added 10.7 million customers in a little over a year, with 2.8 million coming in the three months ending in June, AT&T reported on Thursday. Those figures include both HBO Max and the HBO TV channel.The company has 67.5 million subscribers to HBO and HBO Max, with 47 million in the United States. AT&T, which has struck a deal to sell its media businesses, expects HBO and HBO Max will have between 70 million and 73 million customers by the end of the year, exceeding earlier predictions.Netflix, the most popular streaming service, has 209 million subscribers, with about 66 million in the United States. It gained customers in the second quarter, but growth has considerably slowed and it lost 430,000 subscribers across the United States and Canada, a sign that cracks are beginning to show in the streamer’s long-held dominance.Speaking on the broader streaming industry, Jason Kilar, the chief executive of AT&T’s media arm, WarnerMedia, said in an interview: “The only thing I can promise you is change. There is no doubt that change is coming, and that’s appropriate because we live in a dynamic time.”WarnerMedia, which includes CNN, the Warner Bros. film and television studios and the Turner cable networks, is about to become the property of Discovery Inc., as media companies continue to gobble each other up in an effort to take on Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The deal, which is expected to close around the middle of next year, will create the second-largest media business in the United States, behind the Walt Disney Company and ahead of Netflix and NBCUniversal.Mr. Kilar, who learned of the acquisition only weeks before it would be announced, could be out of a job after the deal closes.Both companies are prohibited from working together until the merger is approved by government regulators, including striking any employment agreements. Still, such deals often involve tacit arrangements about leadership. Mr. Kilar said that he had met socially with David Zaslav, the head of Discovery, but that he hadn’t broached the topic of his employment.“David and I have known each other for a long time,” he said, “and I think it’s fair to say there’s a lot of shared respect between the both of us.”Mr. Kilar, who took charge of the company only 15 months ago, said he did not have plans to step away. “There will be a point where I pick my head up next year where I think about this topic,” he continued. “But I certainly don’t intend to do it until 2022.”Jason Kilar, the chief executive of WarnerMedia, in Dallas last December.Allison V. Smith for The New York TimesMr. Kilar, who was the founding chief executive of Hulu, is considered within Hollywood to be a bit of an iconoclast. In 2011, he broadsided the industry with a now-famous manifesto on the future of entertainment that, to many, came across as a blistering critique of Hulu’s corporate ownership.The post panned traditional TV for running far too many commercials. Mr. Kilar also blasted cable, predicting that viewers would eventually drop expensive packages.After Mr. Kilar joined WarnerMedia, he quickly shuffled the executive ranks and cut costs in an effort to streamline the business.Then he angered Hollywood (again) by breaking with tradition and releasing the entire 2021 lineup of Warner Bros. films on HBO Max on the same day they were scheduled to appear in theaters. The move would have cost some of Hollywood’s biggest players back-end profits — the commission that top-flight producers and stars earn based on box office receipts — but the company quickly worked out deals to make sure they would be paid.Unlike Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max and other new entrants into streaming have legacy agreements with cable distributors and Hollywood studios that prevent a more full-throated approach to making films and TV shows immediately available online.For Mr. Kilar, the move wasn’t about upsetting Hollywood, but rather was part of a larger strategy to goose HBO Max.It seems to have worked. The release of made-for-the-big-screen spectacles like “Godzilla vs. Kong” on HBO Max helped to increase the service’s customer rolls.Mr. Kilar intends to keep up that strategy through 2022. Warner Bros. will release 10 films exclusively for the streaming platform. And big-budget films like “The Batman,” a reimagining of the comic book character starring Robert Pattinson, will have relatively short windows in theaters of 45 days before they show up on HBO Max, according to Mr. Kilar.“That’s very, very different than the way the world operated in 2019,” he said. “Ultimately, I do think that as long as you’re thoughtful about it, change could be very, very good for not only the customers but also the people we get to work with.” More

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      ‘All the Streets Are Silent’ Review: Hip-Hop and Skateboarding Collide

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      This documentary is a portrait of downtown New York in the late 1980s and early ’90s that revels in nostalgia.In the late 1980s and early ’90s, long before hypebeasts spent hours waiting for coveted drops outside the Supreme store in SoHo, skaters assembled at a smaller shop on Lafayette Street. There, they would smoke and watch skate videos, listen to music and crack jokes with friends.“All the Streets Are Silent,” a documentary from the director, Jeremy Elkin, is a portrait of that time, capturing the transformative moment when hip-hop and skateboarding culture converged in New York. It draws on archival footage of influential figures like Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter, among dozens of others, and incorporates new interviews with major players like Fab 5 Freddy and Darryl McDaniels, of Run-DMC. Throughout, Elkin explores how racial associations with both subcultures crumbled as their worlds collided.The film revels in fuzzy, intimate home videos from the period, courtesy of the narrator, Eli Gesner, who spent much of his youth filming the scene on his camcorder. There are shots of skaters dodging traffic at Astor Place or partying at the now defunct hip-hop nexus Club Mars. At one point, a young Jay-Z appears, rapping at lightning speed over a breakbeat. The film immerses us in this world, rendering a loving, tender homage to the city’s street culture before it went global.Ultimately, “All the Streets Are Silent” has little more to give than nostalgia. An ending that considers the mainstream explosion of these subcultures is ambiguous and offers surface-level analysis. The film excels when it harnesses the wistful thrill of a bygone era, reminding us of a rich, creative past that deserves ample recognition.All the Streets Are SilentNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour and 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Old’ Review: They Say Sun Can Age You, but This Is Ridiculous

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      A half-hour at the beach costs vacationers a year in this disquieting new horror puzzler, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.In the opening pages of “Dino,” a 1992 biography of Dean Martin by Nick Tosches, the author cites a haunting Italian phrase: “La vecchiaia è carogna.” “Old age is carrion.”When some vacationing families are deposited on a secluded beach recommended to them by a smarmy resort manager in “Old,” the new movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, we see a trio of vultures atop a tree take to the sky.Not long after that, unusual things begin happening. The young children of Guy and Prisca (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, both superb, as is the entire cast) feel their bathing suits tightening. An epileptic psychologist (Nikki Amuka-Bird) unexpectedly finds herself without symptoms. The elderly mother of the trophy wife of a tetchy physician just up and dies. A moderately famous rap star (Aaron Pierre), who had come to the beach some hours before, wanders around befuddled, with an incurable nosebleed. The corpse of his female companion is discovered in the water, prompting the physician (Rufus Sewell) to accuse the rapper of murder.In time — not too much time, because, as it happens, it is of the essence in this situation — the beachgoers figure out that they are aging at an accelerated rate. One half-hour equals about a year.And the beach that is aging them won’t let them leave.Some vacation. Shyamalan adapted his disquieting tale from the graphic novel “Sandcastle,” by the French writer Pierre Oscar Lévy and the Swiss illustrator Frederik Peeters. As is frequently the case with French-produced bandes dessinées, “Sandcastle” is a stark existentialist parable. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the book Krieps’s character attempts to read on the beach is a dual biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.) Shyamalan expands on the book in the way one would expect an American filmmaker to — among other things, eventually offering a sort-of explanation that the source material doesn’t.Being PG-13, “Old” does not dwell, as the graphic novel does, on how rapid aging affects the children of this ensemble in the hormonal department once they hit their teens, although one pregnancy does occur during the victims’ shared life-in-a-day. Instead, the movie buckles down on the considerable anxiety and dread felt, and amplified, by the frequently bickering adults. Because time is accelerated here, wounds heal incredibly quickly. The director exploits this for a couple of weirdly harrowing knife fights and an impromptu surgery scene. The horrific potential of bones breaking, then instantly resetting themselves incorrectly, does not go unnoticed.Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here. Sometimes the camera will pan back and forth in a ticktock pendulum fashion (get it?) and return to its starting point to reveal a terrifying change. The way he switches out his actors as their characters age is seamless. (The filmmaker’s work in the verbal department is not so felicitous. He names Pierre’s rap star “Mid-Sized Sedan”; early on one character complains to another, “You’re always thinking about the future, and it makes me feel not seen.”)If old age is carrion, it’s also, as a “Citizen Kane” character put it, the one disease you don’t look forward to curing, which provides the impetus for the movie’s finale. While Shyamalan is often cited for his tricky endings, it’s arguable that he doesn’t quite stick the landing with this one. He adds to the story a dollop of that much-venerated Hollywood commodity, hope, and also doles out some anti-science propaganda that couldn’t be more unwelcome at this particular time in the real world.OldRated PG-13 for horrific imagery, language and aging. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ailey’ Review: A Poetic Look at the Man Behind the Dances

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      Jamila Wignot explores the life of Alvin Ailey in a new documentary that brings a choreographer to life through movement and words.Too often, the idea of Alvin Ailey is reduced to a single dance: “Revelations.” His 1960 exploration of the Black experience remains a masterpiece, but it also overshadows the person who made it. How can an artist grow after such early success? Who was Alvin Ailey the man?In “Ailey,” the director Jamila Wignot layers images, video and — most important — voice-overs from Ailey to create a portrait that feels as poetic and nuanced as choreography itself. Black-and-white footage of crowds filing into church, children playing, dance parties, and the dusty landscape of Texas (his birthplace) builds an atmosphere. Like Ailey’s dances, the documentary leaves you swimming in sensation.Ailey’s story is told alongside the creation of “Lazarus,” a new dance by the contemporary choreographer Rennie Harris, whose homage to Ailey proposes an intriguing juxtaposition of past and present. In his search to reveal the man behind the legacy, Harris lands on the theme of resurrection. Ailey died in 1989, but his spirit lives on in his dancers.But his early days weren’t easy. Born in 1931, Ailey never knew his father and recalls “being glued to my mother’s hip. Sloshing through the terrain. Branches slashing against a child’s body. Going from one place to another. Looking for a place to be. My mother off working in the fields. I used to pick cotton.”He was only 4. Ailey spoke about how his dances were full of “dark deep things, beautiful things inside me that I’d always been trying to get out.”All the while, Ailey, who was gay, remained intensely private. Here, we grasp his anguish, especially after the sudden death of his friend, the choreographer and dancer Joyce Trisler. In her honor, he choreographed “Memoria” (1979), a dance of loneliness and celebration. “I couldn’t cry until I saw this piece,” he says.Ailey’s mental health was fragile toward the end of his life; Wignot shows crowds converging on sidewalks, but instead of having them walk normally, she reverses their steps. He was suffering from AIDS. Before his death, he passed on his company to Judith Jamison, who sums up his magnetic, enduring presence: “Alvin breathed in and never breathed out.”Again, it’s that idea of resurrection. “We are his breath out,” she continues. “So that’s what we’re floating on, that’s what we’re living on.”AileyRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour and 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Charlatan’ Review: The Miracle Worker

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      With this drama, the writer-director Agnieszka Holland tackles another complicated historical figure in the Czech herbal healer, Jan Mikolasek.As the world’s biggest fan of Peter Watkins’s twisted and superb “Edvard Munch,” I harbor a soft spot for filmmakers who muss up the perfectly coifed looks and reassuring habits of biographical films. The great writer-director Agnieszka Holland — a connoisseur of those deemed “difficult” by society — does not disappoint with “Charlatan,” her fictionalized story of the persecuted Czech herbalist Jan Mikolasek.Mikolasek rose to prominence and prosperity in the 1930s and 1940s by treating patients with natural remedies, scrutinizing their urine for signs of illness. “Charlatan” jumps between Mikolasek’s rise and fall: his apprenticeship as a youth (Josef Trojan) who has an uncanny “I see sick people” gift; and his professional practice as an adult (Ivan Trojan), as lines of patients out the door were eventually replaced by suspicious state security agents.Mikolasek’s fall out of favor after World War II is not hard to figure since this stubborn individualist stuck out for several reasons. Holland tracks his failures to finesse the postwar turnovers in power — though he did find a way with the Nazis — and his unorthodox approach and ample wealth don’t sit well with postwar apparatchiks. But in these conservative times (which persist) he was also singled out for his loving relationship with his handsome assistant, Frantisek Palko (Juraj Loj).Their warm but unequal romance fuels the second half of the movie, after we’ve seen plenty of scenes of inspired healing and urine swirling. Their clandestine love brings some bucolic light and energy to a movie that often mucks about in Mikolasek’s dim, gray clinic. But Holland also keeps spiking the film with doses of the healer’s coldness, which can be shockingly cruel.When Frantisek says his wife is pregnant, Mikolasek offers him an abortive poison to give her. There is also — fair warning — a scene of Mikolasek disposing of a sack of kittens by thrashing them against a rock. The moment is frankly baffling in its brutality, even if it’s interpreted as demonstrating another kind of barbarity in past eras, or as early evidence of Mikolasek’s dark side.Both Trojans’ performance — the actors are father and son — are steadfast in resisting a sense of heroism, villainy, or, really, charisma, and Josef Trojan suggested to me a credible vision of old-fashioned formality as it might actually have felt to be around. A great-man outsider who falls hard, Mikolasek makes for an intriguing counterpoint to the female protagonist of “Spoor,” the fierce, funny, and mysterious film co-directed by Holland and Kasia Adamik.Often as thorny as its subject but also oddly fascinated by his near-magical abilities, “Charlatan” is a temporary cure for the common biopic.CharlatanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour and 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘How It Ends’ Review: What, You Expected Us to Tell You?

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      In this apocalyptic comedy, Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein count down Earth’s last day, measuring out the hours in serial conflict resolutions.In the apocalyptic comedy “How It Ends,” the Earth faces destruction by meteor at the end of the night. Here, the world ends not with a bang or a whimper, but with self-deprecating jokes and irreverent self-reflection.For her last hours before Earth’s expiration, Liza (Zoe Lister-Jones) wanders Los Angeles, visiting family, friends and lovers in a search for spiritual resolution. In a metaphysical twist, the adult Liza is accompanied by the manifestation of her younger self (Cailee Spaeny).Among the standouts from the film’s deep cast are Helen Hunt as Liza’s mother, who offers a heartfelt monologue about not being meant for parenthood. Liza and her former best friend, played by Olivia Wilde, demonstrate their psychic bond through complicated and rhythmic overlapping dialogue. Logan Marshall-Green, as the man who got away, brims with brooding romanticism.The film’s writers and directors, Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, ensure that each reconciliation has an arc that builds from confrontation to explanation to resolution, and they are also careful to ensure that each scene stands on its own. The film plays as a series of perfectly enjoyable sketches strung together, an excuse for veteran actors to chew on playful dialogue. Liza attempts to tie up the loose ends of her life in one day, and if it seems like she succeeds rather economically, the writing, ever clever, builds in an explanation for the film’s breeziness. The characters shrug off the importance of their revelations — it’s only the end of the world.How It EndsRated R for language and references to drugs and sex. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More