Movies

A teenage girl is roped into her estranged aunt’s criminal activities in this psychodrama by the Danish filmmaker Jeanette Nordahl.In “Wildland,” by the Danish filmmaker Jeanette Nordahl, the 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) is roped into her mysterious aunt Bodil’s family business after a car accident kills Ida’s mother. Still in mourning, our soft-spoken yet observant protagonist is eased into the family circle, coming-of-age, so to speak, as the violent reality of their criminal affairs come into view.This intentionally restrained debut feature is just shy of an intriguing study about the power dynamics of a disturbed family. So committed to maintaining an enigmatically sinister atmosphere, the film fails to build out the many compelling issues it raises about toxic masculinity and familial gaslighting.Nevertheless, some inspired confrontations, and a commanding performance by Sidse Babett Knudsen, who plays the hot-and-cold matriarch, Bodil, makes “Wildland” an absorbing and highly watchable psychodrama.When Ida arrives at her aunt’s abode, she’s suddenly surrounded by her male cousins, two temperamental, maladjusted dudes and an eerily composed third. Eventually, the guys accept their shy cousin into their ranks, allowing her to tag along on their boozy, late-night outings to the club. Ida, for better or worse, comes to love her new family, even as she witnesses some questionable exchanges, as when the eldest brother gives a ride to a nervous schoolgirl under the guise of being friends with her father.Ingeborg Topsoe’s mostly unremarkable script does, however, hint at a more compelling angle: the sidelined role of women in these criminal enterprises. It’s not often in films about thugs that we get the female perspective, yet through Ida’s gaze a more expansive portrait is achieved, bringing to the fore the tragic fates of those who bear the burden in such macho proceedings.WildlandNot rated. In Danish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

A sensational Rebecca Hall plays a grieving widow besieged by potentially occult forces in this superior creepout.The scares land like blows and the eeriness is pervasive in “The Night House,” David Bruckner’s hyper-focused, unnervingly sure follow-up to his 2018 wilderness frightener, “The Ritual.”Fully owning every one of her scenes, Rebecca Hall plays Beth, a New York schoolteacher whose husband of 14 years, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), has just taken his own life. Now Beth wanders around the modernist lakeshore home Owen built, guzzling brandy and tortured by the mystery of his death. The only darkness in their marriage, she confesses to her best friend (Sarah Goldberg) and co-workers, was hers, the result of a traumatic experience years before.From among Owen’s things, baffling clues emerge. A creepy suicide note; architectural drawings that appear to reverse the layout of their home; pictures of strange women on his phone, all resembling Beth. Petrifying sights and sounds haunt her nights and inchoate shadows hover around her. A kind neighbor (Vondie Curtis-Hall) tries to help, but it’s clear he can’t see the bloody footprints straggling from the couple’s rowboat and heading toward the house.As the screenplay teases natural explanations for these sinister goings-on — Extreme grief? Nightmares? Mental illness? — Bruckner maintains a death grip on the film’s mood while his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, turns the home’s reflective surfaces into shape-shifting puzzle pieces. The ending is the least daring of the possible options; but Hall is spectacular, flinty and fraying in a role that leaves her often alone and, in one chilling scene, requires her to contort in disquieting ways. As Beth’s skin undulates to an unseen touch and her throat arcs alarmingly backward, Hall shows us a woman for whom terror and desire have become one.The Night HouseRated R for buried bodies and bumps in the night. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

In their first big-screen outing, the frisky rescue pups of the popular animated series “Paw Patrol” stay forever young.While many franchises aimed at children smuggle in some adult-appeal added-value — you know! for parents! — “Paw Patrol” is not one of them. The adventures of the squad of anthropomorphized rescue puppies, set in the environs of Adventure Bay, are entirely toddler-friendly and irony-free.In segments on TVs or tablets, these anodyne tales are effective babysitters. In a movie theater, they require adult oversight. To its possible credit, “Paw Patrol: The Movie” (also streaming on Paramount+) shrugs off this reality and offers only a few feeble internet-mocking japes for the entertainment of grown-ups.Yes, the computer-generated colors, overseen by the director Cal Brunker, are bright, the pups have soulful eyes (they include a newbie, named Liberty, a street-smart dog eager to join the team, which would add another female to the boy-heavy crew, yay), and the story line — in which the megalomaniacal Mayor Humdinger hijacks a cloud-storage machine to ensure blue skies over Adventure City (it’s near the bay) while the head pup Chase undergoes a crisis of confidence — is, um, a story line.To pass the time, viewers over the age of 6 may ponder some questions. Chase (voiced by Iain Armitage) hates Adventure City, where he was abandoned as a young pup. He was adopted and trained by Ryder (Will Brisbin), the little human who I guess you could call the Patrol’s Nick Fury. And Chase remains a pup, as do his colleagues. Is Adventure Bay the opposite of M. Night Shyamalan’s beach that makes you old, only for dogs? Also: The streets of Adventure City are so immaculate that the Patrol could eat kibble off them. So while Mayor Humdinger is indeed a creep, surely someone in municipal government is doing something right, no?By the time one has figured this stuff out, or not, the trim movie has ended, and the kids will have learned simple lessons about courage, team spirit and how it’s OK to fail every now and then, provided you have adequate backup.Paw Patrol: The MovieRated G. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters and on Paramount+. More

This documentary looks at the recording studio George Martin created in the Caribbean that nurtured the stars of the MTV era.Between this film and “Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm,” there seems to be a minor vogue for documentaries about recording studios this year. The pretext for doing “Under the Volcano” — about the short-lived AIR studio on Montserrat in the Caribbean — is better than solid: The state-of-the-art facility, built by the Beatles producer George Martin, was in the immediate vicinity of the Soufrière Hills volcano.Sure, it was supposedly dormant, but it wasn’t always. Sting notes that the volcanic ash from prior eruptions made the ground on the island unusually fertile and lush.Martin’s desire to create an ideal environment for musicians is touching. Although a certain patrician colonialism did seem inherent in the idea. Jimmy Buffett relates how he and his helpmates were flummoxed by the slow service at a local bar, and how he solved the issue by buying the place. Buffett seems to think it’s a charming story.Fortunately, Earth, Wind & Fire shows up for a session, and the director, Gracie Otto, switches the film’s perspective to the Montserrat residents who worked at the studio and their interactions with various stars of what became the MTV era.Filmed separately, the three members of the Police relate how the environment could both exacerbate and ameliorate tensions between the musicians during recording sessions. Almost 40 years later, it’s hilarious to see Stewart Copeland speak of Sting with still-fresh feelings of exasperation, irritation and admiration. Fans of Elton John will find the manic work ethic he applied to the album “Too Low for Zero” fascinating.It wasn’t the volcano but a hurricane in the late-80s that killed the dream. The volcano did spew a few years later, further devastating the island. Martin, to his credit, sponsored charity concerts to aid in the island’s rehabilitation.Under the VolcanoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

This documentary aspires to offer a study of education worldwide, but it lacks in economic and cultural context.As summer ends and families agonize over how to send children back to school safely, we receive an education documentary that was plainly produced before the pandemic. “The Smartest Kids in the World” aspires to offer a study of teaching methods worldwide, but the documentary (on Discovery+) contains little rigor. It’s a dippy lecture in motion.Inspired by Amanda Ripley’s book of the same name, the documentary introduces four American teenagers planning to study abroad for a year. We are told that their chosen destinations — the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland and South Korea — far surpass the United States in education. This calculation comes from PISA, an international learning assessment. On what this mystery exam contains, however, the director, Tracy Droz Tragos, spends no time at all — the first of many curious omissions.As the students become immersed in overseas high schools, the movie pairs their stories with talking-head speculations from Ripley, who rhapsodizes over the foreign systems. In Finland, class autonomy empowers students. Switzerland offers enriching pre-professional opportunities. And the value South Korea places on education inspires a drive for excellence. Ripley’s ideas are interesting, but they are conveyed in swift succession and in broad and basic terms, giving the impression of a series of flashcards dispensed for memorization.Sometimes, Ripley’s notions diverge from the students’ experiences. When Jaxon, struggling with his Dutch curriculum, chooses to drop out and return to the U.S. early, the documentary declines to probe the cultural barriers to his ambitions. Later, Brittany, studying in Finland, marvels that the country pays its students to attend college — a crucial gesture at the economics of success that is left hanging in the air, unanalyzed.Listening to students is “the key to understanding how we’re doing and what’s possible,” Ripley proclaims early in “The Smartest Kids in the World.” The documentary fails to follow this advice, and its smartest points suffer for the mistake.The Smartest Kids in the WorldNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

This animated film is a rapturously hallucinogenic daydream for mature audiences.In one of the year’s most memorable openers, Matthew and Amber, a hippyish couple voiced by Michael Cera and Louisa Krause, make love under the stars, their naked, fleshy bodies enveloped by the blank, black space that is the forest around them. It’s an eerily enchanting scene flecked with droll humor that gives way to industrial menace when the duo stumble upon a towering chain link fence hiding something both wonderful and terrible: a whole wide world of unicorns, griffins, hydras — you name it.Far from childish playthings, these mythical beings, or “cryptids,” bring our two dazed dreamers violently down to Earth.Imbued with the polychromatic sensibility of 1960s animation like Heinz Edelmann’s work on “The Yellow Submarine,” “Cryptozoo,” the new feature directed by Dash Shaw, with animation directed by Jane Samborski, is a rapturously hallucinogenic daydream for mature audiences.Following the uncanny cold opening, the film presents its real leading lady, Lauren Grey (Lake Bell), a cryptozoologist employed by an aging heiress to wrangle vulnerable cryptids and protect them from a warmongering military man who wants to weaponize them against a growing counterculture movement. These missions take our heroine around the world to desolate tundras, electric jungles — and in the gutter to sketchy strip clubs and writhing orgies.Especially valuable is the baku, a mystical pachyderm capable of sucking dreams — and nightmares — straight out of one’s head. Catastrophe is imminent should the beast fall into the wrong hands.Opposite the “real” world in which cryptids are poached and trafficked is the titular cryptozoo, an amusement park and sanctuary intended to be a steppingstone toward a more integrated world. Here, cryptids of all kinds are commodified into tourist attractions — but at least they do not live in fear.Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia), a Medusa-like being who passes for human by tranquilizing the snakes atop her head and wrapping them in a head scarf, questions Lauren’s gradualist approach. An exoticized, refugee-like figure, she’s a too-familiar symbol of marginalization that magnifies the film’s schematic political commentary. Caught between an authoritarian state that hates them and a profit-driven liberal project that dehumanizes them, the cryptids are obviously better off fending for themselves. “Jurassic Park,” another film about failed utopias, comes to mind.Yet “Cryptozoo” stands out as an aesthetically ambitious undertaking, seducing viewers with its hypnotizing hand-drawn animation and John Carroll Kirby’s pulsing electronic score. The story is interestingly windy enough, but it’s these otherworldly sounds and fluidly surreal, pastel-colored images that will leave you entranced.CryptozooNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

The neon lights are bright, and so is the spirit of this brief but loving history of Broadway.A sunset view of the New York City skyline, speckled with lights, while George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” plays. Old Broadway marquees. Moving snapshots from a Broadway of more recent past — a flight of Hogwarts wizards, the swinging and snapping Temptations, the triumphant gaze of a brown-skinned Alexander Hamilton.“On Broadway” sure knows how to work a theater-lover’s heart.The documentary, directed by Oren Jacoby, welcomes stage stans into a brief but loving history of Broadway that still reckons, if somewhat myopically, with some of the less attractive parts of its past and present. The film provides a fascinating textbooklike chronology of these stages from the 1960s until today, how economic downturns and cultural shifts changed the star status and fiscal success of the Great White Way.“On Broadway” could have easily become an extended post-pandemic “Broadway returns!” PSA, but thankfully Covid-19 is only mentioned in a brief epilogue of text. The story of these theaters’ resilience and resurrection throughout the pandemic is already there in the documentary’s account of Broadway’s long history of failures and deathbed moments, from which it always bounced back.“The key to Broadway is every day you have to pay your rent,” the director George C. Wolfe says at some point in the film, discussing the colossal financial risks that shows face and how exorbitant ticket prices have become standard. That the documentary manages to critique its subject while still declaring its love is commendable. Broadway is, after all, a commercial enterprise. The documentary weaves an account of the 2018 opening of the play “The Nap” — from awkward, stilted early read-throughs to the big premiere — into its narrative to illustrate the uphill battle that is bringing a show to Broadway. “The Nap” is transparently used as the shining example of what Broadway is at its best: It’s an American premiere without any celebrities and a transgender lead actress — and it was a critical success.But for the documentary’s heraldry of this little Broadway darling, it also isn’t that interested in it; the story of the play is briefly and haphazardly slotted into the larger narrative.The bigger problem of “On Broadway” is that it is (understandably) seduced by Broadway’s superficial glamour. So there are mostly big names interviewed, like Helen Mirren, Hugh Jackman, John Lithgow and Alec Baldwin. The archival clips also focus just on familiar faces: James Earl Jones, Bernadette Peters, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s hard for the film to see past the veil of celebrity that obscures the lesser known (and thus less glamorous) but vital theater-makers and artists who also make Broadway what it is.And yet, by the end of the film, what stuck most with me was the fresh surge of affection I felt for Broadway — even the bad shows. Even the commercial schlock. At heart “On Broadway” may be just another valentine to Broadway, but I get it; I’m also happy to bask in the warmth of those lights.On BroadwayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On Jan 6., as rioters were attacking the U.S. Capitol, Times journalists on the Visual Investigations team were downloading as many recordings of the violence as they could find.Over the next six months, the team, which combines traditional reporting techniques with forensic visual analysis, gathered over 3,000 videos, equaling hundreds of hours. The journalists analyzed, verified and pinpointed the location of each one, then distilled the footage into a 40-minute documentary that captured the fury and destruction moment by moment. The video, the longest the team has ever produced, provides a comprehensive picture of “a violent assault encouraged by the president on a seat of democracy that he vowed to protect,” as a reporter says in the piece.The visual investigation, “Day of Rage,” which was published digitally on June 30 and which is part of a print special section in Sunday’s paper, comes as conservative lawmakers continue to minimize or deny the violence, even going as far as recasting the riot as a “normal tourist visit.” The video, in contrast, shows up-close a mob breaking through windows, the gruesome deaths of two women and a police officer crushed between doors.“In providing the definitive account of what happened that day, the piece serves to combat efforts to downplay it or to rewrite that history,” said Malachy Browne, a senior producer on the Visual Investigations team who worked on the documentary.“It serves the core mission of The Times, which is to find the truth and show it.”Haley Willis, a producer on the team who helped gather the footage, said that some of the searches required special techniques but that much of the content was easily accessible. Many of the videos came from social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Parler, a platform that was popular with conservatives and later shut down. The team also collected recordings from journalists on the scene and police radio traffic, and went to court to unseal body camera footage.“Most of where we found this information was on platforms and places that the average person who has grown up on the internet would understand,” Ms. Willis said.In analyzing the videos, the team members verified the images, looked for specific individuals or groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and identified when and where each one was filmed. Then they put the videos on a timeline, which allowed them to reconstruct the scenes by the minute and track the key instigators.David Botti, a senior producer, said the team wanted to use this footage to explain how the riot happened, to underscore just how close the mob came to the lawmakers and to explore how much worse it could have gotten. For example, the investigation tracked the proximity of the rioters to former Vice President Mike Pence and an aide who was carrying the United States nuclear codes.“It’s rare to get an event of this magnitude that’s covered by so many cameras in so many places by so many different types of people filming with different agendas,” Mr. Botti said. “There was just so much video that someone needed to make sense of it.”Dmitriy Khavin, a video editor on the team, said he wanted viewers to feel like they were on the scene. But he also recognized the images were graphic, so he tried to modulate the pace with slower moments and other visual elements like maps and diagrams.“This event was overwhelming,” Mr. Khavin said. “So we worked a lot on trying to make it easier to process, so it’s not like you’re being bombarded and then tuning out.”Carrie Mifsud, an art director who designed the print special section, said her goal was similar, adding that she wanted to stay true to the video’s foundation. “For this project, it was the sequence and the full picture of events,” she said. Working with the graphics editors Bill Marsh and Guilbert Gates, she anchored the design in a timeline and included as many visuals and text from the documentary as possible to offer readers a bird’s-eye view of what happened.“My hope is that the special section can serve as a printed guide to what happened that day, where it started, and the aftermath, Ms. Mifsud said.For the journalists on the Visual Investigations team, it was challenging to shake off the work at the end of the day. Mr. Khavin said images of the riot would often appear in his dreams long after he stepped away from the computer.“You watch it so many times and look at these people and notice every detail and digest the anger,” he said. “It is difficult.” More