Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Treasure’ Review: Unearthing the Past

      by

      Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry star in a Holocaust-memory drama that uneasily doubles as a father-daughter road movie.Along with Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain,” scheduled for release this fall, Julia von Heinz’s “Treasure” is one of at least two dramas this year to follow the American descendants of Holocaust survivors on travels across Poland. Von Heinz’s film is based on a novel by the Australia-raised author Lily Brett, herself the daughter of survivors. But whatever complexities might come across in the book don’t register in a film that has been fashioned, sometimes uneasily, into a sentimental father-daughter road movie.It is 1991, and Ruth (Lena Dunham, asked to do the most serious acting of her career), a journalist, has planned a trip to Poland. Her father, Edek (Stephen Fry), who, along with Ruth’s mother, survived Auschwitz, has insisted on joining her. He says he couldn’t let his daughter visit Poland alone.Initially, “Treasure” presents Edek as a goofy lug, jocular and uninhibited. But his carefree attitude masks repressed trauma, to an extent that Fry never manages to make visceral. Unnerved by train travel, Edek hires a driver (Zbigniew Zamachowski, from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “White”) to take them from site to site. “Treasure” builds to their trip to Auschwitz, where Edek quickly takes over from the tour guide with an outpouring of memories.The crux of the film involves their visits to the Lodz apartment from which Edek and his family were exiled in 1940. Ruth wants to reclaim what was stolen from her family; Edek has a learned fear of not moving on from the past. Their difference in outlooks is a potentially powerful subject, but miscasting has blunted its impact.TreasureRated R. Intense descriptions of survival in Auschwitz. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Summer Solstice’ Review: Through Thick and Thin

      by

      A triumph of sensitivity, Noah Schamus’s debut feature tracks a rural reunion between old friends struggling to recover their bond.“When I look at you, I see an old friend,” a voice croons over the credits of the delicate relationship drama “Summer Solstice.” Much like the film in which it features, the song (by Margaux, who contributes original music) is an aching ode to love worn thin, gesturing at how time and changes in circumstance, life planning or self-perception can deepen bonds, or erode them.A triumph of sensitivity from the first-time feature filmmaker Noah Schamus, “Summer Solstice” tracks two college friends who reunite for a weekend in the verdant valleys of upstate New York. It’s been a while, and when Leo (Bobbi Salvör Menuez), a shy actor, and Eleanor (Marianne Rendón), an attention-seeking teacher, initially meet at Leo’s apartment, the pair have not seen one another since his transition.Eleanor was once the popular girl; Leo, her doting sidekick. Now on the brink of 30, the old friends should have a lot of catching up to do. But Schamus gracefully shows how, as the summer days wear on, Eleanor neglects to acknowledge Leo’s personal growth and instead grasps at the fraying threads of their old dynamic. That thread finally snaps, with two outside witnesses to its wreckage: the queer friends Joe (Yaron Lotan) and Oliver (Mila Myles, a heartthrob whose chemistry with Menuez cries out for a sequel).It’s difficult to discern what Leo saw in Eleanor; she mostly comes off as a bossy mess. But perhaps that characterization is deliberate: In declining to put us under Eleanor’s spell, Schamus is able to focus on coaxing out the magic in Leo, a onetime wallflower just beginning to bloom.Summer SolsticeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Reverse the Curse’ Review: Baseball Is Life

      by

      The writer-director David Duchovny plays a long-suffering Red Sox fan with cancer who may yet live to see the team defeat the Yankees.David Duchovny is hardly the first American novelist to find literary profundity in baseball — Bernard Malamud and Don DeLillo spring quickly to mind. Not just baseball as a thing itself — a very American thing, better still — but baseball as a metaphor for Life Itself.But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. While Duchovny is the author of several novels, he is better known as an actor and director. His new movie, “Reverse the Curse,” is an adaptation of his 2016 novel — now with a more newspaper-friendly title.This tale of father-and-son reconciliation is set against the backdrop of the long rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The year is 1978 and Ted (Logan Marshall-Green) is a struggling novelist who makes his living as a stadium peanut vendor; Marty (Duchovny) is his father, once a low-level ad man stuck in the suburbs, now dying of cancer.The movie struggles with period detail from the beginning. Green’s stringy wig and mutton chops make him look like Steve Guttenberg in the ’90s comedy “Don’t Tell Her It’s Me” if Guttenberg’s character had been a werewolf. And Duchovny’s haircut is pretty Beverly Hills, despite many of the movie’s scenes taking place in a regular-guy barbershop.Ted and Marty’s interactions are alternately earthy and highfalutin. On a road trip, they have a flatulence competition, and then one rhapsodizes over a woman whose smile makes “a rip in the fabric of time.” After Ted introduces Marty to weed, Marty is seen reading Walter Benjamin’s “On Hashish.”Duchovny’s smarts are commendable, theoretically, but the movie falls short of compelling. And for all the novelistic details that he packs in, “Reverse the Curse” moves at the pace of a self-defeating snail.Reverse the CurseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

    • 50 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Firebrand’ Review: Placid Queen

      by

      Top-shelf actors and authentic Tudor table-setting fail to quicken this glumly unfocused take on the exploits of Henry VIII’s last wife, Katherine Parr.Not until I watched “Firebrand” did I think the sight of Jude Law’s naked behind could cause me to recoil rather than rejoice. Playing a late-career Henry VIII, Law is all rutting buttocks and barely mobile bulk, an obese, paranoid ruler with a weeping leg wound where maggots wriggle in ecstatic close-up. Law (and his director, Karim Aïnouz) might be laying it on thick, but his grotesque tyrant is the only thing lifting this dreary, ahistoric drama out of its narrative doldrums.Adapted from Elizabeth Fremantle’s 2012 novel, “Queen’s Gambit,” “Firebrand” seeks to highlight Henry’s sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), the only spouse to outlive the infamous king. Studious and devout, Parr conceals her Protestant sympathies while arguing in favor of women’s education and an English-language Bible. Her clandestine support for the poet and Protestant preacher Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), however, almost proves fatal when she’s accused of heresy by an oily bishop (Simon Russell Beale).Unfolding in and around Whitehall Palace in 1547, the movie is lavishly, oppressively costumed, the actors imprisoned by fabric and a screenplay that plays fast and loose with the historical record. A plummy voice-over describes Henry’s kingdom as “blood-soaked” and “plague-ridden,” though we see little of either plasma or pustules. What we see is a queen whose downcast demeanor speaks less of a firebrand than of a wife placating a husband who isn’t above spousal decapitation if a younger, saucier option should wiggle past.That Parr deserves a spotlight is easily argued. But the woman who believed herself chosen by God to influence the King is, despite Vikander’s skills, ill-served by this meandering, glum picture. So much so that, in just two brief appearances, Doherty’s vivid portrayal of the reformist Askew makes us wonder whom the film’s title is really memorializing.FirebrandRated R for spousal abuse and celebrity skin. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Tiger Stripes’ Review: A Ferocious Change

      by

      Myth and the changes of puberty combine in Amanda Nell Eu’s fierce, funny debut feature.Decades of storytellers have framed changes in the adolescent female body as somehow mysterious and dangerous, almost sorcery. That’s why horror films like “Carrie,” “The Witch,” “The Exorcist” and “Teeth” are so spine-chilling. The theme is so well-trodden that it’s a little hard to find a fresh spin on the subject. In her feature debut “Tiger Stripes,” the director Amanda Nell Eu pulls it off.Eu’s film is set in her native Malaysia, and centers on Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal), a vivacious 11-year-old whose world revolves around her best friends Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa). Together they film TikTok dances, play in the river on the way home from school, plaster stickers everywhere and talk about bras. They pretend to be kittens and they have a club for the three of them. They are, in other words, typical tweens.Then one day, Zaffan discovers she’s begun menstruating, and overnight her life changes. In her strict religious school, she doesn’t attend prayers while on her period. Her friends suddenly see her as unclean, dirty, an outsider. They gang up on her. They call her names. And strange things start to happen to Zaffan’s body and mind, including the lingering presence of a red-eyed woman in a tree that only she seems to be able to see.“Tiger Stripes” literalizes some of the potential side effects of menstruation — mood changes, cramps, body dysmorphia and more — but it also heads in a more fanciful direction, with the idea of a stalking tiger lurking around the edges of Zaffan’s consciousness.In her village, a tiger is a figure of curiosity, with everyone wanting to look at it and film it, and a source of danger, a powerful being that can hurt you if it chooses. Zaffan begins to feel that’s what she has become; no longer is she the little girl who sometimes misbehaves but mostly follows the rules. She has stepped beyond their reach, and deserves her own kind of freedom.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

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Ride’ Review: Heists, Heifers and Hospital Bills

      by

      A father and son resort to desperate measures to save an ailing child in this Texas-set dramatic thriller.Like many movies before it, including “John Q,” and “Ambulance,” the indie thriller “Ride” is about a well-meaning father who turns to crime in a desperate bid to cover his family’s medical bills. It’s a distinctly, bleakly American crisis, one with an inevitable political subtext: If a man is forced to choose between stealing and watching his daughter die of cancer, maybe it’s the system, not the man, that’s the problem.“I’m praying for you,” John (C. Thomas Howell) is told when his request to draw on his pension is denied. In the United States, you might not get help, as “Ride” bitterly makes clear, but you’ll get plenty of thoughts and prayers.John is a rancher and former rodeo star in Texas worn down by years of hard labor, and Howell, looking much older than his 57 years, brings a Sam Elliott-type of rugged cowboy pathos to the role of the family patriarch. The writer-director Jake Allyn also stars as John’s wayward son Peter, who helps him plan a high-risk theft.But Allyn always seems a bit out of his depth trying to convey Peter’s inner anguish. Consequently, the character’s struggles with addiction and a troubled past feel like a distraction from the heart of the story, which is John’s drive to do anything to help Virginia, his ailing child (Zia Carlock). Decked out in cowboy hat and Carhartt jacket, Allyn looks the part. But only Howell truly embodies the spirit of the Old West.RideRated R for drug use, strong language and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Sony Pictures Acquires Alamo Drafthouse in Lifeline to Cinema Chain

      by

      The deal is a rare example of a traditional Hollywood studio owning a movie theater chain.Sony Pictures Entertainment is acquiring Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and will manage its 35 locations, a rare example of a traditional Hollywood studio’s owning a theater chain.The deal, announced Wednesday, followed the Justice Department’s decision in 2020 to rescind the so-called Paramount consent decrees — movie distribution rules dating to 1949 that forced the largest Hollywood studios to sell off their theater holdings. Those rules were intended to prevent studios from controlling the film business, from creation to exhibition.In 2019, the Justice Department’s antitrust chief at the time, Makan Delrahim, said changes in the entertainment industry “made it unlikely that the remaining defendants can reinstate their cartel.” Sony’s move could open the door to similar deals by other leading studios. In recent years, Netflix, the leading streaming company, has bought theaters to show films.Alamo, the seventh-largest theater chain in North America, operates theaters in 25 metro areas across the United States and has invested in distinctive programming and food offerings in an attempt to lure in moviegoers away from major multiplexes.The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sony bought Alamo from Altamont Capital Partners and Fortress Investment Group, as well as the chain’s founder, Tim League. Mr. League said the dine-in movie theater chain was “beyond thrilled” about the deal.It comes at a time of financial trouble for Alamo and for the movie theater business as a whole. Several of Alamo’s franchised locations filed for bankruptcy and closed this month, making Sony’s move a potential lifeline for the struggling chain. Alamo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2021 before a private equity firm stepped in.The cinemas will still operate under the Alamo Drafthouse brand, Sony said, though they will be managed by a newly formed division at Sony led by Michael Kustermann, Alamo’s chief executive.“Alamo Drafthouse has always held the craft of filmmaking and the theatrical experience in high esteem, which are fundamental shared values between our companies,” said Tom Rothman, the chief executive of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group.The industry has grappled with multiple headwinds in recent years, as the pandemic caused a slump in box office receipts — and, more recently, a dismal start to the summer blockbuster season — while Hollywood strikes chipped away at the number of movies that studios churned out.Ticket sales in the United States and Canada for the year to date total just over $2.8 billion, a 26 percent decline from the same period last year, according to Comscore. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Inside Out 2’ Review: A Charming Sequel to the 2015 Hit

      by

      Anxiety meets Joy in Pixar’s eager, predictably charming sequel to its innovative 2015 hit. Sadness is still around, too, as are Fear and Disgust.When a dumpling of an old lady toddles into the animated charmer “Inside Out 2,” she is quickly shooed away by some other characters. Wearing rose-tinted glasses, she has twinkling eyes and a helmet of white hair. Her name is Nostalgia, and those who wave her off — Joy and Sadness included — tell her it’s too soon for her to show up. I guess that they’ve never seen a Pixar movie, much less “Inside Out,” a wistful conceptual dazzler about a girl that is also a testament to one of the pleasures of movies: the engagement of our emotions.If you’ve seen “Inside Out” (2015), your tear ducts will already be primed for the sequel. The original movie centers on the life of Riley, a cute, predictably spunky if otherwise decidedly ordinary 11-year-old. What distinguishes Riley is that her inner workings are represented as an elaborate realm with characters who embody her basic emotions. For much of her life, those emotions have been orchestrated by Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), a barefoot, manic pixie. Once Riley’s parents move the family to a new city, though, Sadness (Phyllis Smith) steps up, and our girl spirals into depression. This being the wonderful world of Pixar, the emotions eventually find a new harmonious balance, and Riley again becomes a happy child.When “Inside Out 2” opens, Joy is still running the show with Sadness, Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) inside a bright tower called headquarters. It’s here, in the hub of Riley’s mind — an ingeniously detailed, labyrinthine expanse that’s part carnival, part industrial zone — that they monitor her on an enormous oval screen, as if they were parked behind her eyes. They track, manage and sometimes disrupt her thinking and actions, at times by working a control console, which looks like a sound mixing board and grows more complex as she ages. By the time the first movie ends, a mysterious new button labeled “puberty” has materialized on the console; soon after the sequel opens, that button has turned into a shrieking red alarm.Puberty unleashes trouble for Riley (Kensington Tallman) in “Inside Out 2,” some of it very poignant, most of it unsurprising. It’s been almost a decade since the first movie was released, but film time is magical and shortly after the story opens, Riley is blowing out the candles on her 13th birthday cake with metal braces on her teeth and a stubborn pimple on her chin. New emotions soon enter headed by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), a carrot-colored sprite with jumpy eyebrows and excitable hair. Not long afterward, Anxiety takes command both of the console and of Riley, with help from Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and my favorite, the studiously weary, French-accented Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).Directed by Kelsey Mann, this smooth, streamlined sequel largely focuses on Riley’s nerve-jangling (and strictly PG) interlude at a girls’ hockey camp, an episode that separates her from her parents while bringing her new friends, feelings and choices. (Mann came up with the story with Meg LeFauve, who wrote the screenplay with Dave Holstein.) As in the first movie, the story restlessly shifts between what happens inside Riley’s head and what happens as she navigates the world. Her new emotions find her worrying, grousing, blushing and feigning indifference, and while Joy and the rest of the older emotions are humorously waylaid at times, you can always feel the filmmakers leading Riley toward emotional wellness.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