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      In ‘The Last of the Sea Women,’ Divers Face a Vanishing Way of Life

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      The film captures the arduous work of South Korean haenyeo, who harvest seafood without diving gear, and whose traditions may be ending.In the South Korean province of Jeju lives a group of women who may, at first, sound as if they’re mythical creatures. The haenyeo (“sea women”) dive and swim in the depths of the ocean without any breathing gear, harvesting seafood like conch, urchin and octopus, which they sell to support their families. Often, haenyeo are the main earners in their households. They’ve done this for centuries.That is remarkable enough on its own. Free diving — without breathing apparatus other than your own lungs — is incredibly physically demanding and dangerous. Jellyfish and sharks lurk, and bad weather can pose a hazard, too. Some of the haenyeo dive for two full minutes without coming up for air, all while gathering marine life.But what’s more extraordinary — and what’s explored in “The Last of the Sea Women” (on Apple TV+), directed by Sue Kim — is this astonishing fact: Most of the haenyeo are in their 60s, 70s and 80s. For them, it’s both a point of pride that they’re still doing the work — “men can’t handle this job,” Soon Deok Jang, 72, notes with a grin — and a grave concern.That is because they have been at this a long time. Yet in recent decades, their numbers have dwindled from tens of thousands to about 4,000. Few young women join the community anymore, and the divers worry that their way of life is disappearing. “I feel like the haenyeo culture is melting away,” one says, referring not only their work, but also their camaraderie and empowerment.Kim takes a lightly ethnographic approach, melding an observational eye with conversations with the women. She follows the haenyeo into the sea, hangs out with them as they wait at the crack of dawn for transportation to the water and attends meetings where they discuss how to preserve haenyeo culture.And, as the film shows, there are a few encouraging signs. There’s a school for new haenyeo, though the grueling demands of yearlong training and the work itself mean only about 5 percent of graduates continue on. The film also focuses on Sohee Jin and Jeongmin Woo, who are in their 30s and the youngest by far among the haenyeo. They initially connected over that fact, and now they post videos to YouTube and Instagram to draw attention to their work.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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      ‘Lonely Planet’ Review: Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth Leave Home

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      Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth star in a muddled romance without much to say.One of the odder trends in 2024 cinema has involved romances, some of them steamy, between middle-aged women and much younger men. Anne Hathaway starred in one, Léa Drucker in another, and Nicole Kidman in not one but two more. This plot is hardly new, either in concept — Hollywood history is riddled with older men romancing ingénues — or in this specifically gendered execution, with examples from “The Graduate” to “May December” in the canon.But this year’s bumper crop is noticeable and a little inexplicable. The nature of the tale is fairly consistent: A woman is on a journey of self-understanding, and the liaison is the key to unlocking some ineffable thing she’s lost. The relationship may or may not be fated for long-term success, but it points to double standards about women’s pleasure and also can make for some pretty hot cinema.In this 2024 lineup, “Lonely Planet” is distinctive mostly for being the one starring Laura Dern. Unfortunately, despite its wattage, it pales in comparison to its cousins.Dern plays Katherine Loewe, a novelist of some renown who’s flown to Marrakesh for a chic writers residency. She’s on deadline, but also in the midst of a bad breakup. Flustered and exhausted, she is hoping to find the head space she needs to finally finish her next book.Among the other residency guests is Lily Kemp (Diana Silvers), whose first book made her an instant literary star. She’s uncertain of herself, and still young enough to be star-struck by other writers in attendance, including Katherine. And she’s also still young enough to have brought her boyfriend, Owen (Liam Hemsworth), along with her. (A seasoned writer, presumably, would know enough about the usual residency social scene to leave him back in New York.) But Lily is annoyed that Owen keeps having to leave their room at night to take calls about some deal that he’s making at his private equity firm.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 Apprentice’ Review: An Origin Story for Donald J. Trump

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      In this ribald fictional telling of a young Trump’s rise, the man responsible is the lawyer Roy Cohn, played to sleazy perfection by Jeremy Strong.Midway through “The Apprentice,” a gleefully vulgar fictional dramatization of the loves and deals of the young Donald J. Trump, the movie’s look changes. From the start, the images have had the grainy quality that you sometimes see in films from the 1970s, which is when the movie opens. Then suddenly, while Donald — a terrific Sebastian Stan — is giving a TV interview in 1980, faint horizontal lines begin slicing across the image, evoking the flicker in analog video. It’s a sly nod at the future and a brand-new reality: A (television) star is born.“The Apprentice” is arriving in theaters less than a month before the U.S. presidential election, but it would be a strain to call this energetic, queasily funny if finally very bleak portrait an October surprise. The real Trump’s reaction to the movie suggested that it had the makings of a bombshell, though the most shocking parts of the movie have been reported elsewhere. His campaign called it “garbage” the day after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and his lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to the filmmakers. Yet the only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.In broad strokes, “The Apprentice” recounts a familiar story of individual empowerment and (gilded) bootstraps through Donald, who hungers for the very best, or at least shiniest, that life can offer, be it women, clothing, swank digs or amber waves of hair. Like the hero in a Horatio Alger tale, except with, you know, family money and connections, Donald finds success partly through his association with a slithery lawyer, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, fantastic), who was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Senate’s 1950s investigations into Communist influence in the United States. Roy becomes Donald’s mentor, helping him achieve his American dream that here has the makings of a nightmare.The director Ali Abbasi thrusts you right in the scrum, opening on Donald as he navigates the outwardly mean, trash-choked streets of Times Square. It’s 1973, and New York seems to be on the ropes. Parts of the city look like they’ve been bombed, and its rats are on the march. It’s tough out there, even for ambitious go-getters. Yet Donald, who’s in his late 20s and works for the Trump family’s sprawling real-estate business — he knocks on residential tenant doors to personally collect the rent — has grandiose plans to revive the struggling city and make his fortune by giving a hulking, rundown Midtown hotel a classy makeover.Donald’s aspirations for that hotel, the Commodore, become the first in a series of ladder rungs he grasps on his upward climb through the 1970s and into the go-go ’80s. Working from a script by Gabriel Sherman, Abbasi tracks Donald’s high points and low on his transformational journey, which takes him from testy meals in his parents’ Queens home and into Manhattan’s corridors of power, its boardrooms and party dens. Whether in the back seat of a stretch limo or riding along with Roy Cohn in a Rolls, Donald is on the make and on the move. (Sherman wrote “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” a biography of the Fox News executive Roger Ailes; Abbasi’s directing credits include “Holy Spider.”)Donald’s path, as it were, proves grim and glittering by turns, and is lined with shrewd wheedling, outlandish excesses, sketchy characters and anguished family drama. There’s also somewhat of a fork in his road, symbolized by his relationship with Roy and his romance with a feisty, skeptical Czech model, Ivana (an appealing Maria Bakalova). The movie suggests that Ivana is good for Donald and maybe a potential lodestar, but he’s in thrall to Roy and to his father, Fred (an unrecognizable Martin Donovan). A tyrant who berates his grown children at the family dining-room table, especially his eldest son, Freddy (Charlie Carrick), Fred is the father Donald conspicuously fears and whom he trades in for Roy.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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      ‘Separated’ Review: Interrogating a Policy

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      The latest documentary from Errol Morris looks at the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border.When the great documentarian Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line”) has taken on overtly political subjects, he has rarely approached them from a position of express advocacy. His perspective tends to be more philosophical, even cosmic.“American Dharma” (2019) sought to understand what made the former Trump White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon tick. “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008) revolved around the photographs of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and how acts that might look so obviously like torture were in certain cases rationalized as routine. The director’s portraits of former defense secretaries — Robert S. McNamara in “The Fog of War” (2003) and Donald H. Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known” (2014) — centered on figures who were well out of office, even if, in 2003, McNamara’s reflections on the Vietnam War held up a clear mirror to Rumsfeld and his then-current approach to Iraq.Morris’s “Separated,” on the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border, comes closer to a direct intervention. The filmmaker has been open about his desire to have it released before the presidential election, and although it is now playing in theaters, it isn’t set to air on MSNBC until Dec. 7, when its relevance will be reduced. “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election?” Morris wrote on X. “It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”If “Separated” is likely too straightforward — too much of a conventional issue documentary — to be remembered as one of Morris’s richest films, it is not as if the director has abandoned his sense of profound absurdity. In the film, Jonathan White, who worked for the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services when family separations began, speaks of a period in 2017 when those actions flew under the public’s radar. “It happened for months before there was any policy to do it,” he says, “and it was going on while my own leadership maintained it wasn’t.”At the Venice Film Festival, Morris highlighted the contradiction: “If the purpose was deterrence, why do it covertly?” he said in August. (There is a hint of Peter Sellers’s Dr. Strangelove in that idea: “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret.”) But White says that “harm to children was part of the point.”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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      ‘Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story’ Review: In Blithe Spirits

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      A brisk documentary by Barnaby Thompson counters that the tuxedo-wearing playwright hid his insecurities under a platinum-plated veneer.When Ian Fleming asked him to play the villainous Dr. No in the first 007 movie, Noël Coward, one of the defining theatrical talents of the 20th century, fired off this telegram: “No, no, no, a thousand times no!”“Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story,” a brisk documentary by Barnaby Thompson, counters that Coward was closer to Broadway’s James Bond, a dashing Brit as cool and dry as a martini. As proof, the film opens with the pop star Adam Lambert reworking Coward’s titular 1932 song into a groove that pairs divinely with a collage of Coward modeling tuxedos — and would go just as well with a montage of Daniel Craig.Coward’s suave persona was itself a character he played to perfection (and exhaustion) on and offstage. Born into relative poverty, he became a self-educated sophisticate who hid his insecurities and then-criminalized homosexuality under a platinum-plated veneer.That’s as much psychology as Thompson is willing to indulge. Coward wasn’t one for pity, and neither is the film. Instead, it glides on to name-check his staggering résumé — “Private Lives,” “Design for Living,” “Cavalcade,” “Easy Virtue,” “Brief Encounter” — and parade its wonderful archival footage: travelogues of Coward cradling tiny snakes and home movies with his early boyfriend and business manager, Jack Wilson.The documentary’s biggest challenge is shaping Coward’s biography into a satisfying roller coaster of highs and lows. During Coward’s years in Jamaica, the narrator (Alan Cumming) regales us with the time Queen Elizabeth II detoured 80 miles to enjoy his beachfront vodka-and-beef bullion shooters; Cumming has scarcely finished the tale before he’s made to intone that Coward, a future knight, was “destined to die forgotten in exile.” Whenever things risk getting personal, you can practically hear Coward repurpose a threat from “Blithe Spirit,” his smash hit about a disgruntled ghost: Stop fawning on me or I shall break something.Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Terrifier 3’ Review: Still Clowning Around

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      The deaths remain grisly, but the pacing uneven in this new installment in Damien Leone’s horror franchise.Nobody is pushing horror boundaries quite like the writer-director Damien Leone. Eight years ago, his killer clown film “Terrifier” had gorehounds buzzing. Its 2022 sequel unexpectedly broke into the mainstream and to date has earned over $15 million, a huge haul for a blood-drenched exploitation slasher.Leone’s new “Terrifier” film sags under its predecessors’ trappings: a bloated running time, an unfocused script, uneven pacing. But when Leone steps on the gas with Art the Clown — the franchise’s signature psycho-butcher, fiendishly played again by David Howard Thornton — he gets a jump on Santa, delivering an extreme and gruesome early Christmas gift.“Terrifier 3” picks up five years after the previous film but at Christmas, and Art is a killing machine in a Santa Claus suit. (It helps to have seen the first two films.) Art has a new monstrous female accomplice, Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), who aids Art in inventively torturing and killing his victims, including death by intubated rodent tunnel.Back are the ferocious final girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her now college-aged brother, Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), who join new characters in fights to end Art’s unquenchable bloodthirst. Christien Tinsley, the prosthetics and makeup effects creator, is a ruthless master of decapitations and glistening viscera.Devastated stomachs are badges of honor for “Terrifier” fans, and the great gut buster here comes when Art bombs a mall Santa meet-and-greet — a scene that makes “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” the once shocking evil St. Nick slasher, look like “Miracle on 34th Street.”Terrifier 3Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We Live in Time’ Review: Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield’s Weepie

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      Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield star in this weepie romance that tries to be modern by unfolding over three intersecting timelines.Time doesn’t stand still in “We Live in Time,” a shamelessly old-fashioned weepie about love and heartache; it jitters and jumps, restlessly shifting back and forth. Set in contemporary Britain, the story follows Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) over a half-decade or so as their relationship develops around familiar milestones. They fall into bed and then into love, move in together and have a child, all while celebrating triumphs and weathering tragedies. As the years pass, they grow older, naturally, but their story is somewhat more complicated than most only because it unfolds out of chronological order.It’s a clever conceit that suggests how we experience the passage of time and, in the more successful interludes, conveys how the past, present and future inform one another. Early on, Almut whips up some eggs before waking Tobias in a sun-drenched bedroom in their picture-perfect country home. In a following sequence — which turns out to be set years before — he jolts awake in their darkened London flat and checks on the heavily pregnant Almut. Each awakening is connected by the couple’s love and ministering tenderness; intentionally or not, the scenes also signal that this movie has a real thing for eggs, fertilized and not.Written by Nick Payne and directed by John Crowley, “We Live in Time” is set during three time periods — one lasts several years, another six months and the third about a day — that have been minced and mixed together. The transitions between the different times are blunt and, at first, they’re a touch disorienting because they don’t come with the usual prompts; there are no rapidly turning calendar pages or characters mistily announcing, “I remember ….” Instead, the filmmakers keep you grounded in the separate eras partly through Tobias and Almut’s changing hairstyles, as well as through the birth of their daughter, Ella (Grace Delaney), who grows from a topic of discussion into a charming little kid.Even as the filmmakers shuffle the couple’s different epochs around in a nonlinear fashion, time demands its due, as it must. As Almut and Tobias settle in for the long haul, more than just their hair changes. Almut, who quickly proves the richer character, undergoes significant transformations, including professionally as she goes from cooking in a small restaurant to presiding over a large staff in her own Michelin-starred place. Fairly early on, she and Tobias also receive the grim news from a doctor that her ovarian cancer has returned. It’s a jolt; it is the first indication that she’s been ill, and it’s also clear that the bad news will keep on coming.For the most part, Pugh and Garfield are pleasantly watchable, and they fit together persuasively enough to convey their characters’ mutual attraction. That’s the case even if Almut is more convincingly fleshed out than Tobias, who, as the story continues, can seem like both an obstacle and an appendage to this complicated woman. Almut doesn’t just give birth and fall gravely ill — which is already a lot for any one character — she’s far more professionally engaged than Tobias, who’s as bland as his job (for a cereal company) sounds. It’s an underwritten, reactive role that, particularly as Almut’s health crisis worsens, finds Garfield too often leaning on his talent for flooding his big, beseeching eyes with tears.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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      ‘Piece by Piece’ Review: Pharrell Williams’s Life, in Legos

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      The producer and musician gets the biographical documentary treatment — with an unexpected twist.Credit where it’s due: In a sea of formulaic biographical documentaries about musicians, “Piece by Piece,” about the life of the hitmaker and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams, stands out boldly. Not because it doesn’t follow the usual narrative formula. It absolutely does: humble beginnings, rocket toward stardom, crash and then, inevitably, resurrection. That’s all so standard to the genre that it’s practically calcified.No, “Piece by Piece” pops because everyone — including Williams and the film’s director, Morgan Neville — is played by animated Legos.This choice, which was Williams’s idea, comes off less gimmicky than it sounds. Legos have proven to be remarkably versatile utility players in the past decade. They’ve performed as Ninjas and Batman and themselves ever since “The Lego Movie” (2014) opened and became both a staggering commercial hit and an instant classic. The movie was clever and inventive, but the choice of toy worked, too: Legos are recognizable, beloved and, most important, endlessly open to reinterpretation. There’s no reason not to mingle your Lego Hogwarts set with your Lego Star Wars set in the shadow of your Lego Eiffel Tower alongside your little cousin’s Duplo trucks, and that’s the fun of them — the potential for chaos and imagination.For “Piece by Piece,” the Legos are taking on a new challenge: playing real people. Animated feature-length documentaries have become more common in recent years — “Waltz With Bashir” (2008) and “Flee” (2021) are two significant examples — but here the animation is aggressively nonrealistic, on purpose. The subjects, which include Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Daft Punk, show up rendered as cylinder-headed, block-bodied minifigures, Lego parlance for the people-shaped pieces. Minifigure Williams and Minifigure Neville sit across from each other, chatting about the movie and Williams’s life. The voices are real — Neville interviewed the plethora of collaborators and artists that Williams has worked for and with — but we only ever see their Lego versions, with some distinguishing facial hair or outfit.The playfulness fits Williams’s aesthetic, which ranges from producing beats and albums for that dizzying array of artists to recording his own megahit “Happy” to collaborating on lines of streetwear, fragrances, eyeglasses, sneakers and skin care. He’s clearly bursting with ideas all the time, and that’s the narrative of the film: This is a man who never stops dreaming of ways to remix the world. It’s his playground, his sandbox. Legos fit right in.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