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      ‘Elio’ Review: Pixar’s Fantastical, Familiar World

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      An orphaned boy is whisked away on a visually wondrous cosmic adventure, but he returns home with mostly reassuring lessons.Colors pop, lines flow and an alien world shimmers like the Vegas strip after dark in Pixar’s latest, “Elio,” a lackluster science-fiction adventure about a lonely boy and extraterrestrials who come in peace, except when they don’t. By turns appealing and drearily familiar, the movie offers the expected visual pleasures and characters who range from the gently exaggerated to the hyperbolic. Some have rubbery countenances and curious appendages; others have enormous eyes that water with emotion. Yours may glaze over in boredom.A morality tale with far-out friendlies and a glowering, growling Marvelesque villain, “Elio” has predictable Pixar bright spots, but the story is a drag. It tracks the title character (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), an 11-year-old who’s been recently and mysteriously orphaned. He now lives with his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force Major who monitors space junk at the coastal California base where she’s stationed. Loving yet clueless, she is at a loss on how to raise a child, especially one who’s unhappy and feels out of place with her or anywhere. (Her parenting book is studded with a rainbow of sticky notes.) Less comically, Olga is especially ill-equipped to deal with a grieving child, a failing that she shares with the filmmakers.Orphans are a storybook staple — from Disney’s original “Snow White” to “Lilo & Stitch” — though not on Planet Pixar. Yet to judge by this movie’s at times abruptly fluctuating tones and eagerness to dry every tear, Elio’s greatest issue isn’t that his parents are dead but that the filmmakers are uncomfortable with his grief. Early on, while out with his aunt, he hides under a table and weeps. Soon, though, the story has revved up, and he’s humorously sending messages into space begging to be taken away from Olga, Earth, everything. “Aliens abduct me!!!,” Elio scrawls on a beach, before lying down and grinning hopefully at the sky.After some more narrative busyness, character development and scene changes, the filmmakers grant Elio’s wish and send him off on his hoped-for cosmic adventure. One evening, while Olga is at work and Elio waits for deliverance, he is pulled from the beach on a beam of light, an image of alien abduction with a suggestively rapturous religious undertone. Once he achieves liftoff, the movie starts to as well. It grows more vividly hued and nicely unbound, and Elio is soon careering through bursts of color and graphic forms, much like the astronaut in the oft-copied lysergic star gate sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Elio predictably exits our solar system and ends up in the Communiverse, a sparkly, kaleidoscopic alternative realm where the directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi modestly cut loose. (The script is by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones.) A jumble of landscapes rich in lightly phantasmagoric embellishments, it functions as a kind of hangout and otherworldly United Nations for extraterrestrials. There, Elio zips past terrains with an array of biomorphic and geometric forms. He also, via a translator, chats up others, including a talking, floating blue supercomputer, Ooooo (Shirley Henderson), a kind of A.I. Jiminy Cricket, if one that tends to look like a dialogue bubble with eyes and a mouth.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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      ‘28 Years Later’ Review: Danny Boyle Revives His Monsters

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      The director returns to the postapocalyptic Britain he conjured in his 2002 movie “28 Days Later,” this time with a father and son running from flesh-eaters. Mom joins in, too.After more than two decades of dipping in and out of genres that have taken him from the Milky Way to Mumbai, Danny Boyle has returned to the juicily gruesome world of consuming violence, human and otherwise, with “28 Years Later.” Once again, flesh-eating creatures are wandering, crawling and, most worryingly, running amok, ravaging every conceivable living being. Humanity remains on the run with some souls safely barricaded in isolation. It’s a sensible precaution that — along with all the gnawed bodies, shredded nerves and broken relationships — makes this futuristic freakout seem as plausible as it is familiar.Pitched between sputtering hope and despairing resignation, the movie is a classic boys-into-men coming-of-age story updated for the postapocalypse and future installments. On a lushly green British island, a ragtag collection of adults and children are doing their best to keep the tattered remains of civilization intact. Inside a protected hamlet, they live and congregate much as their peasant forbears might have centuries earlier. They share precious resources; nuzzle sexily in the dark. There are threats and some provocative mysteries, like the figure who appears in a ghoulish mask that’s suggestive of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”This is the third addition to a cycle that opened with “28 Days Later” (2002), a violent parable also directed by Boyle in which humanity is stricken into near-oblivion. (The 2007 follow-up, “28 Weeks Later,” was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.) The 2002 movie opens in Britain with animal-rights activists set on freeing some lab chimps. Even after an on-site scientist helpfully explains that the animals are infected with rage, the activists keep blundering toward doom. As they restrain the scientist, he shouts, “You’ve no idea—” just before a chimp chows down on a would-be liberator in a flurry of blood-red imagery.Like the new movie, “28 Days Later” was written by Alex Garland and draws on different influences, most obviously zombie movies. (Boyle directed the screen adaptation of Garland’s novel “The Beach”; they also collaborated on “Sunshine,” a very different dystopian fantasy.) In interviews, Boyle readily discussed the inspirations for “28 Days Later,” realistic and otherwise, citing the Ebola virus as well as “The Omega Man” (1971), a thriller set in the wake of germ warfare. Even so, he pushed back against genre-pigeonholing “28 Days Later.” “See, it’s not a film about monsters — it’s a film about us,” he told Time Out. That our monsters are always us is as obvious as the all-too-human face of Frankenstein’s creature.Whether zombies or not, the infected in “28 Days Later” kill indiscriminately, much like the undead that George A. Romero first sicced on us in 1968 with “Night of the Living Dead.” One striking, nerve-thwacking difference between these generations of insatiable ghouls is their pacing. Along with Zack Snyder in his zippy 2004 remake of Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” Boyle popularized the now-familiar fast zombie. Romero’s tend to stagger and lurch with their arms raised like scarily ravenous toddlers, moving slowly enough for some of their swifter would-be victims to escape, though not always. Quickening the pace of the creatures added genre novelty, and it expressed the real world’s ever accelerating rhythms.The pace complemented Boyle’s filmmaking, which tends toward speed. That’s very much in evidence in “28 Years Later,” which opens with some pro forma background about the state of the world (it’s still bad) and a freaky episode in a house that echoes the opener in the previous movie. The scene here begins with a group of obviously terrified children shut up in a room watching “Teletubbies” on a TV. It’s an unsettling scene that grows all the more disturbing as noises from outside the room grow progressively louder. As the thumps and panicked voices rise, increasing and then converging, the editing rapidly goes into overdrive and grows choppy, finally becoming a grim churn of tots, Teletubbies and flesh-eaters.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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      ‘Shanghai Blues’ Review: Slapstick Fun in a 1984 Tsui Hark Picture

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      This newly restored screwball comedy is a buoyant romp. The director revisits and refines the techniques used here in his later work in other genres.By the time he directed “Shanghai Blues” in 1984, the protean Hong Kong cinema maestro Tsui Hark had demonstrated a consistently delight-inducing facility in any genre he touched — he had made a couple of impressive wuxia” (swordplay) films, each unusual; his “Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind” was, implications of its title notwithstanding, a harrowing crime picture; and he had even made a cannibal-themed feature.With “Blues,” Tsui found a slapstick comedy register that he would continue to refine and expand over his career, one that would inform even the more serious period epics he would make in the future. (And his splendid work continues; this year’s relatively unheralded “Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants” is great fun.) “Blues” begins with a kiss under a bridge in the late 1930s and picks up again after World War II.Kenny Bee plays an optimistic songwriter who’s also a bit of a klutz (an early gag has him repeatedly crowning his bandmates with the bell of a tuba). Sally Yeh is the winsome and amiable character known as Stool, who’s living next door to the ambitious and tetchy songstress Shu-Shu, who’s both commanding and funny as portrayed by Sylvia Chang.“Blues,” playing now in a 40th anniversary restoration, is a constant charmer. Watching it is a buoyant experience even when the humor is a bit tasteless, including a bit involving mistaken sex partners during a blackout. Tsui’s affection for his characters rings as clear as his love for screwball comedy antecedents; while the film won’t commit to a “Design for Living” denouement, Ernst Lubitsch would recognize a few of his touches here, even if they’re delivered with cinematic exclamation points.Shanghai BluesRated PG. In Cantonese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘SVU’ Star Mariska Hargitay on Her Mother Jayne Mansfield

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      Mariska Hargitay was at home, and she was sprinting up the stairs, bounding between the corners of her very full life. I had to hustle to keep pace.She checked in with her oldest son — tall, polite, home from his first year at Princeton — and supervised the setup of an engagement party she was hosting for her goddaughter. Gardeners buzzed about the terraces of her Manhattan penthouse. She apologized, superfluously, for the noise.Her latest obsession, a family heirloom grand piano that had recently entered her apartment via crane, dominated the living room, with a custom “M” bench, courtesy of her husband, the actor Peter Hermann (“Younger”). “That’s my next thing — I’m going to learn to play soon,” Hargitay vowed.Another dash and we were on the floor below, a warren of cozy offices, painted in jewel tones, with overstuffed couches and muscular art by Annie Leibovitz. Tucked on a bookshelf were some of Hargitay’s awards. She has earned Emmys for playing Olivia Benson, the beloved “Law & Order: SVU” hardass, and for producing the 2017 documentary “I Am Evidence,” about the backlog of rape kits.This is where Hargitay had conceived, edited and even shot some of her newest and perhaps most life-altering project, the documentary “My Mom Jayne.” It’s at once an unflinching portrait of her mother, the 1950s star and pinup Jayne Mansfield, who died when Mariska was 3; a homage to her father, the bodybuilder and actor Mickey Hargitay; and an investigation into her own clouded and secretive origins. Directing the film, which will air June 27 on HBO, and proclaiming her story has unlocked something profound for Hargitay, 61.“I am so clear now about the truth,” she said. “This big haze came off — a veil of fear. And now I just feel so much at peace. It’s like a miracle to me to feel this way. I never thought I could.”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 Queen of My Dreams’ Review: From Karachi to Toronto

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      Fawzia Mirza’s amiable feature debut traces the lives of a mother and her daughter in two coming-of-age tales.The complicated bond between Mariam (Nim­ra Bucha), a traditionally minded Pakistani mother in Canada, and her daughter Azra (Amrit Kaur), an acting student, is at the heart of Fawzia Mirza’s “The Queen of My Dreams.” A vibrant dramedy, the film takes place over three time periods and settings as it tracks Mariam’s shift from youthful pleasure seeking to the conservative values she swears by — and foists upon her queer daughter — later in life.The film opens in Toronto in 1999 as Azra and Mariam are butting heads. It then flashes back to two eras: 1969, where a pert, adolescent Mariam (Kaur again, with a bouffant) is falling in love in Karachi; and 1989 in Nova Scotia, where Mariam hosts Tupperware parties while a preteen Azra (Ayana Manji) struggles as a Muslim among her Christian classmates.In granting equal screen time to the two women, the film shows how their lives expand and contract. Scenes of Mariam’s life in Pakistan buzz with 1960s Bollywood energy, a stark contrast to her staid middle age in Canada. The juxtaposition of the lifestyles builds a nostalgic mood and gestures at a generation of women transformed by societal pressures and familial anxieties.Yet rather than intersperse the three periods, “The Queen of My Dreams” treats the earlier eras as extended flashbacks — an awkward structural choice. The fragmentation often seems to blunt the film’s emotion where it should be deepening it. But Kaur acts as an amiable anchor, gamely embodying a mother and a daughter across time periods.The Queen of My DreamsNot rated. In English and Urdu, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Familiar Touch’ Review: Living With Dementia

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      In this empathetic debut feature, Kathleen Chalfant plays Ruth, a woman who moves into an assisted living facility and adapts to her new life.From the opening scene of Sarah Friedland’s empathetic debut feature “Familiar Touch,” Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) radiates a magnetic yet dubious sense of poise that undergirds the film’s careful balance of tragedy and hope.Ruth, a woman with dementia who lives in a charming cottage-style home, prepares sandwiches and gets dolled up for an unknown visitor. A sheepish younger man joins her for lunch, and by her coy banter and playful pursed lips, we slowly realize that Ruth believes she is on a date.The man, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin), turns out to be her son, making her display of sexuality feel uncomfortable — if, at the same time, a good reminder that older people have libidos, too. From the awkwardness of this attempted flirtation comes a poignant realization. Steve has arrived to move Ruth to an assisted living facility, provoking a sad, funny, confusing process of adaptation that doesn’t sensationalize Ruth’s tribulations.Movies about dementia tend to do that: Think of the cruel reality-warping horrors of “The Father” or the magical weepie “The Notebook.” “Familiar Touch,” which sees Chalfant acting alongside the real inhabitants of an assisted living community, is a series of naturalistic vignettes that showcase Ruth’s struggle to maintain her identity in the face of a new life that she believes poses a threat to her sense of dignity.The film is primarily a character study, subtly revealing details about Ruth’s past through her interactions with her new surroundings and neighbors (her lively responses to weekly medical exercises or taking command of the residential kitchen). Friedland does gesture at the larger context as well: the guilt of patients’ children; the beautiful yet fraught bonds forged between residents’ and their caretakers (Carolyn Michelle, who plays Ruth’s handler, is a quiet standout).In the end, “Familiar Touch” reveals itself to be less about the agonies of change than in the concessions we make to feel closer to our loved ones and ourselves.Familiar TouchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Everything’s Going to be Great’ Review: Show People

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      A theater family sorts out its offstage drama in a coming-of-age movie starring Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney.In the Smart family — a roving clan of four who make their living mounting regional theater productions, and whom we first encounter in Ohio in 1989 — Gilbert and Sullivan are typical car-song material. All four Smarts know the lyrics. The protagonist, Les (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), the younger of the two adolescent sons, converses with the ghosts of Noël Coward, Ruth Gordon and Tallulah Bankhead. Les has a habit of walking onstage during performances and taking a place as a bit player in ensemble scenes, even though he isn’t supposed to be there.That description might give you some sense of “Everything’s Going to Be Great,” a coming-of-age film at once endearing in its specificity and overly previous in its strategies. Directed by Jon S. Baird (“Tetris”) and written by Steven Rogers (“I, Tonya”), whose father worked in regional theater, the film follows the Smarts as they grapple with internal tensions over art, money, identity and religion.The father, Buddy (Bryan Cranston), whose Broadway dreams never came true, is confident that a successful summer season at a New Jersey theater will propel them to a sturdy gig in Milwaukee. Les, a proud oddball who talks back to a school bully by quoting from “Hair,” is fully committed to Buddy’s vision. Macy (Allison Janney), the matriarch, has more of a pragmatic streak. Derrick (Jack Champion), Les’s older brother, who’s spent years going along with the thespian stuff, just wants to play football and lose his virginity.By turns heartfelt and, especially in the ghost tête-à-têtes, irksome, the movie is helped substantially by its cast, especially Cranston, who brings a welcome sincerity to a quixotic, potentially cloying character.Everything’s Going to be GreatRated R for teenage fumblings, adult infidelity. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bride Hard’ Review: Taking on Baddies at Her Best Friend’s Wedding

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      Rebel Wilson gamely plays the role of secret agent and bridesmaid in this action-thriller mixed with a rom-com.If ever there were two genres that traffic in too-muchness, it’s the destination-wedding rom-com and the secret agent action-thriller. So call it fate that over-the-top meets outlandishly excessive in “Bride Hard,” a spoofy genre mash-up whose raison d’être can be boiled down to this line, uttered late in the proceedings: “She’s using the chocolate fountain as cover.”The “she” is Sam, a.k.a. Agent Dragonfly, who leaps into muscular, gravity-defying action to take on a group of interloping baddies at her best friend’s wedding, all while wearing a frilly bridesmaid’s dress. She’s played to perfection by the ever-game Rebel Wilson, leading a cast that leans earnestly and ably into the escalating absurdity.Working from a screenplay by Shaina Steinberg, the director Simon West, who until now has focused mainly on such outings in mayhem and stunt work as “The Mechanic” and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” lands this hybrid beast in the realm of the sort-of caper and the not-quite romp.Sam is a devoted spy whose preposterous cover story is one of the screenplay’s funnier jokes, and who’s barely had time to participate in the countless bachelorette rituals for the bride-to-be Betsy (a high-spirited Anna Camp). Feeling neglected, Betsy has demoted her bestie from maid of honor to bridesmaid — much to the delight of the groom’s sister, a control freak expertly brought to passive-aggressive life by Anna Chlumsky.The extravagant nuptials, on a private island off the coast of Savannah, Ga., grind to a halt with the arrival by speedboat of a gruff mercenary named Kurt (Stephen Dorff), who is in pursuit of a cache of gold. Cue an assortment of purposely ridiculous chases and explosions, and the chance to see Sam wield hair supplies as weapons and go mano a mano with Kurt’s henchmen and the weaselly best man (Justin Hartley). The rest of the wedding party is a collection of one-note types played with conviction, among them the sunny groom (Sam Huntington) and a sex-obsessed bridesmaid (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).A smorgasbord of unconvincing danger and semi-schmaltzy lessons in friendship, “Bride Hard” is rarely as funny as it could be. Opportunities for satirical digs go mostly unplumbed, although you might note that a key prop is a Civil War cannon. You might also note a glaring continuity gaffe in the final sequence, an apt reminder not to give any of this a second thought.Bride HardRated R for sexual references and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More