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The sequence is emblematic of a significant shift in how Asian languages are featured in American film and TV. Just a few years ago, when his Korean dark comedy “Parasite” won the 2020 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, the writer and director Bong Joon Ho ribbed Americans for their aversion to “the one-inch-tall […] More
The actress hasn’t said so, but some internet users think she did. Plus, a bleak week for small fashion brands and wedding dresses for fashion-forward brides.Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, followers of events known for being fashion spectacles — the Oscars, the Met Gala, Eurovision — have watched them become venues for making sartorial as well as political statements about the conflict.The Cannes Festival in France has not been immune to this trend. Several attendees have used the red carpet on the Croisette to show their support for Israelis or Palestinians during the film festival, with some wearing sashes saying “bring them home,” referring to Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, and others wearing red pins calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.Off the carpet, the model Bella Hadid ate ice cream near the beach in Cannes wearing a dress made of the material used for kaffiyehs, the scarves long seen as a symbol of Palestinians solidarity and identity.But those obvious displays have not generated as much buzz as the dress that the actress Cate Blanchett wore on Monday to the premiere of “The Apprentice,” a docudrama about the early life of former President Donald J. Trump.At first glance the gown — a piece from the designer Haider Ackermann’s one-off spring 2023 couture collection for Jean Paul Gaultier — looked like a simple black dress worn with a pearl necklace across the length of Ms. Blanchett’s bare shoulders.But as she began to walk the carpet, flashes of other colors emerged: The back of the dress was a pink so pale that it appeared white, and the gown had an emerald green interior lining that Ms. Blanchett repeatedly revealed by lifting its train. The dress had been significantly altered since it appeared on the runway, where it had a knee-length hemline, a lime-green back and a lavender lining.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
Sophie Dupuis’s sensitive French Canadian drama takes a turn when a young, starry-eyed drag queen (Théodore Pellerin) opens up to questionable figures.The glittering “Solo” centers on Simon (Théodore Pellerin), a charming 20-something making a name for himself as a drag queen in Montreal. Simon’s life is glamorous and filled with loving support from the other performers who work at his nightclub; and from his family, particularly his older sister, Maude (Alice Moreault), his confidante and a costume designer who makes dresses for Simon’s drag alter ego, the blonde bombshell Glory Gore.The third collaboration between Pellerin and the writer-director Sophie Dupuis (“Family First”), the film takes a turn from its blissful beginnings when Simon, starry-eyed and tragically naïve, opens his heart to questionable figures. His mother, Claire (Anne-Marie Cadieux), a famous opera singer who abandoned the family years ago to pursue her career, re-enters Simon’s life. Then there’s the gaslighter, Olivier (Félix Maritaud), a new queen at the club whom Simon starts dating.Bitter disappointments and cruel manipulations seem to conspire to dim Simon’s light and idealism — his mother proves distant and superficial, cutting their meet ups laughably short. Then Olivier isolates Simon from his family, takes credit for his rise in the drag scene and smothers his confidence.Simon’s drag performances, captured with sumptuous visuals, are peppered throughout these intrigues, allowing us to register his anxieties through the lens of his act. Before an audience, the tensions between him and Olivier, with whom he performs as a duo, are magnified; so is the agitation caused by his mother, his artistic role model, when she finally attends one of his shows.“Solo” is a subtle snapshot into a gay man’s profound yet familiar upheavals. Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.SoloNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More
This warm remembrance of a Times Square legend is too careful with its iconoclastic heroine.“Queen of the Deuce,” a curiously flat recounting of the life and titillating times of the adult-theater entrepreneur Chelly Wilson, offers a sadly conventional profile of one of the most vividly eccentric characters in the history of New York City.A Greek Jew who snagged one of the last boats to New York in 1939, a whisker ahead of the Nazi occupation, Wilson wasted no time transforming her hot-dog stand into a thriving pornography empire. From the late 1960s to the ‘80s, she played a pivotal role as the owner of multiple theaters, an importer of pornographic films and, eventually, a founder of her own production company.Ensconced in her apartment above the all-male Adonis Theater, Wilson, who died in 1994, held court among entertainers, Mafia dons, a roster of possible female lovers and shopping bags stuffed with cash. (Her Mob connections are as politely glossed over as her intriguing private life.) Cozy interviews with her children and grandchildren reveal a woman who rarely spoke of her past, including an arranged marriage to a man who repulsed her. Home movies, photographs and a smattering of surviving friends project a severe yet gregarious woman who rarely smiled and who loved to gamble. Her Friday poker nights were the hottest ticket in town.Tastefully directed by Valerie Kontakos, “Queen of the Deuce” is the story of a shape-shifter: a twice-married gay woman, a Sephardic Jew who celebrated Christmas (albeit with surveillance monitors parked behind the tree). The style is stilted, the look rudimentary, with Abhilasha Dewan’s cheeky animation supplying an occasional visual lift. Yet as Wilson’s former errand boy guides us around her onetime fiefdom — conjuring an area fizzing with smut until doused by Giuliani — we may sense the milieu, but its matriarch remains stubbornly indistinct.Queen of the DeuceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More
The motion-capture acting in “The Planet of the Apes” movies tries to preserve the magic of the physical world amid all the effects in a big budget franchise.He’s a goofy little ape in a puffer vest, and he’s giving us a thumbs-up. This was just a small moment of levity in an otherwise grim and operatic film, the 2017 epic “War for the Planet of the Apes.” But it stuck with me. In the midst of a dire war for the fate of humanity, we watch this misfit creature amble into the frame, dwarfed by a magisterial orangutan on one side and the stately ape revolutionary Caesar on the other, both preparing for battle. He turns to Caesar for approval, waits for an awkward beat and flashes his thumbs-up. I cannot overstate how charming it is.Up to that point, the new “Planet of the Apes” movies had mostly been Caesar’s show, with two films focused on his journey from laboratory animal to building a peaceful simian civilization in California’s Muir Woods. The films follow his evolution patiently — in part, perhaps, because they are following the steps of an actor’s process. Caesar is a digitally rendered ape, but he is played, via performance-capture technology, by Andy Serkis, the man whose bravura turn as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films elevated him to become more or less the Laurence Olivier of motion-capture acting. Some 10 years later, Caesar was Serkis’s opportunity to build a mo-cap character from scratch in front of an audience, proving just how well an actor could translate legible humanity to a CGI animal. Part of what’s so remarkable about the 2010s “Apes” films was how much they conditioned viewers to thrill at close-ups of this chimpanzee’s eyes, the performance of impossible consciousness behind them.So it was a big deal when Steve Zahn, playing that goofy little ape, snatched his own small moment. The first thing that stood out was its physicality — a wholly digital creature exhibiting unmissably human comic timing. Second was the playfulness: All this technology was being marshaled not for some action sequence or alien vista but for one funny monkey. What was most incredible, though, was its sheer ordinariness as a piece of film acting. Zahn strolled into a series dominated by Serkis’s performance and made one little attention-grabbing gesture — the sort of thing that usually happens organically, between humans on a film set. Yet here it was, rendered in pixels, gesture by gesture: The simple miracle of a stolen scene.The entire recent “Apes” universe, from 2011 onward — which now includes this month’s new “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” — was designed to let this kind of high-tech realism thrive. The films shoot partly on location, rather than using totalizing digital environments. They’re chockablock with action, but their most compelling work takes place in intimate conversation, ape to ape. Between the digital disposability of Marvel’s multiverse and the paint-by-numbers CGI smoothing of seemingly everything on Netflix, the “Apes” films remind us that we once imagined a more humane future for these tools — the re-creation of reality, rather than its replacement. To save cinema from oblivion, maybe we should take another look at the mo-cap actor.You’ll already know motion capture, or performance capture: It’s that thing where actors typically wear ridiculous bodysuits and get covered with little dots, so their movements can be recorded and then applied to computer-generated 3-D figures. When this technology emerged in the movies around the start of this century, it was by turns revelatory and embarrassing. For every Davy Jones — Bill Nighy’s menacing octopus pirate from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” — there was some unholy nightmare like Tom Hanks in “Polar Express” or Jar Jar Binks, paragliding through the uncanny valley.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
Based on the real life of the pioneering ophthalmologist Ming Wang, this movie follows the character’s struggle to see inside himself.Ming Wang, the real-life physician whose biography is the basis for this fictional feature, is a Nashville-based ophthalmologist whose degree in laser physics has presumably been a boon in his work restoring sight to visually impaired patients, many of whom are children.As is the custom with inspirational medical movies, however, the new film “Sight,” directed by Andrew Hyatt, leans hard into uplift — it provides only the narrative-necessary minimum of the science. Wang’s achievement in developing innovative technology is central to one of the stories here, yes. But the dominating narrative is one of personal growth.Weaving several decades’ worth of flashbacks into its action, otherwise set in 2006, the movie shows Wang’s traumatic childhood in China’s Hangzhou province, where he and his friend Lili are terrorized by the Cultural Revolution’s Red Guard. He wants to be a doctor like his father, who tells him his best “chance” in life is to “become a musician.” You don’t hear that too often.Brilliant at school, Wang is able to make his way to M.I.T., but even in the elite educational environments he passes through, he’s discouraged from pursuing his dreams of becoming a physician. These trials leave Wang with a defensive ego and a tendency to shut out others emotionally. He’s forced to deal with failure and to learn to trust.All of this is laid out in competent commonplace fashion, with the principal actors Terry Chen, Greg Kinnear and the always welcome Fionnula Flanagan displaying the expected professionalism.Wang has written a memoir in which he discusses his Christian faith in some detail. The film proper does not. But the faith-friendly distributor, Angel Films, has appended to the feature a “Pay It Forward” coda (similar to that on their 2023 release “Sound of Freedom”) in which the real Wang testifies to his spirituality.SightRated PG-13 for thematic material, mild violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More
Garfield, voiced by Chris Pratt, is joined by Samuel L. Jackson as his father, in an inert big-screen adaptation that fundamentally misunderstands its protagonist.Since Garfield’s debut in the 1970s, Jim Davis’s orange tabby has become one of the most successful brands to evolve from the humble American comic strip. And fortified by a reliable stream of cartoon shows, video games and a couple of bland Bill Murray-voiced films in the early 2000s, Garfield is now one of the more enduring images of the American imagination.Even if you’ve never consumed Garfield in any prolonged form, you probably know who he is and what he represents. (Mondays: reviled. Lasagna: beloved. Effort of any kind: a fundamental misunderstanding of life.)It’s particularly odd, then, that the latest iteration of the Garfield empire, the animated “The Garfield Movie,” somehow doesn’t. The film, directed by Mark Dindal, is an inert adaptation that mostly tries to skate by on its namesake. In other words, it’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all.Part of this can be attributed to the voice — Chris Pratt, an overly spunky casting choice that was doomed from the start — but there’s also a built-in defect to the very concept of the big-screen Garfield treatment. An animated, animal-centric children’s movie tends to require a narrative structure of action-packed adventure, — the antithesis of Garfield the cat’s raison d’être.Instead, after a perfunctory origin story of Garfield’s life with his owner, Jon (Nicholas Hoult), and dog companion, Odie (Harvey Guillén), the film is quickly set into adventure mode when Garfield and Odie are kidnapped by a pair of henchman dogs working for a vengeful cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). Garfield’s estranged father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), quickly comes to the rescue, but it’s Vic that Jinx is really after. After Jinx demands a truck full of milk as payment for a botched job she took the fall for, Vic, with Garfield and Odie in tow, are off to find a way to pay his debt.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
Glen Powell stars in one of the year’s funniest, sexiest, most enjoyable movies — and somehow it’s surprisingly deep, too.If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now. It’s got the cheeky verve of a 1940s screwball rom-com in a thoroughly contemporary (and slightly racier) package. I’ve seen it twice, and a huge grin plastered itself across my face both times.That’s why it’s a shame most people will see it at home — Netflix is barely giving it a theatrical release before it hits streaming even though it’s the sort of movie that begs for the experience of collective gut-splitting joy. Oh well. If you can see it in a theater, it’s worth it. If not, then get your friends together, pop some popcorn and settle in for a good old-fashioned movie for grown-ups.The director Richard Linklater and Powell collaborated on the “Hit Man” script, which is loosely based on Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a faux hit man who actually worked for the Houston Police Department. In the movie version, Gary (Powell) is a mild-mannered philosophy professor in New Orleans with a part-time side gig doing tech work for law enforcement. One day, he is accidentally pulled into pretending to be a hit man in a sting operation, and soon realizes he loves playing the role.Or roles, really: The more Gary gets into it, the more he realizes that each person’s fantasy of a hit man is different, and he starts to dress up, preparing for the part before he meets with the client. (If this movie were solely constructed as a de facto reel demonstrating Powell’s range, it would work just fine.) Then, one day, pretending to be a sexy, confident hit man named Ron, he meets Madison (Adria Arjona, practically glowing from within), a put-upon housewife seeking his services. And everything changes for Gary.A great deal of the enjoyment of “Hit Man” comes from simply witnessing Powell and Arjona’s white-hot chemistry. Seeing Powell transmogrify from nerdy Gary to five o’clock shadow Ron and back again is both hilarious and tantalizing, while Arjona has a big-eyed innocence crossed with wily smarts that keeps everyone, including Gary, guessing. Multiple layers of deception keep the movie from feeling formulaic — you’re always trying to keep track of who thinks what, and why. Eventually, when “Hit Man” morphs into a kind of caper comedy, part of the joy is rooting for characters as they make choices that are, at best, flexibly ethical. In doing so, we get to be naughty too. In a movie starring a philosophy professor, that’s especially funny, a wry joke on us all.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
