Movies

Here is what I see when I scroll through Instagram Reels on my phone. A woman wakes up in bed, goes to the kitchen and pours coffee, inviting me to follow along with her morning routine. One swipe, and someone is making a “viral kale pasta Caesar salad.” Another swipe reveals a demonstration of “peel-and-stick stair treads,” which I can purchase on Amazon at the link in her bio. A man feeds a puppy a lemon wedge; it is not pleased. One of my own colleagues appears, explaining why we should start taking bird flu seriously.Here’s an ad for a serum for aging skin. Here’s an ad for a nifty battery-powered sconce. Here’s someone teaching me French slang, and someone else auditioning for a Broadway show. Another morning routine, another coffee. A cat steals salami off the kitchen counter.At some point, I must have indicated to the app that these intrigued me — that’s how “the algorithm” works. But with the possible exception of bird flu they are thoroughly ordinary versions of things I’ve already seen a hundred times.Everyone’s social video feed is different, an infinite number of variations molded around each individual user. Yours might be much more sprightly or eccentric than mine. But all of our feeds are at their core tremendously banal: They’re just windows into what people do with themselves all day, repeated over and over again. And we watch, because, for some reason, we love watching humans be humans.I STARTED THINKING ABOUT REELS at a screening of a Frederick Wiseman documentary the other day. (I do not think this is a sentence that has ever been written before.) It was “Aspen” (1991), which is among the 33 newly restored films and a handful of more recent ones in the series “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution” at Lincoln Center through March 5, in an extensive retrospective that joins simultaneous retrospectives in Paris and Los Angeles.“Aspen” peeks into daily life at the Colorado ski resort town among the wealthy, mostly white, mostly older denizens who have homes there, as well as others, mostly people of color, who live in far more modest housing. Structured as a series of scenes without any single protagonist, it seems at first like a neutral portrait. But the longer you follow it, the more you realize it’s actually about the racial, religious and economic lines along which social groups divide in a barely-post-Reagan America.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

“Anora” scored big in the final minutes of the ceremony, while Demi Moore and Adrien Brody collected the top acting honors at the 30th annual Critics Choice Awards.See all the arrival photos from the 2025 Critics Choice Awards red carpet.“Anora” put some points — or, make that one big point — on the board at the Critics Choice Awards on Friday night, taking the top trophy for best picture just a month after it was totally shut out at the Golden Globes.Sean Baker, who directed the film, about an exotic dancer’s star-crossed romance with a Russian heir, used his acceptance speech to exhort the audience to support more independent movies released in theaters.“They’re going through some hard times,” Mr. Baker said. “We lost a thousand theaters during Covid — we lose them almost daily. That’s where we love to see films. Let’s see films in our local theaters, OK?”The Critics Choice ceremony, initially scheduled for Jan. 12, was postponed for several weeks because of the Los Angeles wildfires. This put the show, which was held in the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, Calif., in an unusual position: Voting had already concluded on Jan. 10, meaning the weeks that followed — marked by major events including the announcement of the Oscar nominations and a controversy over inflammatory tweets that engulfed “Emilia Pérez” and its star Karla Sofía Gascón — had no impact on the results.Ms. Gascón, who is under fire for posts that denigrated Muslims, George Floyd and the Oscars, was a no-show at the ceremony, though her co-star Zoe Saldaña, who won the supporting actress trophy, and the film’s director, Jacques Audiard, who accepted the foreign language film award, were both in attendance. “Emilia Pérez” also picked up a third trophy, for best original song.Ms. Gascón ultimately lost the best actress award to Demi Moore (“The Substance”), who won her second major televised prize after triumphing at the Golden Globes last month. The best actor award went to the “Brutalist” star Adrien Brody, furthering a comeback for the 51-year-old Mr. Brody, who has struggled to match his early success in the 2002 film “The Pianist,” for which he won the Oscar.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

The question of what celebrities will wear to an awards show always looms large before any ceremony. But it took on new significance ahead of the 30th Critics Choice Awards in Santa Monica, Calif., on Friday: After postponing the event twice because of the Los Angeles wildfires, organizers announced that a red-carpet preshow would not be part of the televised broadcast.How might that decision influence the fashion choices of the television and movie stars in attendance? Would they be riskier? More relaxed?As people started arriving, it soon became clear that absence of TV cameras on the carpet hadn’t stopped most from taking big style swings. For myriad reasons — most of them good — these 14 looks were among the most memorable from the Critics Choice Awards.Nicole Kidman: Most Humphrey Bogart!Daniel Cole/ReutersInstead of a gown, the “Lioness” and “Babygirl” actress went with a broad-shouldered Saint Laurent suit jacket, high-waist pants and a polka-dot tie, an ensemble that evoked the men’s wear of Old Hollywood.Ariana Grande: Most Jellyfish!Allison Dinner/EPA, via ShutterstockWe 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 film’s director, Walter Salles, narrates a sequence from his film, which is nominated for best picture. Its star, Fernanda Torres is nominated for best actress.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A relaxing time at home turns menacing in this scene from the Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here.”The sequence begins with Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a former congressman, playing a game with his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres). But they are interrupted by the military police, who have arrived to take Rubens in for what they say is a deposition, one from which Rubens won’t return.What was lighthearted becomes dark, both emotionally and visually, as the police begin closing curtains in the house. The joy is drained from the room, and uncertainty and fear permeate the moment, all while the adults try to make it appear, for the couple’s children, that everything is normal.The film, primarily set in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, is based on a 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the son of Rubens. Narrating this sequence, the director Walter Salles discussed switching the camera from a static position to hand-held at the moment the officers enter the scene. He said, “the camera relays the instability of the situation, pulsing with the characters.”During the tense sequence, one of the couple’s daughters, Nalu (Barbara Luz), enters the house and goes upstairs to talk to her father as he is getting dressed to leave the home for what Nalu doesn’t know will be the last time. Salles called it “a vital scene,” and said that it was “staged as the real Nalu told me it happened.”Toward the end of the sequence, we see Eunice in close-up as she stands in the doorway to see Rubens off. Salles said that it is “the first of the only two close-ups in the entire film. We saved it for the last glance between Rubens and Eunice.”Read the “I’m Still Here” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

In this documentary, the artist depicts what a more just and beautiful world might look like.In 1971, the artist Faith Ringgold received a grant to make a painting for a public institution in New York City. She decided to ask the prisoners in the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island what they wanted to see in a painting. “I want to see a road leading out of here,” one incarcerated woman told her.Ringgold took that idea and ran with it. She didn’t paint a literal road. Instead, her canvas — entitled “For the Women’s House” and installed at the prison in January 1972 — is divided into eight sections. In each, women are depicted performing jobs traditionally held by men at the time: bus driver, construction worker, basketball player, president. The road is implied: Seeing women in positions and roles they don’t always occupy can open up the viewer’s world. She might be in a prison for now, but there’s a place for her worth aspiring to beyond these walls.This was Ringgold’s imagination at work, always depicting what a more just and beautiful world might look like, particularly for the people whom the powerful prefer to ignore. Ringgold and “For the Women’s House” both appear in the documentary “Paint Me a Road Out of Here” (in theaters), directed by Catherine Gund, and hearing and seeing her talk is reason enough to see the film. Ringgold died in 2024 at 93, and is widely considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, a native New Yorker who was unflagging in her activism and commitments to dismantle racism wherever it surfaced. As a Black woman and an artist, she insisted on coupling political meaning with her work, which is suffused with curiosity and joy.“Paint Me a Road Out Of Here” is not a biographical film about Ringgold, even though you’ll learn a lot about her biography from it. The film has bigger aspirations, connecting art, prisons, activism and an expansive life. One major subject in the film is the artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, an executive producer of the film whose prison reform work often draws on her own experiences while incarcerated. Shortly after her own arrest, for example, Baxter went into labor — 43 hours while shackled to a bed.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

When Ralph Macchio was first approached about doing a “Karate Kid” series about the adult lives of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, he was skeptical.“I was like, ‘I’m a car salesman?’” said Macchio, who starred in the original 1984 film as Daniel, a teenage transplant to Southern California, who learns karate and defeats his bully, Johnny (William Zabka), on the mat.“They didn’t have me at hello,” he said.But at a meeting that lasted over three hours in the courtyard of the Greenwich Hotel, in Lower Manhattan, the creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg won him over with their vision for that series, “Cobra Kai.” It wasn’t only a nostalgia play. It also looked to introduce a whole new generation of karate kids.“As they started talking about the younger characters — Miguel, Samantha, that next generation — and the parenting part,” Macchio said, “I started leaning forward.”Now, six seasons later, “Cobra Kai,” which is set in the San Fernando Valley approximately 30 years after the events of “The Karate Kid,” will release its final five episodes on Netflix on Thursday. The series, which stars Macchio and Zabka, puts a new lens on Johnny, who begins as a deadbeat dad, haunted by his fall from grace in the 1980s, but finds new purpose in reopening the Cobra Kai dojo and reigniting his rivalry with Daniel.Macchio in the sixth and final season of “Cobra Kai.” “It ends in a way that has all those ’80s movie feels and cheers and tears, and yet sees it through a ‘Cobra Kai’ kind of lens,” Macchio said.Curtis Bonds Baker/NetflixWe 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

Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose play reunited former associates from a criminal outfit. Sparks don’t exactly fly.In “Love Hurts,” Ke Huy Quan plays a cheery, cookie-baking real estate agent who has tried hard to forget his past life as an assassin. Ariana DeBose plays a former associate who emerges from the shadows and reminds him of what he’s left behind, in a movie that does its utmost to repress any memories of both stars’ being recent Academy Award winners.“Love Hurts” is the feature directorial debut of Jonathan Eusebio, who has amassed an eye-popping list of stunt- and fight-coordinating credits (“John Wick,” “The Matrix Resurrections”). In effect, he plays that role here as well, because there is little else worth directing: The plot is a barely-there thread of random incidents designed to string together action scenes in which Quan, banishing any thoughts of his own past playing Data from “The Goonies,” demonstrates an impressive facility for martial arts. The screenwriters, for their part, find ways to weaponize unlikely items: sharpened pencil here, amethyst there. Boba straws sure are sharp.The casting is effective, in part because few would guess that Quan would show such balletic grace in hand-to-hand combat, even though he has a background in stunts from the aughts. DeBose eventually steps up as an action star, too, albeit without quite as much sparring. (She generally seems to have more munitions on hand.) But somebody should have built them more of a movie to play in. At 83 minutes, “Love Hurts” falls somewhere between making a virtue of brevity and wheezing its way to the finish line.No sooner has Quan’s Marvin Gable (his name sounds distractingly like Marvin Gaye throughout) entered his office for the day than the Raven (Mustafa Shakir), a fellow assassin from the old days hiding there, smacks him in the face. It’s Valentine’s Day at the agency, and while everyone else — including Marvin’s dour assistant (Lio Tipton) — is doing their best to be festive, Marvin, behind a closed door, is fending off a killer who has a coat full of knives and a book of original poetry. His verses suggest an emo high schooler imitating Robert Frost.The Raven wants to know the whereabouts of Rose (DeBose), whom Marvin’s kingpin brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu), had long ago ordered killed. Knuckles thought Rose was dead, but lately she has taken to sending out valentine cards. She is also Marvin’s secret love, and what drama there is turns on whether he will profess his ardor, and on whether, as he is increasingly bloodied, he will manage to keep his new life and status as “regional Realtor of the year.” The chemistry between DeBose and Quan is nonexistent, but it barely matters — the emphasis is on hurt, not love. But this self-amused movie barely leaves a mark.Love HurtsRated R. Love, lies, bleeding. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More