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      ‘Fancy Dance’ Review: The Search for a Sister

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      This debut feature about a missing woman on an Oklahoma reservation is an imperfect but palpably emotional portrait of desperation and hard-won hope.“Fancy Dance,” the debut feature film from Erica Tremblay, begins where most films of its ilk might find their story’s second act. Tawi, a mother of a teenage daughter, has been missing for weeks. Search parties have been combing the fields, and her sister, Jax (Lily Gladstone), has struggled to get the F.B.I. to assist.The ghost of Tawi, in other words, is a fixture from the start and hovers over the film. The empty space of her — we glimpse her only in photos and fliers — is intentional: This story about the search for a missing woman on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation of Oklahoma is not a mystery thriller, and the film is not meant to milk dramatic tension from her disappearance. Rather, Tawi’s case is all too common, and the entry point to what is ultimately a portrait of desperation, poverty and hard-won hope.Hope, or the illusion of it, is worth fighting for because of Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), Tawi’s daughter, whom Jax has been taking care of since Tawi went missing. The two are close, forcing Jax between two poles: the hardened exterior that reservation life necessitates (Gladstone is imperfect, but well suited to Jax’s steel-encased tenderness) and the desire to preserve Roki’s innocence. Even as they commit petty crimes to scrounge up cash and continue the search, Jax assures Roki that her mother will be at the upcoming annual powwow, where there is a mother-daughter dance.Tremblay’s film is not always graceful — the dialogue and acting can be stilted, and one hopes for a little more formal rigor — but it’s a strong debut undergirded by a palpably real emotional core and an un-showy sense of the reality of reservation life. Jax is often confronted by a push and pull in the same room: those ready to pounce and those offering to help. Each stance is born out of the same understanding — that the world is harsh, and not everyone can survive it.Fancy DanceRated R for language, some drug content and sexual material. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Daddio’ Review: Two for the Road

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      Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson outclass a humdrum script as two people who talk — and talk — in a New York City taxicab.Handicapped by more than a terrible title, Christy Hall’s “Daddio,” set almost entirely inside a New York City taxicab, tries too hard and lasts too long. A synthetic encounter between a gabby cabby and his self-possessed female passenger, the movie is a claustrophobic two-hander oxygenated in part by Phedon Papamichael’s sleekly gorgeous cinematography.The star power of its leads, Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson, doesn’t hurt either. Injecting nuance and emotional depth into Hall’s uninspired script, the two turn a threatened slog into a mildly enjoyable journey. Penn plays Clark, a tough, salt-of-the-earth type (he actually talks about salt at one point) whose roughened hands and veined forearms are catnip to the camera. Johnson is his last fare of the night, a sophisticated young woman traveling from Kennedy Airport to midtown Manhattan. He calls her Girlie.He is very nosy. When not railing against credit cards and rideshare apps, he peppers his passenger with increasingly personal questions. Initially guarded, Girlie slowly warms to this drive-by philosopher. Through the barriers of age, gender, class and education, their revelations grow more intimate — sometimes implausibly so, as when Clark shares a distasteful anecdote about his first wife, along with his thoughts on what married men want in a mistress. (Hint: It’s not love.) Not that Girlie is clutching her pearls; rather, she’s surreptitiously sexting her tongue-lolling lover.Somehow, Penn never allows Clark’s inappropriateness to become predatory, and Johnson’s marvelously expressive features reveal details the dialogue declines to provide. Yet if there’s a finer point to any of this — beyond yes, talking to strangers is sometimes beneficial — it eluded me. I did, though, appreciate Hall’s choice to flash some texts directly onto the movie screen: Squinting at characters’ smartphones is one of my least favorite activities. Along with listening to gossipy cabdrivers.DaddioRated R for bared breasts and barroom language. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Chronicles of a Wandering Saint’ Review: Are the Meek Blessed?

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      It’s clear that Rita’s life in rural Argentina could use a bit of magic. But her willingness to bend the truth to achieve it heralds disaster.“How do I know if something is a miracle?” This is the question that Rita (Mónica Villa), a 60-something Catholic woman living in rural Argentina, poses to a search engine — though deep down, she already knows the answer. A statue that Rita found while tending to her duties as the local chapel keeper isn’t the long-lost figure of St. Rita. But it’d be a miracle if it were, and miracles mean glory, attention and prestige in her small town.Rita’s simple life — scrubbing pews, tolerating the pretenses of other church volunteers, coming home to her spacey but loyal husband, Norberto (Horacio Marassi) — could use a bit of magic. Yet this desire, and her willingness to bend the truth to achieve it, herald disaster.Directed by Tomás Gómez Bustillo, “Chronicles of a Wandering Saint” begins as a slow-moving scammer comedy. Halfway through, the film receives a jolt, and Rita’s drab surroundings take on an enchanted quality that places the film within the robust tradition of Latin American magical realism.The visually elegant film can also be overly precious and whimsical, though that might be a virtue by some measures. In this regard it shares DNA with the laconic comedies of Aki Kaurismaki. The superior second half, in which Rita’s reality is upended, eases into a realm of fantasy that is admirable — and more effective — because of its uncanny, inventive minimalism.That miracles happen under the most banal circumstances is a bit of a cliché, but the film tackles this conceit with the kind of originality and intelligence that makes you forget there’s a blueprint in the first place.Chronicles of a Wandering SaintNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ at 20: Revisiting the Fear and Anger

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      Michael Moore’s hit documentary isn’t a prosecutor’s brief but a political and emotional appeal, rooted in the ways in which the country’s burdens are unequally borne.Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” opens with a dazed look at the 2000 presidential election, when it seemed that Vice President Al Gore might defeat George W. Bush, then the governor of Texas. “Was it all just a dream?” Moore’s voice-over intones, before going on to chronicle Bush’s first year in office, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.The opening might remind some viewers of witnessing election night 2016 and Donald Trump’s surprise victory, but that’s only one echo of several in Moore’s blockbuster documentary. Twenty years ago, “Fahrenheit 9/11” landed in an era facing similar challenges to today: wars abroad that divide people at home, worries that the country was losing sight of long-cherished principles, fears about presidential abuses of power. It felt like a do-or-die moment, much as 2024 does, and Moore embraced the roles of truth-teller, fire-starter, satirist, confidant, and man-of-the-people bullhorn.The movie was a popular phenomenon: It became the top-grossing documentary domestically, according to Box Office Mojo, making $119 million. This was years before streamers pumped out hours and hours of nonfiction features and series. Controversy erupted even before it was released, when Disney tried to block its distribution out of political concerns. After a Palme d’Or win in Cannes, a June release followed.The groundswell showed that Moore was tuning into a national mood. As Bush sought re-election in the thick of the Iraq occupation and terrorism alerts, Moore’s film vented about the toll of the Iraq War and the administration’s overall response to the 9/11 attacks. (Cue the infamous Aug. 6, 2001, C.I.A. warning to Bush: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) Whipping up sympathy and outrage over the deaths of young U.S. soldiers and Iraqis, and the perceptions of Bush as out of touch, Moore stirs up a potent cocktail of damning news clips, filmed confrontations and tag-alongs, and plain old ridicule (for instance, Attorney General John Ashcroft bellowing a patriotic song of his own composition).It’s all less preachy than polemical, with doses of Mark Twain showmanship and heartstring-pulling. Moore’s feature managed to capture a popular political narrative about recent U.S. history without feeling out of date as soon as it was released. It’s a feat that today’s constant EKG of social media response has made more difficult (along with evolving trends in how movies are made and released). In a time before YouTube, Moore’s documentary performed a service in surfacing footage of casualties or abuses in Iraq, or insensitive presidential gaffes, that was not always available to see.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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      Alec Baldwin’s Long Journey to Court After ‘Rust’ Shooting

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      It’s been a challenge to follow the case. Here are its many twists and turns. The actor Alec Baldwin is scheduled to go on trial next month for involuntary manslaughter in Santa Fe, N.M.Baldwin’s long journey to the courtroom started on Oct. 21, 2021, on the set of the western movie “Rust,” when the gun he was holding while blocking out a shot discharged, firing a live round that injured the movie’s director, Joel Souza, and killed its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.It was an almost unimaginable tragedy, but Baldwin soon found himself in legal jeopardy, too. The subsequent saga has amounted to a high-stakes version of a familiar Baldwin ritual: He does or says something controversial; then, in an attempt to be understood, he doubles down on whatever he said or did, inviting further scrutiny; finally, feeling victimized and aggrieved, he vows to stop engaging with the media. He was in this third stage by the time I started reporting a few months ago. To trace the improbable arc of his prosecution, I interviewed more than 30 people in New York and Santa Fe, reviewed numerous public court filings, police records and videos, and obtained additional documents under New Mexico’s freedom-of-information act.It’s been a challenge to follow the case through all of its many twists and turns. Here’s what you need to know as the trial approaches.Troubling details quickly emerged about the film’s set.The shooting occurred at 1:46 p.m. at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, a family-owned Old West movie set about 20 miles southeast of Santa Fe. 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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      Celine Dion Can Only Be Herself

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      The singer’s over-the-top sincerity and expressiveness were once seen as irredeemably uncool. In the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion,” they have become her superpowers.“I always envy people who smoke and drink and party and don’t sleep,” Celine Dion tells her physical therapist with an exaggerated sigh, midway through the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion.” “Me, I have water and I sleep 12 hours.”This monastic constraint has long been a core part of the Celine Dion legend. A professional singer since 12, she spent decades meticulously caring for her voice as though it were an endangered hothouse flower, committing to long stretches of vocal rest, complicated warm-up rituals and a lifestyle of exacting discipline — all so she could leap octaves and belt soaring notes with gobsmacking precision.In a cruel twist of fate, though, even the ceaseless care Dion devoted to her voice could not preserve it. In 2022, she revealed in an emotional Instagram post that she has stiff person syndrome, a rare and incurable neurological disorder that causes painful muscle spasms and affects roughly one in a million people. After watching “I Am: Celine Dion,” a remarkably candid portrait directed by Irene Taylor on Amazon Prime Video, it is difficult to imagine a disease that would be more personally devastating to Dion, whose entire career has been one long exercise in control, sacrificing all for the ecstatic release of live performance.Since her emergence as a Québécois child star with a precociously huge voice, something about Dion’s essential nature has remained constant, impervious to both changing trends and scathing critique. Whether power ballads were in fashion or not — and by and large, they were not — she sang them with the conviction of someone who’d never even heard the word “restraint.” “At her best,” wrote Elisabeth Vincentelli in a Times review of Dion’s most recent New York performance in February 2020, “Dion projects a sense of bigness — besides fairly simple graphics, the background videos in her show often showed cosmic images, as if they were the only thing measuring up on the Dion scale.” This bombastic approach gained her a worldwide fan base and a requisite backlash that she may have finally outpaced.In 2007, the music critic Carl Wilson used Dion’s 1999 blockbuster album “Let’s Talk About Love” as the inspiration for an insightful, ultimately sympathetic book-length examination of musical taste, the assumption being that (at least 17 years ago) Dion’s name was a symbol for all things gauche, sincere and uncool. (The book’s subtitle? “A Journey to the End of Taste.”) “Schmaltz rots faster than other ingredients in the musical pantry,” Wilson wrote, “which may be why we doubt the possibility of a Celine Dion revival in 2027.”Dion allows cameras to follow her as she struggles with stiff person syndrome in a new film.Amazon StudiosWe 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 Long, Strange Road to Alec Baldwin’s Manslaughter Trial

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      On the afternoon of Oct. 21, 2021, Mary Carmack-Altwies, the district attorney for New Mexico’s First Judicial District, was driving along a lonely stretch of the mountain highway connecting Santa Fe and Taos when her cell service abruptly returned and her phone started pinging — message after message. She pulled over to the side of the road and began scrolling: Alec Baldwin had accidentally shot two people on a movie set in her jurisdiction. Carmack-Altwies had planned to spend the next couple of days alone in the mountains before celebrating her 43rd birthday with her wife, a retired investigator for the state, and their two children. Clearly that was not going to happen.Listen to this article, read by Pete SimonelliThe shooting occurred at 1:46 p.m. that day at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, a family-owned Old West movie set about 20 miles southeast of Santa Fe that had been rented out by “Rust,” an independent film that Baldwin was both starring in and producing. The bullet he inadvertently fired passed through the upper body of the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and lodged near the spine of Joel Souza, the director. Souza was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Santa Fe; Hutchins was airlifted to a trauma center in Albuquerque and died a short time later.Carmack-Altwies was nearing the end of her first year in office. She had been an assistant district attorney specializing in violent crimes when her boss made a bid for Congress. She ran to succeed him — her first foray into electoral politics — and won easily, inheriting a jurisdiction that covers three counties: Los Alamos, Rio Arriba and Santa Fe. She’s a Democrat in a Democratic district, though the label connotes something very different in New Mexico, a rural hunting state whose voters tend to place a high value on the Second Amendment, than it does in, say, New York or California. Carmack-Altwies turned around and went back to her office in Santa Fe, where she spent most of the night on the phone with the local police, trying to make sure that the movie set, now a potential crime scene, was properly secured. In the days that followed, reporters from all over the world descended on Santa Fe. Carmack-Altwies held her first news conference about the incident six days later outside the Sheriff’s Department. She was asked if she intended to prosecute anyone. “I do not make rash decisions, and I do not rush to judgment,” she said. “All options are on the table at this point.”Bonanza Creek Ranch, the movie set where Alec Baldwin fatally shot the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins with a prop gun in October 2021, leading to his indictment on charges of involuntary manslaughter.Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal, via ZUMA/AlamyWe 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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      Kino Film Collection, a Streaming Alternative to Netflix and Hulu

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      The service is an art house answer to what’s missing on some of the more popular streamers.Even those who swear by Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and their ilk must admit that the platforms leave something to be desired when it comes to art house titles.Netflix is perpetually chasing nostalgia or algorithmic trends. Prime is going for crowd-pleasers and classics. And Hulu can devote only so much energy to its film selection when most people still think of it as a TV service. So streaming consumers seeking independent films, foreign cinema and documentaries (other than true crime) may have to look elsewhere. We previously highlighted Mubi as one option; the new Kino Film Collection service is another.Like Shout! TV, Kino is tied to a brand beloved by cinephiles: Kino Lorber began as a film distributor in the late 1970s, and it is one of the most reliably high-quality home video labels, with particular emphasis on classic American cinema. It took some time to find the right formula for its streaming service, starting first, in 2019, with the à la carte Kino Now (an “arthouse iTunes”) before introducing Kino Film Collection late last year. Initially only available as an Amazon Prime Video channel, it became a stand-alone service in May, with its own app on Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV and Android TV.So what does it offer? Well, foremost and unsurprisingly, there are Kino Lorber’s own theatrical and home video titles, an impressive array of contemporary indies that includes “Martin Eden,” “Bacurau,” “Close to Vermeer,” “La Syndicaliste,” “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of ‘Midnight Cowboy’” and the Oscar-nominated “Four Daughters.” Several of these are found in a selection highlighting Critic’s Picks from these very pages, a wise organizing principle if there ever was one.Other sections are similarly well curated. As has (thankfully) become de rigueur for the streamers, a selection of “LGBTQ+ Stories” highlights queer cinema, past and present, for Pride Month. The Cannes Film Festival concluded a few weeks back, but the “Cannes Favorites” sidebar is still up, and well worth exploring. “Thought-Provoking Documentaries” includes explorations of everything from jazz music to the hedonism of Studio 54 to the history of the Great White Way. But the highlight may well be the robust selection of “Classics,” which runs the gamut from German Expressionism to nunsploitation.The Kino Film Collection interface is easy to use, and the image is excellent, with streams (of new releases in particular) frequently Blu-ray quality. The price is similarly nice: A monthly subscription is only $5.99 per month, or $59.99 annually, and a current promotion offers 20 percent off that annual rate. The service’s total number of available films is smaller than that of its art house streaming competitors Mubi and the Criterion Channel, but the price point is proportionately lower. (Mubi is currently $14.99 monthly, while Criterion charges $10.99 per month.)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