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      ‘Until Dawn’ Review: They Keep Dying, You’ll Keep Shrugging

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      Based on a video game, this movie is done in by mediocre monsters and muddled time loops.Watching someone play a video game that they never let you play is a singular kind of boring. A similar “why am I here?” dullness arrives early and stays late in “Until Dawn,” the new supernatural slasher film based on the popular horror video game of the same name.The game, about the eerie goings-on that happen after sisters go missing from a remote mountain resort, is played in a choose-your-own-adventure style. With interactivity off the table, the film relies on a traditional slasher formula: Clover (Ella Rubin) and a group of her friends make the terrible decision to visit a remote valley’s welcome center seeking answers about the strange disappearance of Clover’s sister.Inside, a masked killer starts slaughtering the characters one by one. But here’s the “Happy Death Day”-style twist: Each night the characters’ lives, and deaths, get reset by an hourglass clock. It turns out there’s a deus ex machina madman at work in this uncanny valley, and as part of his diabolical project to learn more about the mechanics of fear, he reboots days and forces his victims to survive (they don’t) until (you guessed it) dawn.The director, David F. Sandberg (“Annabelle: Creation”) does an exhausting job moving along a script, written by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler, that’s made slack by mediocre monsters, muddled time loop stuff and underdeveloped characters who seem straight out of a lesser “Goosebumps” episode. The spectacular and repulsively funny deaths by spontaneous combustion deserve their own, better movie.Until DawnRated R for face bashing, gut busting and exploding torso jump scares. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Trouble with Jessica’ Review: Dinner Party or Crime Scene?

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      This British black comedy, starring Indira Varma, centers on a group of wealthy middle-aged friends with fraught histories.There’s a lot not to like about Jessica (Indira Varma), a smug bachelorette with a thing for married men and a new memoir that’s earning raves. Her book’s title is “The Trouble with Jessica,” which takes on new layers when, early on in the film by the same name, she kills herself during a gathering with her longtime friends.If my tone here sounds caustic, that’s because the film, a British black comedy directed by Matt Winn, runs on gallows humor. Unfolding almost entirely in a single setting — a stylish London home — that underscores its Pinteresque theatricality, it uses Jessica’s corpse as a comic prop during the mad scramble that ensues after her death.Before then, the film lays out her friend group’s dynamics, closely tracking the prickly matriarch Sarah (Shirley Henderson) and her guileless husband, Tom (Alan Tudyk). Sarah, more a frenemy to Jessica than a real pal, is peeved when Jessica invites herself to the dinner party she’s hosting — a last hurrah before finalizing the sale of her cherished abode. Joining them is Richard (Rufus Sewell), a louche defense attorney, and his antsy wife Beth (Olivia Williams), who mix up the film’s game of finger-pointing and blackmailing.Tom and the guests are appalled (and eventually complicit) when Sarah — desperate not to jeopardize the sale — suggests moving Jessica’s body to her own apartment. Impromptu appearances from confused cops and an elite buyer ramp up the pressure, while a cheeky jazz score accentuates the sense of chaos and mischief.The problem is that Jessica’s death only serves as a mirror through which the four central characters come to terms with their own flaws, which aren’t all that interesting or revelatory. A critique about the hypocrisies of the righteous upper middle class unfolds halfheartedly, leaving us with performances that might’ve worked better in a sketch comedy scene.The Trouble with JessicaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Magic Farm’ Review: A Droll Delight

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      Amalia Ulman’s playful second feature follows an American television crew that lands in rural Argentina.A New York City documentary crew sets up shop in rural Argentina in “Magic Farm,” an Americans-abroad satire that teeters between pop treat and indie trifle. It is the second feature from the writer, director and actress Amalia Ulman (“El Planeta”), who across her work shows a knack for droll humor, a soft spot for pretenders and a penchant for play.The story follows Justin (Joe Apollonio) and Elena (Ulman), crew members hoping to salvage a TV segment about quirky subcultures after a gaffe lands them in the wrong country. In the movie, Ulman makes use of a more famous cast — including Chloë Sevigny as a vexed TV anchor — although it is the film’s lesser-known actors who stand out. Apollonio, as a man-child with a crush, is a wry delight, as is the newcomer Camila del Campo, who plays a pouting local coquette.Ingeniously simmering under the folly is a health crisis that has afflicted the agricultural area for decades. This is the film’s joke: If the crew could only get their heads out of their rears, they would uncover a gonzo documentary gold mine.At points, “Magic Farm” idles so heavily that one wonders whether Ulman suffered her own preproduction blunder, stranding her cast and crew in South America without the material to back up her vision. But by pairing the loose subject matter with a curlicued visual style — at one point, she straps the camera to a dog’s head — Ulman suggests that she knows what she’s doing.Magic FarmNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie’ Review: Rolling Another One for the Road

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      The comedy duo celebrates a partnership that they just can’t quit in this celebratory documentary.It is not quite accurate to state that had recreational marijuana use been legal in the early 1970s, the comedy team of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong would not have had careers. As the new documentary “Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie” details, they had rather relatively lucrative gigs before the rise of the counterculture. But when they brought stoner characters into their act, it propelled them even, well, higher.“Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie,” directed by David Bushell, features the two comedians ruminating on their careers and friendship. They do so both in separate talking-head segments and sitting together in the front seat of a vintage roadster in search of a site called “The Joint.” The first segments are more or less extemporaneous interviews, while the scenes in the roadster are scripted. The emotions they perform, however, feel genuine. Bushell has an archive of vintage audio and visual footage to buttress an already incredible narrative. Tommy Chong was born in Canada, but Richard Marin, who was known as Cheech, moved there in the 1960s to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Both were keen on pursuing music careers before they met in an improv theater group in Vancouver. The movie delves so deeply into their pasts that “Cheech and Chong,” their 1971 blockbuster debut comedy album, doesn’t come up until an hour into the movie.And yet the documentary doesn’t quite cover everything — their collaborations with Joni Mitchell and Martin Scorsese go unmentioned, for example. This is still a rollicking account that will make even non-herbally-inclined viewers root for the fellows.Cheech and Chong’s Last MovieRated R for language and — surprise — drug humor. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Dea Kulumbegashvili’s ‘April’ Wont Be Shown in Georgia

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      The director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s new movie, “April,” shines a light on the complicated situation for women seeking abortions in Georgia.Dea Kulumbegashvili may be the most celebrated filmmaker to emerge in the past decade from Georgia, a nation of about 3.6 million people that was once part of the Soviet Union. Her debut, “Beginning” (2020), was her country’s submission for the best international feature Oscar in 2021, and her latest, “April,” which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, won the special jury prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.Yet Kulumbegashvili, who lives in Berlin, doesn’t feel particularly welcome back home.“April,” which follows an obstetrician who performs abortions illegally, has not been screened in Georgia. “It has no distribution potential because no one wants to deal with something that would cause a problem with the authorities,” Kulumbegashvili said in a video interview. Though abortion is legal in Georgia for pregnancies under 12 weeks, the reality for women — especially those living outside the major cities — is complicated. A vast majority of Georgians are Orthodox Christians, and traditional ideas about gender roles and domesticity hold sway in most families.The film was “essentially shot in secret,” Kulumbegashvili said. She did not seek domestic funding, instead relying on her producers — who included Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director of “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name” — to raise money from international sources.Kulumbegashvili’s grew up in Lagodekhi, a small town at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, near the border with Azerbaijan; both “Beginning” and “April” were shot there. Underage marriage is a continuing issue in the town, Kulumbegashvili said — as it is in the rest of the country. Ia Sukhitashvili as Nina, an obstetrician who performs illegal abortions, in “April.”Metrograph PicturesWe 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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      ‘On Swift Horses’ Review: Putting It All on the Line

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      Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi lead a melancholic drama about love and longing in the 1950s.Often the movies treat love and desire as if they’re easy to define: romantic, platonic, familial, sexual. Either you want him or you don’t; either you love her or you don’t. But the messy places in between those poles are where real life lies, and that’s where “On Swift Horses” dwells. Based on Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel, the story is set in the 1950s, in a world in which characters might act on desire but do not really speak of it directly. The air around them is thus charged with something that crackles and explodes, and the movie, when it works, is electric.It doesn’t always work, but you won’t mind that much, because it’s so beautiful to look at. The story centers on Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who is engaged to Lee (Will Poulter), a soldier who’s on leave from his tour of duty in Korea. We meet them in bed at the Kansas house she inherited from her mother, whose voracious hunger for life and experience set an example that Muriel yearns to follow.Within the first few moments of the film, Muriel repairs to the bathroom in a filmy nightgown for a postcoital cigarette and, leaning out her bathroom’s second-story window, discovers the long body and smiling face of Julius (Jacob Elordi) sprawled across the hood of his car below, brazenly shirtless, soaking in the sun. If you thought this was going to be a buttoned-up and modest film, think again: The director Daniel Minahan has no compunction about the fact we’re here to admire these people. The two spark, exchanging cigarettes and repartee, with the ease of strangers who nonetheless know each other. Julius is Lee’s brother, already discharged from his own tour in Korea, and Muriel has been expecting him.Julius soon comes inside and spends the evening with Lee and Muriel, and that’s the genesis of everything that follows. It’s a tangled kind of story: Lee worships Muriel and longs for a house, a family, a life. Muriel loves Lee back, but maybe in a different way, something that starts to become evident when they move to California and she meets their neighbor, Sandra (Sasha Calle).Yet she also senses an instant connection with Julius, who soon takes off for Las Vegas and a job in a casino. Julius is a gambler, both the literal and metaphorical kind; he inspires Muriel to try betting on horses soon after she and Lee move to California. He falls into a relationship with another casino employee, Henry (Diego Calva), but they dare not let that fact outside the room they share.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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      ‘Blue Sun Palace’ Review: A Whole World Inside

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      A gorgeously intimate debut feature explores the lives of Chinese immigrants in a massage parlor in Queens.The first scene of “Blue Sun Palace” lingers on a couple at dinner, eating a mouthwatering chicken, speaking Mandarin to one another. The man seems older than the woman. They’re on a date, but you can tell something is a little off — like this relationship is very new, or there’s some unresolved power dynamic.It’s not until after dinner, and a subsequent trip to a karaoke bar, that the pieces of Constance Tsang’s sensitive, lovely and ultimately devastating first feature fall into place. The man is Cheung (Lee Kang Sheng), a married Taiwanese migrant who is working a menial job and sending money back to his wife, his daughter and his mother. The woman is Didi (Haipeng Xu), who works in a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens — the Blue Sun Palace — which officially doesn’t provide any “sexual services” but is frequented by a series of men, most of them white, looking for just that. Didi and Cheung, however, have a different kind of relationship, one built partly on companionship, and she sneaks him into Blue Sun Palace to spend the night.But Didi’s closest friend is another of the Blue Sun Palace employees, Amy (Ke-Xi Wu). Tsang’s film starts out like a chronicle of workplace friendship, albeit an unusual workplace. Amy and Didi hang out on the staircase in their building, eating lunch and sharing dreams and plotting toward the day they’ll head to Baltimore, where Didi’s daughter lives with her aunt, and open a restaurant together. Wu and Xu’s performances are light and full of life, two women who are making the best of a situation that isn’t ideal but certainly could be worse. They and their other co-workers form a network of support and joy. In these early moments, “Blue Sun Palace” feels like it could have some kinship with “Support the Girls,” both films about the community that women build together to survive a world that isn’t made for their them to thrive in. But “Blue Sun Palace” is gentler, with the cinematographer Norm Li’s camera drifting around the space, capturing the play of light or air on a curtain.This first section is a prelude. On Lunar Near Year, sudden tragedy strikes the massage parlor. It happens so abruptly, and with so little cinematic heralding, that it feels almost happenstance, the full blunt weight of the impact only landing moments later. To underline this, Tsang borrows a page from a number of other films in the recent past (perhaps most notably Ryusuke Hamaguchi in “Drive My Car”) and delays the film’s credits till 30 minutes into the movie, signaling to us where the real story has begun.It turns out this is not a tale of friendship; it’s a story of grief, and of the unexpected, fraught bonds people build in the midst of it. In the wake of violence, Amy and Cheung fall into a kind of friendship, two people brought together by mutual pain and by their shared experience as immigrants with jobs of necessity. Cheung takes her to the restaurant he took Didi, to the karaoke bar where they’d gone afterward. But Amy is not interchangeable with her friend, or any other woman, as much as the men around her might like to treat her that way.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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      ‘April’ Review: A Doctor’s Dilemma

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      In this, her second feature, the Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili takes on the risks faced by an obstetrician who performs kitchen-table abortions.The visually arresting drama “April” is filled with naked and clothed female bodies that are, in turn, possessed by desire, racked by pain, and isolated by convention and otherworldly mystery. It’s a heavy, serious and studiously elusive movie filled with handsome images and troubled by the inexplicable presence of a humanoid creature in weird female form. This entity gives “April” a supernatural sheen, yet the movie is rooted in the material world, in the here and now, in flesh and fluids. Its concern is the haunted faces of women struggling to care for the children they already have and seeking to terminate the pregnancies they don’t want.These faces often turn to Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician who works in a rural hospital in the country of Georgia. Sharp, empathetic, determined and tightly coiled, Nina has the sober confidence of a battle-tested veteran. She has also attracted the kind of resentment that professional women at times endure through no fault of their own. She lives alone and, at first, she seems OK with this even if she doesn’t seem to have friends, only patients and a former lover. Still, loneliness clings to her like a shroud; it’s as palpable as the danger she faces when she drives off to perform an abortion, which she often does in people’s homes.“April” was written and directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, who likes minimal dialogue, long takes, narrative ellipses and really big bangs. There’s one near the start of her feature directing debut, “Beginning” (2020), set largely in the aftermath of a church bombing. In “April,” it’s the death of an infant during childbirth that shakes up this world. The birth scene is genuine — there are two in the movie — and it jolts the story into gear. The hospital begins an investigation, drawing unwanted attention to Nina’s work quietly providing abortions. (The procedure is legal in Georgia, but stigmatized.) She fights back, insisting that she did nothing wrong. “Other than my job,” she says at one point, “I have nothing to lose.”It’s a sad, persuasive line, and a memorably blunt admission. Even so, Nina sounds more matter of fact than anguished or desperate, even if the person she’s talking to is her ex, another doctor, David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who’s been tasked with leading the investigation. What’s most notable about this exchange isn’t what the two characters say and the emotional restraint you hear in their voices. Rather, it’s how Kulumbegashvili stages and shoots the scene, which begins with Nina offscreen and the camera solely trained on David, who’s hunched over on a couch in a cheerless hospital room. Only partway through their conversation does Nina enter the shot, standing still as David rises to embrace her.Here and elsewhere, Kulumbegashvili takes a modestly stylized approach to a seemingly ordinary setup, which nibbles away at the overall realism. Nina and David sound comfortable with each other, but the staging suggests there’s a chasm separating them. When he wraps his arms around her, it takes a few beats for her to fully return his hug. It’s as if she were out of practice, or a performer briefly flubbing her cue. Her physical stiffness is as telling as some of the dialogue, which fills in a bit of their back story. Kulumbegashvili, however, isn’t interested in rekindling their romance. Her focus is on Nina, who — as the investigation develops and other characters enter — comes into view, even as she becomes increasingly enigmatic.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