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    ‘The Accountant 2’ Review: Ben Affleck’s Revenge of the Killer Nerd

    Affleck returns as a brilliant C.P.A. who moonlights as a mysterious, gun-toting fixer and gets help from his little bro, played by Jon Bernthal.“The Accountant 2” is a blithely nonsensical, enjoyably vulgar follow-up to “The Accountant” (2016) about a numbers whiz played by Ben Affleck, who has impeccable marksmanship and shaky people skills. Like the first movie, the sequel embraces violence without apology, slathers the screen with (fake) blood and unleashes a small army of stunt performers who convincingly play dead. This one has another complicated intrigue and a great deal of plot, though most of the tension comes from watching Affleck struggle to suppress a smile while sharing the screen with an exuberantly showboating Jon Bernthal.The sequel picks up eight years after the first movie introduced Affleck’s Christian Wolff, a brilliant autistic forensic accountant who moonlights as a freelance avenger with help from friends. (The movie’s breezy embrace of cliché includes the stereotype of the autistic savant.) J.K. Simmons shows up as Ray King, the former director of the Treasury Department’s criminal investigations unit. He briefly enters wearing a cap and soon exits without a pulse, though not before setting the story in motion. Cue the gunfire and choreographed chaos, as well as amnesia, plastic surgery, trafficked women, child hostages and a miscellany of villains, ones who are cruel enough to bring out (and amply stoke) the audience’s bloodlust.King’s successor, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), re-enters afterward to help nudge the story forward as does Christian’s younger brother, Braxton (Bernthal). Everything (and everyone) flows together more or less, even when the story strains credulity, as B-movie shoot-em-ups often do. It helps that there’s less back story here than in the first movie, which revisited Christian’s brutal childhood and his Oedipally nurtured violent skill set. That frees up the filmmakers — like the first movie, this was written by Bill Dubuque and directed by Gavin O’Connor — to focus on keeping all the people and parts nicely moving. Among these is Affleck, whose controlled, inward-directed performance holds the center.One irresistible draw of a diversion like this is that while its good guys are often bad, its bad guys are assuredly worse. Both Christian and especially Braxton have obvious moral failings (ha!), but their kill counts are never the problem, which puts them in fine, crowded company. American movies love gunslingers, after all, whether they have Texas or British accents, wear white hats or gray ones like Christian. Among these are the seemingly ordinary men — blue-collar types, next-door dads, computer jockeys — who, when hard push comes to brutal shove comes to catastrophic violence, will take off their glasses à la Clark Kent to transform into near-mystically gifted avengers. They lock and load, restoring order to a broken world.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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    Death, Taxes and Ben Affleck: ‘The Accountant’ Gets a Sequel

    In the movie class of 2016, “The Accountant” was a wild-card.It told an original story for adults, breaking from the family-friendly intellectual property derivatives that crowded the top of the box office charts. And though it resembled a durable breed of man-on-a-mission action thrillers, it had an absurdist, gleefully dorky twist — Ben Affleck playing a neurodivergent bookkeeper and consigliere to the criminal underworld.Audiences responded. “The Accountant” outperformed expectations in theaters, earning $155.5 million globally (according to Box Office Mojo), and was the No. 1 most rented movie of 2017 (according to Comscore), ahead of “Moana,” “Wonder Woman” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.”Nine years and a change of studios later, a sequel, “The Accountant 2,” arrives on Friday, with Affleck and much of the original cast (Jon Bernthal, J.K. Simmons, Cynthia Addai-Robinson) returning, along with the director Gavin O’Connor and the screenwriter Bill Dubuque. In two conversations — one at South by Southwest in March, before the film’s premiere there, and another virtually earlier this month — Affleck, O’Connor and Dubuque discussed regaining the rights to the story, the definition of success and a potential idea for a third film.These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Affleck, right, with Jon Bernthal in “The Accountant 2.”Amazon StudiosBill, you wrote the script for the first “Accountant” independently — before an actor or a director was involved. Where did the main character, Christian Wolff, come from?BILL DUBUQUE I know people who are on the spectrum, and I thought something like this might be interesting; I’ve always been interested in how the brain works. I thought we could take this character who has a certain set of skills, a certain set of vulnerabilities, and not make him a victim but put him in a situation that was entertaining and where you felt something for him.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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    J. Lo Cancels ‘This Is Me … Live’ Tour This Summer

    The singer and actress said she was “heartsick and devastated” about the decision, which comes on the heels of a hit Netflix movie and persistent rumors about her marriage.Jennifer Lopez announced on Friday that she has canceled her “This Is Me … Live” summer tour. In a message on her website she said she was “heartsick and devastated” about the decision.“Please know that I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary,” she continued, promising her fans that they’d be “together again.”An accompanying statement from Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, said that “Jennifer is taking time off to be with her children, family and close friends,” and that tickets bought through Ticketmaster would be refunded automatically.The tour, scheduled for arenas across the country, appeared to be struggling with ticket sales; earlier this year, a handful of dates had been canceled and several shows appeared to have a number of unsold seats, Variety reported in March.The cancellation comes during a time when Lopez, 54, has been in the spotlight for both her work and her personal life. She currently stars in the sci-fi action thriller “Atlas,” which has been the No. 1 film on Netflix in the United States since its debut last week.And in February, she released an expansive, ambitious project, which she had poured $20 million of her own money into. It included a studio album, “This Is Me … Now”; an accompanying musical film, “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story”; and a making-of documentary, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” which stars her husband, the actor and director Ben Affleck, 51. The pair also appeared together in an ad for Dunkin’ Donuts that debuted during this year’s Super Bowl.Despite the recent collaborations, rumors have been swirling for weeks that their marriage is in trouble, with tabloids offering reports almost daily on the state of their union. Lopez and Affleck were famously minted as “Bennifer” when they dated from about 2002 to 2004, a period that included a brief engagement. They reunited in 2021 and married in July 2022.A representative for Lopez did not immediately respond on Friday to questions about the tour cancellation or the reports about her marriage to Affleck. More

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    Netflix Takes Comedy Live With Tom Brady Roast and Katt Williams Special

    Sometimes that’s a good thing, as with John Mulaney’s variety show “Everybody’s in L.A.” But the Katt Williams special and Tom Brady roast were more uneven.On Friday night, in the premiere of his appealingly chaotic livestreaming variety show “Everybody’s in L.A.,” which runs every night this week, John Mulaney delivered a monologue about his adopted city next to a map that broke it down into a crooked jigsaw puzzle of neighborhoods.In his distinctive staccato cadence that could sell steak knives or a card trick as convincingly as the premise of a joke, he said, “One thing that unites every part of Los Angeles is that no matter where you go, there is zero sense of community.”For comedy fans, this past week felt different, because everywhere you went in Los Angeles, Netflix was there, blanketing the city in ads and shows for its Netflix Is a Joke Fest, running through May 12. It’s the biggest comedy showcase of the year (with more than 500 offerings, a 40 percent increase from the festival’s already mammoth debut event in 2022) but also something of a corporate flex. Who else could get Hannah Gadsby and Shane Gillis in the same festival or draw the talk-show titans Jon Stewart and David Letterman to host events? Or recruit Chris Rock to play the Billy Crystal role in a reading of the screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally,” with, as Rock introduced it, “an all-Black cast, like it was originally intended.” (Tracee Ellis Ross doing Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm, but louder, received standing ovations from the audience and onstage participants, too.)The most newsworthy shift this year was the aggressive move into livestreaming events, following the blockbuster success of Chris Rock’s 2023 special, “Selective Outrage,” about being slapped at the Oscars. (One of that ceremony’s hosts, Wanda Sykes, returned to the place it happened, the Dolby Theater, for a festival show and began by saying this time no one would get assaulted).For the live events, Netflix picked stars with current buzz. Along with the Mulaney variety show, Katt Williams followed up his viral “Club Shay Shay” interview with a new hour, “Woke Foke,” on Saturday, and Kevin Hart, whom Williams singled out in his interview for criticism, tried to bring back the dormant genre of celebrity roast on Sunday with “The Greatest Roast of All Time,” starring Tom Brady, widely considered the GOAT of quarterbacks. (After livestreaming, the shows can be watched on Netflix, sometimes in edited form.)As the last half-century of “Saturday Night Live” has proved, there is an undeniable excitement to live comedy, an irreplaceable energy that can create a sense of event. But there are significant dangers, not the least of which is that you can’t cut the boring or unfunny parts. Netflix built its comedy empire on elevating the standup special as an art form to rival film or TV. Highlighting live comedy represents a commercial move for Netflix, spotlighting events that promise unpredictability more than refinement, mess instead of polish.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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    25 Biggest Oscar Snubs of All Time

    Every year since the Academy Awards were invented, somebody has been overlooked, ignored, passed over, disregarded or brushed off. You know what they say about beauty and beholders.But perceived Oscar omissions — snubs, as we have come to call them — have grown into a frenzied annual conversation, with people left off the nomination list, or nominated but denied a statuette, sometimes receiving as much attention, or more, as those who win.These are the 25 true snubs and unjust losses that Times film critics, columnists, writers and editors still can’t get over. Read more →‘Do the Right Thing’ for Best Picture (1990)Actual winner: “Driving Miss Daisy”Spike Lee and Danny Aiello in the Brooklyn-set drama.Universal PicturesSome people hated this movie. Others, more ominously, feared it, or claimed to. News articles and reviews imagined riots sprouting in its wake (they never came), seeing in the character of Mookie — who, in a fit of righteous fury, smashes a pizzeria window in the film’s famous climax — confirmation of Lee’s insidious intent. Did academy voters have similar misgivings? Lee, who was shut out of the directing category, did receive a nomination for his screenplay, suggesting at least one branch of the organization had his back. (Danny Aiello was also nominated for supporting actor.) But it’s hard to look at the eventual best picture winner, “Driving Miss Daisy” — a film in which Morgan Freeman plays Hoke Colburn, the patient chauffeur of a bigoted, elderly white woman — and not see a statement of preference. In 1990, it was the Hoke Colburns of the world, not the Mookies, who were welcome on the academy’s biggest stage. REGGIE UGWU, pop culture reporterWe 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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    What Exactly Is Jennifer Lopez’s “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story?”

    Yes, Ben Affleck is in it, as are many of J. Lo’s famous friends. Here’s what to know about “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.”At one point during “This is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a character observes that watching Jennifer Lopez’s love life is like bingeing “Vanderpump Rules” — eventually you stop judging the people you’re seeing and start judging yourself. But in the case of this self-financed multimedia project, you might also question what exactly it is that you have watched. Is it a movie, a collection of music videos, a simple vanity project? Is it a therapy session, or a new genre entirely — the therapy musical? Lopez, who co-wrote and produced this 65-minute spectacle, which is now available on Amazon Prime Video, tries to keep you guessing. You might have a few questions. We have some answers.Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck embrace, mostly, at the premier of “This Is Me … Now.”Mario Anzuoni/ReutersHow much of Ben Affleck is in there?Ben Affleck flits in and out of this like a little-seen hummingbird.He bookends the story as a lost love, a character called the Biker, but he’s a barely glimpsed mystery. Could that be his jawline? Is that his chest? It’s definitely his voice we hear telling a sleeping Lopez, “You know how much I love you?” Going incognito to play cable-news pundit Rex Stone, Affleck dons a bad blonde wig, a prosthetic nose and a Trumpian spray tan. He also adopts a folksy accent that recalls Gary Busey, and a delivery that’s part Tucker Carlson and part Keith Olbermann (a man Affleck once memorably mocked on “Saturday Night Live”). But instead of ranting about politics, ol’ Rexy is concerned with the state of love and connection in the world — a topic of great interest to Lopez’s character, who is simply called the Artist. He’s the anchor of her love, but she’s barely tuning in.It might have served the project better to have less of Affleck on the screen and more of him on the page. After all, this is the guy who co-wrote “Good Will Hunting” — one of the best of all therapy movies. Did the real-life Affleck try to encourage his wife to open up, the way Robin Williams’s therapist, Sean, wanted his patient to do? Did he urge her to think a little more deeply about love and vulnerability? It’s hard to guess from his mid-credits monologue.Can we play Name That Ex?Yes, we can.Marriage might be a sacred union that should only be entered into with the utmost care, as Jane Fonda’s character told Lopez’s in “Monster-in-Law,” but that didn’t stop either Fonda in that film or Lopez in real life from giving it a try four times.In the past, Lopez has used her position as a movie producer to comment on her own marital history. In 2002’s “Marry Me,” for instance, she played an artist who had been married three times. In this new project, she has a whirlwind rom-com sequence, set to the song “Can’t Get Enough,” in which she cycles through three weddings with three interchangeable husbands (played by Tony Bellissimo, Derek Hough and Trevor Jackson). Could this game of musical grooms be a commentary on her past marriages to Ojani Noa (1997-1998), Cris Judd (2001-2003) and Marc Anthony (2004-2014)?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 Flash’ Review: Electric Company

    In the latest DC Comics blowout, Ezra Miller suits up as the speedy superhero alongside special guests like Batman (hello, Michael Keaton).The Flash, the latest DC Comics superhero to get his very own big show, isn’t the outfit’s usual brooding heavyweight. He’s neither an old-style god nor new (a.k.a. a billionaire), but an electrified nerd who joined the super-ranks by accident, not by birthright or by design. Out of uniform, he is a normie, a goof and kind of endearing. He’s really, really fast on his feet, you bet. But what makes him pop onscreen is that when things go bigger and grimmer here, as they invariably do in blowouts of this type, he retains a playful weightlessness.That’s a relief, particularly given how the movie tries to clobber you into submission. Big action-adventures invariably give the viewer a workout, smacking you around with their shocks and awesomeness, though it sometimes feels as if contemporary superhero movies have taken this kind of pummeling to new extremes. That may be true, though movies have long employed spectacle — pyrotechnics, lavish set pieces — to bait, hook and bludgeon the audience so it keeps begging for more. If the bludgeoning feels more inescapable these days, it’s partly because the major studios now bank so heavily on superhero movies.“The Flash” is one of the more watchable ones. It’s smartly cast, ambitious and relatively brisk at two and a half hours. The story tracks Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) and his superhero persona, the Flash, as he whooshes, wrapped in tendrils of lightning; traverses space-time continuums; and tries to exonerate his father (Ron Livingston), who’s in prison for killing Barry’s mom (Maribel Verdú). As is usually the case with superhero movies, the story is nonsensical and convoluted — it’s no wonder a character uses a tangle of cooked spaghetti to try to explain a major plot point — but not calamitously so. The overall vibe is upbeat.Some of that liveliness comes from Miller, a tense and almost feverishly charismatic presence. (Their well-publicized offscreen troubles hang like a cloud over this movie.) Some of the Flash’s appeal, of course, is also baked into the original comic-book character, “the fastest man on Earth,” who first hit in 1940 (via creators Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert) and was revamped (by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino) in 1956. Five years later in Issue No. 123, these versions of the Flash (there are others) discover that they exist on two seemingly separate Earths, an idea this movie, well, runs with by introducing parallel DC Comics realms.It’s a conceit that pays off the second a shambolic Michael Keaton makes his entrance as a graybeard puttering about a near-derelict Wayne Manor. Having hung up his Bat-suit in his reality (while DC has repeatedly rebooted the franchise in ours), Bruce appears to have entered the Howard Hughes chapter of his cosseted life when Barry drops by. Long story short, the two rapidly join forces, dust off the Batcave tech, furrow their brows and suit up, as other members of the DC stock company join the party, including Alfred Pennyworth (Jeremy Irons), General Zod (Michael Shannon) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle).The entrance of these company players are timed like special-guest appearances — ladies and gentlemen, Zod the Zaniac! — and they’re obviously meant to delight true believers. To a degree, they also feel like they’ve been brought in to shore up the Flash during his first stand-alone outing. Cramming the screen with established names to hedge their expensive bets is an old-fashioned studio gambit, whether in a 1920s musical revue or 1970s disaster flick. Whatever the rationale here, the results are amusing, and it’s especially nice to see Keaton, who first played Batman in Tim Burton’s 1989 film. He seems to be having a good time, and when he looks in the mirror approvingly, it’s easy to share in his self-admiration.Working from a script by Christina Hodson, the director Andy Muschietti keeps these pieces greased and quickly moving, though he almost blows it as soon as the movie begins. It opens with an unfunny protracted bit in which Barry, who’s late for work, orders a sandwich from a pokey server. (That the first villain in the story is a service worker is a choice.) While the guy readies the order, Barry turns into the Flash to help his world’s Batman (an uncredited Ben Affleck) dispatch some villains. It goes as expected — bam, splat — but then a hospital wing collapses, and newborn babies go flying, hurtling toward the street.It’s a creepy setup that Muschietti milks for laughs that become queasier and ickier the longer and the more gleefully flamboyant the scene plays out. It’s absurd, outrageous, digitally fabricated and needless to say the Flash will save the day. The problem is that Muschietti, who has a talent for fraying your nerves with images of child endangerment (as he showed in the “It” horror flicks), is so obviously pleased with these airborne babies that he keeps showing off (turning a microwave into a bassinet), which drains the sequence both of its outlandish comedy and of any tension that might make the Flash’s heroism resonate.The movie more or less recovers, settling into its lively groove, even if the Flash remains a curiously uncertain presence. Surrounding him with bigger superheroes may have made branding sense, but the net effect is that the movie never persuasively establishes the Flash as a confident stand-alone entity. That may make the question of Miller playing him in the future moot. Who knows? Last year, Miller apologized for their behavior and said they were seeking treatment for “complex mental health issues.” I liked “The Flash” well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.The FlashRated PG-13 for superhero violence. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. In theaters. More