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    ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Review: Can You Fight City Hall?

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    The sort-of-rebooted series from Marvel and Disney+ pits the blind vigilante against a chaos-inducing, revenge-minded office holder.In the new Marvel series “Daredevil: Born Again,” the gangster Wilson Fisk — a felon preoccupied with status, profit and revenge — embarks on a dark-horse, fear-mongering election campaign. It is for mayor of New York, not president of the United States, but the real-life resonance is hard to miss.And as the season, which premieres Tuesday on Disney+, proceeds through its nine episodes, the sense of familiarity only grows. The spuriously-populist Mayor Fisk rules by executive fiat, sidelines anyone who tries to rein him in and cultivates an atmosphere of violent chaos.Yes, Fisk, also known as the Kingpin, first became mayor of New York in the “Daredevil” comic books on which the series is based, and nothing in “Born Again” is at odds with his previous portrayals. But this is not a coincidence of character or timing. Long before the blind crime-fighting vigilante Daredevil intones, “This is our city, not his, and we can take it back,” it is clear that “Born Again” is summoning the specter of Donald Trump — perhaps as a statement of resistance, perhaps as a dramatic convenience, probably both.The problem is that in this case, real life has become stranger than fiction. “Born Again” is a deluxe comic-book adaptation, meticulously produced and filmed, and on that level it will delight a lot of people. But while it tries to get at something meaningful about social tumult, it does not rise above conventional comic-book ideas or emotions. It doesn’t carry the shock of the real.Within the multiverse of Marvel TV series, “Born Again” has a complicated provenance. “Daredevil” was one of the six shows made for Netflix, beginning a decade ago; it ran for three seasons and ended in 2018. After Marvel began making series for Disney+, the stars of the old show — Charlie Cox as Daredevil (real name Matt Murdock), and Vincent D’Onofrio as Fisk — popped up as supporting players in “Hawkeye” and “Echo,” biding their time.Now their new show is here, sort of a reboot and sort of a new season, with story lines that more or less track. If you haven’t checked in since the original “Daredevil” and certain things puzzle you, such as why Fisk is not in jail, then you may want to watch “Hawkeye” and “Echo.”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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      ‘Echo’ Review: Marvel Tries to Have It Both Ways

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      The entertainment behemoth’s latest series for Disney+ minimizes superheroics in favor of Southwestern noir, but there’s a tug of war between its action-thriller and cultural-historical imperatives.Maya Lopez is, in the Marvel television universe, a deaf Choctaw girl whose mother dies and whose father then moves from Oklahoma to New York City to work for a criminal kingpin (conveniently known as Kingpin). After her father also dies, Maya — embittered and alienated — is groomed for a life of crime by Kingpin and becomes a deadly underworld enforcer. Eventually, one betrayal leads to another and Maya heads back to Oklahoma and the real family that she hasn’t seen for years.That’s more or less what happens in the first episode of the Marvel miniseries “Echo,” which premiered all five of its episodes Tuesday night on Disney+. I don’t feel bad spelling it out because those first 50 minutes of the series are an origin story that is also, to a large degree, an extended Previously On summarizing Maya’s role in the earlier Marvel-Disney+ series “Hawkeye.” And “Echo,” in turn, is an entr’acte setting up a future series, “Daredevil: Born Again.”Such are the demands that pull ever harder on any individual piece of narrative etched into the Marvel cinematic circuit board. Committed fans can shrug off or even enjoy the incongruities fostered by corporate storytelling. But no one should feel like a killjoy for thinking, well, that was repetitious (and perhaps, as a consequence, pretty perfunctorily scripted), or for being bemused when Daredevil does an extraneous one-minute flyby just to maintain the brand.That’s one direction in which “Echo” is tugged. But there are other forces at play. That Maya, a.k.a. Echo, was conceived — more than 20 years ago — as deaf and Native American (Cheyenne in the comics) means that in the 2020s her story will inevitably be taken as an opportunity for the celebration of identity and heritage.That’s fine in itself, but within the five relatively short episodes of “Echo” it sets up a tug of war between an action-thriller imperative and a cultural-historical imperative that ends up as a losing battle for both sides. The show’s writers, including the creator and showrunner, Marion Dayre, have failed to braid the two strands in interesting or dramatic ways. (It’s not a good sign that each episode lists from three to seven writing credits.) Instead, what could be — and occasionally is — an entertaining Southwestern noir has its energy sapped by the intrusion of Choctaw history and myth, while the history and myth are devalued by being put at the service of what is mostly a formulaic thriller.It doesn’t help that the historical elements are handled in a broad, gimmicky fashion that is probably meant to make them accessible but just plays as trying too hard. While Maya (Alaqua Cox) battles her former partners from New York, who track her down in Oklahoma, she has visions of a succession of female ancestors who look out for her and offer her their supernatural powers. That’s about all there is to it, so to give those elements more weight onscreen, and to provide an impression of originality, the show tricks them up.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?  More

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      ‘Household Saints’ at IFC Center: An Italian American Tale

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      Nancy Savoca’s 1993 film, a mystical, multigenerational Italian American family saga, opens for a revival run at IFC Center.Nancy Savoca’s 1993 film “Household Saints,” a warmhearted fable spiced with magic realism and zesty performances, may be the most endearing of multigenerational Italian American family sagas and is likely the most mystical. Heavy on folk belief, it flirts with Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” and the divine madness the Greeks called theia mania.Seemingly overlooked by the 1993 New York Film Festival, “Household Saints” was included as a restoration last October; it’s opening for a revival run on Jan. 12 at IFC Center.Savoca and the producer Richard Guay adapted “Household Saints” from Francine Prose’s well-received 1981 novel. If the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer were a product of Little Italy, he might have spun a similar yarn. Amid a 1949 heat wave so hellish the annual feast of San Gennaro has all but been shut down, a rakish young butcher named Joseph Santangelo (Vincent D’Onofrio) wins a wife, Catherine Falconetti (Tracey Ullman), in a game of pinochle. God’s grace or Joseph’s thumb on the scale?Catherine is the sullen daughter of Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo), a none-too-bright radio repairman. The Santangelos and Falconettis are unfriendly neighbors. Joseph’s superstitious mother, Carmela (played with alarming gusto by Judith Malina), hates her prospective daughter-in-law. Blessings battle tribulations. Savoca contrives a wedding night as filled with rococo confections as the interior of a Palermo church. A curse — disturbingly visualized as a bloody, stillborn infant — is lifted after Carmela dies and a healthy daughter, Teresa, is born.Among other things, “Household Saints” refracts 25 years of the Cold War through a Mulberry Street lens. Teresa and her playmates are obsessed with the prophecies of Our Lady of Fátima, received by three country children in visions that coincided with the triumph of Russian Bolshevism. As an adolescent, Teresa (Lili Taylor) writes a prizewinning essay on the dangers of Communism. She also becomes a fanatical devotee of her namesake, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, associating piety with a devotion to domestic chores.Madness runs in the family. In a parallel obsession, Teresa’s Uncle Nicky (Michael Rispoli) searches Chinatown for a dream Madame Butterfly. In the meantime, forbidden by her parents to take Carmelite vows, Teresa enters an earthy relationship with an awkward but ambitious law student (Michael Imperioli). Happily ironing his shirts in their disheveled, casually psychedelic East Village pad, she has an ecstatic vision of Jesus amid an abundance of checkered garments.“The story is filled with strange, homespun miracles,” Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review when the film was originally released, adding that “this single-minded little film could be counted as one of them.” So too its evocation of Mulberry Street. Largely shot on a North Carolina backlot built for the film “Year of the Dragon,” “Household Saints” seems the most authentically simulated New York movie since Sam Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street.” (The flavorsome line readings are supplied by a bevy of native New York actors, among them Argo, D’Onofrio, Malina, Rispoli and Imperioli.)“Household Saints” never tips its hand. Eventually institutionalized, the beatific Teresa informs her parents of celestial pinochle games, noting that God (like her dad) cheats at cards. While the once credulous Catherine thinks her daughter has suffered a psychotic break with reality, the anticlerical Joseph takes Teresa for a saint. Thanks to the spell the film casts, they’re both right.Household SaintsOpens on Jan. 12 at IFC Center, Manhattan; ifccenter.com. More

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      Watch Jessica Chastain Take a Stand in ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’

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      The director Michael Showalter narrates a sequence featuring the actress as Tammy Faye Bakker and Andrew Garfield as Jim Bakker.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.An outdoor barbecue turns into a forum for uncomfortable debate in this scene from “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” The film, which chronicles the rise and fall of the televangelist couple Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, stars Andrew Garfield and Jessica Chastain in the lead roles.This sequence, which occurs as Jim and Tammy Faye are becoming more popular on the Christian Broadcasting Network, involves a gathering thrown by that network’s head, Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds). Jim is at a table with Robertson and other leaders in the televangelism world, including Jimmy Swaggart (Jay Huguley) and Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio).Tammy Faye is initially seated at another table with the wives, but decides the conversation seems more interesting at the men’s table and makes her way over, with not much subtlety, to join them.“I wanted to show the extent to which Tammy is trying to operate and be seen and heard in a man’s world,” Michael Showalter said.He did that with audio cues along with visual ones. When Tammy Faye drags a seat over to the table, the chair scraping across the floor is so loud, people stop to look. “We amplified the sound of the napkin on her lap and the silverware,” Showalter said. “Everything that she’s doing is disrupting this kind of insular boys’ club thing that they’re all having with each other.”The intention was to show how disruptive Tammy Faye’s behavior seemed to people, but to also shine a light on a person who was always breaking the norms. A discussion between Falwell and Tammy Faye involves his view about the need to fight against “the liberal agenda, feminist agenda, homosexual agenda.” Tammy Faye disagrees.“I love our country,” she replies, “but America is for them, too.”“The central conflict that is ignited in this scene between her and Jerry Falwell ends up being the central theme of Tammy Faye’s arc throughout the entire film,” Showalter said.Read the “Eyes of Tammy Faye” review.Read about how Jessica Chastain’s look was created.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More