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    Watch Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal Spark in ‘Materialists’

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    The writer and director Celine Song narrates a sequence from her film, which also features Chris Evans.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 meet-cute, an intriguing drink order and a stealth character in the background make for a clever scene in Celine Song’s latest film, “Materialists.” Narrating this sequence, the writer-director said she chose this particular scene to discuss for this series “because it’s the first scene that I wrote.”In it, Harry, played by Pedro Pascal, is at the reception following his brother’s wedding. He rearranges his name card so he can sit next to Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker he quickly starts to hit on.Discussing the scene, Song said she wanted the camera to settle on a long two-shot, in which Lucy and Harry have a thoughtful conversation.“This really reflects how incredible my actors are,” she said, “because we’re really treating them like they’re theater actors having to have a whole conversation while sitting in this two-shot.”During that discussion, Song adds to the narrative with a background moment, a quick introduction of the film’s third lead, John (Chris Evans), who walks through the frame while the two are talking.“I really did want the sound design and the way that he walks by to be something that is maybe not easy to spot in the first watch, but it’s a bit of a secret.”That moment pays off when Lucy tells Harry her drink order toward the end of the scene.Read the “Materialists” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Materialists’ Review: When Dakota Met Pedro (and Chris)

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      The director Celine Song follows up her “Past Lives” with a side-eyeing update on the rom-com, starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans.Is heterosexual romance doomed, is the romantic comedy? Those questions swirl with light, teasing provocation in Celine Song’s “Materialists,” a seductive, smartly refreshed addition to an impossibly, perhaps irredeemably old-fashioned genre that was once a Hollywood staple. Set in the New York of today, it stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a professional matchmaker who’s all business until her personal life takes a surprising turn — if more to her than to you — when she’s swept into a romance with two different men. One is a broke dreamboat (Chris Evans as John), the other is more of a superyacht (Pedro Pascal as Harry).Theirs is a sexy, sleek triangle, one that starts taking flight during a wedding after-party where Harry and Lucy have been chatting at the singles’ table. A matchmaker, she introduced the bride and the groom, and now is eyeing up Harry as a prospective client, a so-called unicorn (wealthy, full head of hair, tall). Harry, who’s the groom’s brother, is more interested in her. With sly smiles, they playfully wink and coo, lunge and parry. Just as their flirting begins heating up, John — a waiter and, ta-da, her ex — loudly plunks down bottles of Lucy’s favorite drink order: a Coke and a beer. The lines of attack have been established, and it’s on.Romantic comedies are often described as battles of the sexes, a metaphor that suggests that love affairs are effectively wars. Feelings get badly bruised in “Materialists,” and there’s a sobering shock of violence that’s unusual in screen comedies or romances. But for Lucy and her clients, dating isn’t about winners and losers; it’s transactional, a market for buyers and sellers, and a matter of exchange value. Lucy’s clients yearn, have familiar swoony hopes and dreams, but they’re also consumers with shopping lists that include a prospect’s height, weight, hair (or lack thereof) and age. “She’s 40 and fat,” one disgruntled male client tells Lucy early on about a match. “I would never swipe right on a woman like that.”Blunt and effective, that line is as realistic as it is gasp-out-loud ugly. It also an example of how Song can distill an entire ethos into a single, bracingly unsentimental line. (This is her second feature; her first was the wistful “Past Lives.”) What makes the moment land, though, is how Song uses the contempt in the guy’s voice — it stops Lucy in her tracks — to signal that Song isn’t interested in making just another dopey romance. He sounds insulted, angry, and not just at Lucy or his date (Zoë Winters as Sophie). It makes you wonder what he thinks about women, which introduces a shiver of menace that lingers even after Song shifts tones and focus to settle on Lucy’s budding romance with Harry and her feelings for John.That affair and those feelings are warm, true (or true enough) and, at times, delightful; there are, romance fans know, few movie pleasures as agreeable as watching good-looking, talented actors playact love. It’s especially nice to see Johnson in a lead role that makes the most of her gifts. A consistently surprising actress, she is a supremely, sometimes fascinatingly languorous screen presence, one suggestive of Malibu beaches and excellent weed. She’s been in the spotlight since childhood (her parents are Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson) and seems invitingly comfortable in her own skin, without a trace of that detached quality that can encase some beautiful, famous people like a protective membrane. If anything, Johnson seems lightly amused to be the center of attraction, and entirely aware of why she is.It’s instructive then that the first image of Lucy is a reflection of her face in a mirror. She’s doing her makeup and getting ready for work, and looks attentive yet unreadable. Lucy is soon on the move, her ponytail swinging, easing through New York with a purposefulness that dovetails with Song’s filmmaking. In crisp, breezy scenes, with lilting music and some great sound work, Song introduces the matchmaking company where Lucy is a star employee, her killer, off-kilter sales pitch — “you’re looking for a nursing-home partner and a grave buddy” — and the outwardly independent women who flock to her, women who are edging toward 40 (or older) and are as much in Song’s sightlines as Lucy and her romantic foils are.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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      ‘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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      The Animosity Tour and Other Promotional Movie Campaigns We Love

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      For Jennifer Lopez, Sterling K. Brown, Dakota Johnson and others, the standard publicity push isn’t so standard anymore.In the 1999 rom-com “Notting Hill,” the sheepish bookseller played by Hugh Grant goes to a hotel expecting a date with the megawatt star played by Julia Roberts. He is surprised to find he has arrived at a press junket and looks adorably flustered as he’s shuffled from room to room, pretending to be a reporter from Horse & Hound to interview the stars of her space movie.The sequence is a handy introduction to this strange custom of film publicity: actors sitting in sterile suites for a parade of brief interviews. But these days that almost seems quaint. The press tour has taken on a life of its own, with stars like Dakota Johnson, Jennifer Lopez and Zendaya making news for the tour itself with quippy sound bites, inscrutable looks and fashion moments.It can be grueling for celebrities. Lupita Nyong’o recently described junkets as a “torture technique” in an interview with Glamour. But these cycles can be more entertaining than the movies themselves. Grant’s bookseller would be baffled to learn that you can categorize the tours as follows:The Animosity TourFlorence Pugh was pointedly not at the Venice Film Festival news conference for “Don’t Worry Darling” in 2022.Jacopo Raule/Getty ImagesThe promotion stops for nothing, not even cast members who appear to hate being in one another’s company. This seemed to be the case during the cycle for “Atlas,” Netflix’s new sci-fi flick starring Jennifer Lopez and Sterling K. Brown.During joint interviews, Brown seemed unable to help himself from making fun of Lopez. In one viral moment, he feigned surprise when she said she was Puerto Rican, before repeating her comfort meal of “rice and beans and like, you know, chicken” in overemphasized Spanish. In another moment, he jumped in and helped her out when her own Spanish failed her. After supplying the right word, he did a little dance. That clip prompted social-media users to wonder what J. Lo did to Brown. During these interactions Lopez looked perturbed, leaving plenty of room for observers to jump to conclusions.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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      ‘Am I OK?’ Review: When It’s Time to Grow Up

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      Dakota Johnson stars in an expansive friendship comedy about coming out in your 30s and finding yourself.The appeal of the late bloomer movie is rooted in its parent genre: the coming-of-age story. Our heroine begins a little naïve and learns some hard but good lessons, maybe falls in love. Sometimes a mentor provides wisdom before leaving her to stand on her own two feet. In a traditional coming-of-age story, the protagonist is usually very young, so that world is full of possibility. Anything could happen next.But with a late bloomer, the world’s possibilities have been shut down a little, and that shifts the tone. Decisions about career, friendships and family have already been made; the stakes of change are higher. That means a late bloomer story could be a comedy, or it could feel more melancholy, even like a tragedy. There’s an inherent realism in a film like “All of Us Strangers” or “Her” or “20th Century Women” that’s bracing and invigorating.Depending on your age, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who is 32, may not feel old enough to be termed a late bloomer. But she certainly feels like she is. The protagonist of “Am I OK?” has settled into a quiet, unchallenging Los Angeles life. She’s the kind of person who stares at a diner menu full of options and then orders the same meal — veggie burger, sweet potato fries, black iced coffee — every time. She spends most of her free time with Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), her childhood best friend, and keeps her life ripple-free. She’s never been in love. At the end of dinners with Ben (Whitmer Thomas), the guy she’s ostensibly dating, she shakes his hand.By her own admission, Lucy is nervous all the time, “scared of everything.” Worse, she says, she’s not sure if she’s ever been happy, or what even makes her happy. She has built herself a comfortable box to live in, as long as nothing changes.Her box is about to cave in. One day, Jane announces that she’s moving to London for work, and Lucy suddenly feels unmoored. A feeling that’s been growing inside her is now too strong to ignore: Lucy knows she’s attracted to women. And she’s especially attracted to Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), the peppy new masseuse at the spa where she works as a receptionist.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 Internet Is Obsessed With ‘Madame Web.’ The Box Office? Well …

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      The new addition to the Spider-Man franchise has been panned by critics and mocked on social media. But if all press is good press, why are its ticket sales so dismal?Ricky Valero walked into a mostly empty showing of “Madame Web” with a bucket of popcorn and an open mind.He had some idea of what he was getting into. The movie, which stars Dakota Johnson as a clairvoyant character from the Spider-Man comics, has been gleefully panned in the week since its release.The reviews were lousy, with critics calling the movie “a genuine Chernobyl-level disaster” that is “full of bad dialogue delivered badly.” The box office numbers were somehow worse, landing “Madame Web” among the lowest ticket sales ever for a superhero movie.The movie has been jeered on social media, where Mr. Valero, 37, had been seeing negative posts about it for weeks. But when he attended a showing on Thursday at a theater in Nashville, he was pleasantly surprised.“There’s a level of terrible that can be enjoyable,” he said, adding that he would rate the movie three out of five stars despite some cheesy dialogue. When he voiced mild appreciation for the movie on X, the responses were so vicious that he ended up muting them.“You feel like you’re standing alone on an island,” he said.Sony’s latest addition to the Spider-Man franchise has been inspiring memes for months. But after a dismal first week in theaters, it has come to occupy an odd perch in popular culture: It’s dominating online conversation, but not drawing all that many viewers to theaters.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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      ‘Madame Web’ Review: Dakota Johnson Can’t Save This Spidey Spinoff

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      The actress stars as a clairvoyant in the latest entry to the Spider-Man franchise, using her charm to rise above this flat, predictable movie.The only real bummer about “Madame Web,” the latest installment in the Spider-Man chronicles, isn’t that it’s bad, but that it never achieves memorably terrible status. The story is absurd, the dialogue snort-out-loud risible, the fights uninspired. Even so, there are glimmers of wit and competency. And then there’s its star, Dakota Johnson, who has a fascinating, seemingly natural ability to appear wholly detached from the nonsense swirling around her. Most actors at least try to sell the shoddy goods; Johnson serenely floats above it all.A misterioso clairvoyant, Madame Web is a secondary Spider-Man character who met the web-weaver in the comics in 1980 while regally parked on a life-support system shaped like a round-bottom flask. Blind and plagued by a debilitating autoimmune disease, she had a standard super-type get-up — a black unitard veined with lines that converge in a web — that was offset by a white-and-black hairdo that suggested she shared a stylist with Peter Parker’s editor J. Jonah Jameson. She entered with “a smell of ozone and disinfectant and age,” the classy intro explained, and with “a voice that crackles like ancient parchment.”Johnson’s Cassandra Webb — Cassie for short — is far younger and seems more like a patchouli and cannabis kind of gal, despite the frenetic wheel skills she displays in her job as a New York paramedic. Her powers haven’t yet emerged when, after a preamble in the Peruvian Amazon, she is speeding through the city in 2003. As with many superheroes, Cassie has a tragic back story and so on, a generic burden that Johnson’s palpably awkward charm humanizes. If the actress at times seems understandably baffled by the movie she’s in, it’s because she hasn’t been smoothed into plastic perfection by the star-making machinery. Johnson seems too real for the phoniness thrown at her, which is her own super power.The British director S.J. Clarkson has multiple TV credits on her résumé, including a few episodes of the Netflix series “Jessica Jones,” about the hard boozing, fighting and fornicating superhero. Johnson’s Cassie is sadder and more naturally offbeat than Jones, and like most big-screen superheroes, Cassie doesn’t seem to be getting any noncombative action. Yet she too doesn’t fit easily in Normal World. One of the better scenes in “Madame Web” happens at a baby shower, where Cassie inadvertently wipes the smiles off the faces of a roomful of women by talking about her dead mother. It’s squirmy, funny filler: the guest of honor is Mary Parker (Emma Roberts), Spidey’s soon-to-be mom, who chats with his future uncle, Ben (Adam Scott).Clarkson shares screenwriter credit with Claire Parker as well as with the writing team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, whose collaborations include a string of critically maligned box-office fantasies: “Dracula Untold,” “Gods of Egypt,” “The Last Witch Hunter” and “Morbius.” (That’s entertainment!)“Madame Web” hits the prerequisite genre marks, more or less, as Cassie starts developing her second-sight skills and begins shuffling into the near future and back. One of the character’s more attractive attributes is that her powers are mental rather than physical, which seems to have flummoxed the filmmakers. The movie never coheres narratively, tonally or, really, any way; one problem is the people behind it don’t know what to do with a woman who thinks her way out of trouble.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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      ‘Persuasion’ Review: The Present Intrudes Into the Past

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      Dakota Johnson smirks her way through a Netflix adaptation of the rekindled romance in Jane Austen’s last novel, our critic writes.The great irony of this new, not-quite-modernized adaptation of Jane Austen’s final novel, “Persuasion,” is that it communicates its tense relationship to its 19th-century source material in a repressed, passive-aggressive manner — an approach oddly suited to Austen’s trenchant view of society. The film doesn’t take the creative leap to transpose the beloved story in the present day. Instead, in curiously excruciating fashion, the director, screenwriters, and star imply their discomfort with Georgian-era social norms from within the novel’s period setting.Both the film and the novel begin in the early 1800s, as the story’s heroine, Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson), visits her sister Mary (Mia McKenna-Bruce) in the English countryside, after their father squandered the family savings. Anne is an unmarried woman who is fortunate to be respected — or, at least, perceived as useful — by her blue-blooded relations. But in direct addresses to the camera, Anne admits that she is haunted by the memory of a love affair she was persuaded to end with an enterprising but fortuneless sailor, Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis).Now Anne is alone, and her regrets only grow when Wentworth returns to the country as a wealthy naval captain. He’s eager to find a wife, and if his sights are first set on Anne’s lively sister-in-law Louisa (Nia Towle), his attention always seems to wander back to Anne.For this story of rekindled romance, the film summons the handsome appointments expected for a big-budget period drama. There are extravagant mansions, brocaded costumes and magnificent vistas. But there is a crisis of contemporaneity at the heart of this pretty adaptation, and the trouble begins with its presentation of its heroine.Johnson, wearing smoky eye shadow and pink lipstick, displays the confident appeal of a celebrity sharing her secrets with the audience. Her smile reads as a smirk. The incongruous bravado of her performance is mirrored by the film’s script, written by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, which peppers lines from the novel with meme-ish truisms like, “Now we are worse than exes. We’re friends.”The contrast between the modernized dialogue and Austen’s period-appropriate language only makes both styles seem more mannered. The story’s heroine, its dialogue and even its themes of regret and loneliness seem to be swallowed up by the need to maintain an appearance of contemporary cheek.For fans of Austen’s novel, it’s hard to imagine the director Carrie Cracknell’s version providing a sense of ease or escapism. Instead, the unbearable tension between past and present serves as a disarmingly naked window into the anxieties of current Hollywood filmmaking. Better to have the whole movie be a skeptical, uncertain affair than to risk presenting a pre-feminist heroine who lacks confidence.PersuasionRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More