McAvoy, James

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    ‘Speak No Evil’ Review: He Seemed So Nice

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    In this horror remake, James McAvoy plays an aggressively friendly British stranger who extends a dubious invitation to an American couple. Suckers!Given the travel horror stories that fill the news — cruise-ship contagion, passengers trying to open plane doors mid-flight — the movies have some serious competition when it comes to fear mongering. Yet filmmakers keep trying to top reality with familiar stories about the terrors that await you when you venture into the world. Characters keep heading down dark roads. They visit weird hotels and isolated cabins (come on!), invite creeps into their homes and enter those of people they scarcely know (as if!). These travelers don’t ask for trouble; they beg for it.The first time that Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben (Scoot McNairy), an American couple, really notice Paddy (an exhaustingly over-the-top James McAvoy), he’s taking a splashy leap in a pool. They’re on vacation in Tuscany and having a good time, and meeting new people is fun (unless you’re in a horror movie, that is). Paddy seems excitable, a bit over-eager — for attention, certainly — but he and his wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), are friendly, attractive and British, so they’re easy to talk to. Like Louise and Ben, they have a boy, Ant (Dan Hough), so they must be nice. They’re like us, you can almost hear Louise and Ben thinking.For reasons that never make any sense — rationality is often in short supply in horror cinema — it isn’t long before Louise and Ben take up Paddy and Ciara’s invitation to visit them at their house in the English countryside. First, though, the writer-director James Watkins stirs up some marital tension for Ben and Louise, who have moved to London, upturning their lives. (Davis and McNairy starred in the great AMC show “Halt and Catch Fire,” and are persuasively cozy together.) She seems to be just fine, but Ben is unhappily unemployed, a divide that Watkins also uses to feed the story’s themes, chiefly masculinity and middle-class norms.Red alarms have already begun blinking by the time that Louise and Ben and their 11-year-old daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), an anxious child who self-soothes with a stuffed bunny, pull up to Paddy and Ciara’s house one portentously dark night. Once inside, the alarms start flashing faster. Louise tries to put on a good game face, but she’s visibly put off by the house, an uncomfortable, ramshackle warren of cluttered rooms with low ceilings that boxes them in. Soon, Paddy is slaughtering a goose (uh-oh) and pushing a forkful of cooked bird at Louise — a vegetarian — and the atmosphere has appreciably soured. Things only get worse because they have to.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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      in Music

      Brooklyn Academy of Music Plans a Global Season

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      The company’s spring offerings include the British choreographer Akram Khan’s “Giselle” and the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby.After focusing its most recent season on the artists of New York City, the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Monday announced a spring season filled with global offerings, including the New York premiere of the British choreographer Akram Khan’s “Giselle,” a series of shows by the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby and a production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring James McAvoy.The season will also feature a variety of New York artists, like the contemporary ensemble Bang on a Can and the visual artist Saya Woolfalk, who will present a new digital installation.“It’s local and it’s global,” the academy’s artistic director, David Binder, said of the new season. “There’s an optimism running through it, where artists are reimagining what the world can be.”The academy hopes the offerings will continue to drive its recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. The academy saw relatively robust ticket sales in the fall and winter, with several sold-out performances, Binder said, but is still working to recover from the turmoil of the pandemic, which forced it to suspend performances for more than a year.The spring season opens on March 24 with the New York premiere of “32 Sounds,” an immersive documentary by the filmmaker Sam Green. The film, which was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January, is narrated live; audience members wear headphones.Khan’s acclaimed reworking of “Giselle,” which the English National Ballet is bringing to the academy in June, has been widely praised since its premiere in London in 2016. It has since been performed in Auckland, New Zealand, as well as Hong Kong and Dublin.The New York Times called the 2016 production “a beautiful and intelligent remaking of the beloved 1841 classic, and probably — and improbably — the best work Mr. Khan has created.”During four performances at the academy in May, Gadsby, the star of the popular Netflix specials “Douglas” and “Nanette,” will perform “Body of Work,” her latest stand-up show, which explores themes of love and relationships.In April, Jamie Lloyd’s Olivier Award-winning production of “Cyrano de Bergerac” will come to the academy, featuring McAvoy, the “X-Men” star.In addition to “Giselle,” there will be a variety of other dance productions. The 10-member Brazilian dance group Suave will perform “Cria” in March, after its original engagement at the academy last fall was delayed because of visa issues. The German choreographer Sasha Waltz’s “In C” will have its American premiere in April, accompanied by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. The annual DanceAfrica festival returns in May.Binder said even though another surge of the virus was always possible, he was hopeful audiences would turn out for the new season.“I feel very lucky that our audiences are there and up for the adventure, and are ready and are really super engaged,” he said. “People are really ready to come back.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Together’ Review: Love and Loathing in London

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      Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy play a battling couple trapped in lockdown in this theatrical pandemic drama.Like an awful herald of what could lie in wait as future filmmakers grapple with our ongoing viral nightmare, Stephen Daldry’s “Together” is an almost punishing watch. That it’s bearable at all is entirely because of the superlative acting skills of James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan as an unnamed couple forced to endure an extended London lockdown. In place of a plot, we get a setup: They can’t stand the sight of each other.A yearlong pandemic diary embedded in a prickly domestic negotiation, the movie is essentially a two-person play set in the upscale kitchen of the couple’s comfortable middle-class home. Repeatedly breaking the fourth wall — perhaps to avoid breaking the crockery — the two address the camera in earnest monologues. While these can range from confessional to explanatory (like a lengthy ponder on the meaning of “exponential” when tallying Covid infections), they are almost always suffocatingly self-absorbed.An agonizing opening scene lays out the pair’s practiced hostility (“I hate your face!” “I think of you as a cancer!”) and the bickering state of their union. She’s a Liberal of some privilege; he’s a Tory from a poor background. She works with a refugee charity; he has a highly profitable consulting business. Floating somewhere on the periphery is a young son, Artie (Samuel Logan), who’s supposedly the glue that keeps the couple quarantining together. A monologue from him might have gone a long way toward explaining his parents’ dysfunction.The movie’s persistent squabbling is bad, but its too-raw reminders of pandemic trials are almost worse. The reports of denuded grocery stores and mask refuseniks; the paeans to an overworked Somali caregiver and a saintly nurse standing watch over a relative’s hospital bed. And by intermittently stamping the movie with a date and a U.K. death count, Daldry seems to chide us for caring about his characters at all, the fussing and fighting of the living rendered even more trivial alongside the bodies piling up off screen.An awkward and uncomfortable experiment, “Together” unfolds with a staginess that rebuffs our involvement. Political lectures are never fun, and the movie’s bitterly angry attacks on government ineptitude and nursing-home deaths made me wonder if the writer, Dennis Kelly, needed a back rub. So it’s a relief when McAvoy’s character starts growing asparagus and an uneasy détente is reached: No one needs a plague tale whose arc refuses to bend toward hope.TogetherRated R for cruel language and cringeworthy sex talk. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More