Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares136 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Feeling’ Review: Fifty Shades of Apathy

      by

      In the sex comedy “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” Joanna Arnow keeps her scenes short and her expressions flat.Joanna Arnow’s attention-grabbing debut “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” has been described as a sadomasochistic sex comedy, but it’s hard to laugh.Arnow, who wrote, directed and stars in this sometimes-riveting, sometimes-dull study of demoralization, plays a dour 30-something New Yorker who spends her days getting pushed around by her boss (Armand Reiser). At night, she submits to the sexual commands of her various male masters, whom she meets online. The joke is that her days and nights aren’t that different.And then the joke is on the audience when Arnow introduces us to six men in 30 minutes before we realize that we don’t yet know her character’s name. (It’s Ann.)The film is structured by Ann’s partners, whose names appear in tidy white font on a black screen. They’re nearly always dressed; she’s almost always naked (though one partner, played by Parish Bradley, commands her to wear bunny ears and a pig nose). It’d be one thing if Ann enjoyed the sex. But from the snapshots we see, these encounters seem mostly humiliating and joyless. When obeying an order to touch herself in view of drivers on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, she just looks bored.Arnow keeps her scenes short and her expressions flat. These glimpses of her character’s life could be stand-alone comic book panels. Together, they’re a mosaic of stagnation.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

    • 88 Shares110 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Boy Kills World’ Review: A Wide-Eyed Assassin

      by

      Beefed up and bloodied, Bill Skarsgard goes mano a mano against disposable hordes in this dystopian action flick.At least give it up for the stunt crew on “Boy Kills World,” a boneheaded action movie that gives some exceedingly fit performers — its hard-body star Bill Skarsgard very much included — a chance to flaunt their physical skills. To judge from all the grunting, the straining muscles and cascading sweat, Skarsgard, along with a few of his nimble co-stars and an army of stunt performers, puts in serious work to try to make the relentless bashing and smashing, flailing and dying look good. Too bad the filmmakers were incapable of doing the same.Set in a discount dystopian hellscape, the story centers on, ta-da, Boy (Skarsgard), a saucer-eyed dynamo with an uninteresting back story who can neither hear nor talk. Once upon a time, for reasons that are laboriously teased out, he landed in the jungle, where he was taken under wing by a punishing caretaker, the Shaman. This cat is played with a lot of grimacing by the Indonesian martial-arts phenom Yayan Ruhian, of the “Raid” movies. Ruhian also shows up in “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum,” which isn’t good, yet is still better than “Boy Kills World” because it was made by people who know how to showcase stunt fighting.“Boy Kills World,” by contrast, consistently undermines its stunts with frustratingly clumsy filmmaking. Again and again, the frantic camera goes overly close when it should go wide — turning bodies into a chaotic jumble of parts — and the choppy over-editing makes matters worse. I’m not sure what the director Moritz Mohr thought he was doing here. (Sam Raimi is one of the producers.) It’s also unclear why anyone even bothered to concoct a story for Boy, because the only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.The story involves, yup, a revenge mission that the filmmakers fuss with by toggling between the past and present but that mostly finds Boy hunting a cartoon despot (Famke Janssen) and her minions (Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Brett Gelman). Andrew Koji also shows up as a sidekick for Boy, whom Skarsgard plays as a guileless killing machine. As he did in “It,” the actor makes shrewd use of the whites of his eyes, turning them into attention-grabbing beacons. That’s understandable given that another actor (H. Jon Benjamin, of “Bob’s Burgers”) provides Boy’s internal voice using a putatively humorous tough-guy drone. This gimmick gets old fast, as does the movie, even as its hero and ideas remain underbaked.Boy Kills WorldRated R for action movie fighting and killing. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares144 Views

      in Movies

      Zendaya, Luca Guadagnino, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist on ‘Challengers’

      by

      Can trash talk be a love language?It is in the world of Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Challengers,” which pits two best-friend tennis players, Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), against each other in a bid to win the heart of the superstar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). What begins as innocent teasing becomes more charged once an injury cuts short Tashi’s career: Forced to pivot to coaching, she weds Art and goads him to demolish her former lover Patrick on the court, though both men continue to nurse their own hidden agendas.“I find them all really likable and charming — and terrible also,” Zendaya said with a grin. The complicated adult stakes of “Challengers” offer a new pursuit for this 27-year-old actress, who shot to fame as a teenager on the Disney Channel and is now best known for her Emmy-winning role on HBO’s “Euphoria” and the big-budget movie franchises “Spider-Man” and “Dune.” Though she is aware that “Challengers” will test her box-office draw as a solo star, she didn’t overthink her decision to make the movie, which comes out in theaters on Friday.“I wanted to do it because it’s brilliant,” she said. “It’s not like I sat in my room and had this master board: ‘OK, this is how I’m going to make my big transition for my first lead theatrical role.’”Last week at a Beverly Hills hotel, I met Zendaya, her co-stars O’Connor (“The Crown”) and Faist (“West Side Story”), and Guadagnino for an hour of freewheeling conversation about “Challengers” and the pressure of forging a life and career in the public eye. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“The triangle is not just two people after one,” Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Challengers,” said, “but the corners touch together all the time.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThis movie poses a lot of questions about ambition and drive. Zendaya, has your relationship to your own ambition changed over time?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

    • 75 Shares157 Views

      in Movies

      What Directors Love About Nicole Kidman

      by

      As the actress receives a life achievement award from the American Film Institute this week, five filmmakers discuss what makes her work so singular.“We come to this place for magic,” Nicole Kidman says in the well-known AMC Theaters preshow advertisement. And who could better welcome back audiences to experience movies on the big screen than an acclaimed artist who’s illuminated stories across all genres?Kidman has starred in daring art house projects (“Dogville,” “Birth”), awards-friendly dramas (“Cold Mountain,” “Rabbit Hole”), big-budget crowd-pleasers (“Aquaman,” “Paddington”) and everything in between.On Saturday, the Australian American Oscar-winning actress will receive the life achievement award from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. At 56, Kidman is among the youngest honorees.But what qualities have kept Kidman consistently in demand for the past three decades?The Australian director Jane Campion said via email that “her fierce curiosity has helped her take an audience inside some gnarly women.” The American filmmaker Karyn Kusama described her as a “channeler of inchoate energy,” and explained that when this “coalesces into something visceral for her character, you almost feel the molecules in the air shift around her.”Five directors who have worked with Kidman, including Campion and Kusama, discussed what makes the performer an irreplaceable, shape-shifting talent.Baz Luhrmann‘Moulin Rouge!’ (2001), ‘Australia’ (2008)As Satine in “Moulin Rouge!”20th Century FoxWe 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

    • 175 Shares143 Views

      in Movies

      Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell on How ‘Anyone but You’ Beat the Rom-Com Odds

      by

      Here are their takeaways after the film, debuting on Netflix, went from box office miss to runaway hit.As Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell promoted their romantic comedy, “Anyone but You,” last year, life appeared to be imitating art: The co-stars posed cheek to cheek while sightseeing in Australia. Powell dipped a gleeful Sweeney in his arms. Sweeney cast longing gazes up at Powell on red carpets. The pair flirted and giggled in interviews.When Powell and his long-term girlfriend broke up, and Sweeney remained engaged to her fiancé, Jonathan Davino (an executive producer of “Anyone but You”), rumors of an illicit offscreen relationship between the two actors took hold.The speculation played out, the stars said, exactly as they intended.“The two things that you have to sell a rom-com are fun and chemistry. Sydney and I have a ton of fun together, and we have a ton of effortless chemistry,” Powell said in an interview. “That’s people wanting what’s on the screen off the screen, and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit — and it worked wonderfully. Sydney is very smart.”Sweeney, who is also an executive producer through her Fifty-Fifty Films company, said she was intimately involved with the marketing strategy on the Columbia Pictures film, including, perhaps, fanning those headline-generating flames.“I was on every call. I was in text group chats. I was probably keeping everybody over at Sony marketing and distribution awake at night because I couldn’t stop with ideas,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that we were actively having a conversation with the audience as we were promoting this film, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who created the entire narrative.”The R-rated romance follows Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell), who share a night that ends badly and are then thrust together at a destination wedding in Australia, where Ben’s friend and Bea’s sister are getting married. The film is based loosely on Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and is full of bawdy zingers, grand gestures and sun-dappled scenery.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

    • 138 Shares110 Views

      in Movies

      How Many Biographies on the Page and Screen Do You Know?

      by

      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about literature that has gone on to find new life in the form of movies, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats. This week’s quiz highlights films that were adapted from the biographies or autobiographies of their notable subjects.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their screen adaptations. More

    • 138 Shares156 Views

      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: N.F.L. Draft and ‘Bridget Jones’ Marathon

      by

      Football players get their chance to play in the national league. HBO airs all three movies staring Renée Zellweger.For TV viewers who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network shows, movies and specials broadcasting Monday through Sunday, April 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE SYNANON FIX 9 p.m. on HBO. In 1958, Synanon opened their doors in California as drug rehabilitation center. But the center started using a kind of attack therapy, in which patients are verbally abused and degraded in front of a group, and several members were later charged with child abuse, assault and attempted murder. This documentary series, which had its premiere at Sundance this year, is airing its fourth and final episode this week.TuesdayTHE EXPRESS WAY WITH DULÉ HILL 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In each of the four episodes of this documentary series, the actor Dulé Hill speaks to people across the country who are making art in nontraditional ways. In the first episode, Hill heads to California to meet a deaf dancer, a gay Mariachi and a cabaret group of senior citizens. The other episodes take place in Appalachia, Texas and Chicago.Anna Sawai in “Shogun.”Katie Yu/FXSHOGUN 10 p.m. on FX. This mini series, based on the 1980s NBC show and book of the same name, is wrapping up. In an interview with The New York Times, Anna Sawai, who plays Lady Mariko on the show, said that the “the last two episodes are very special” and that “the men have been physically fighting. The women are fighting their own battles.”WednesdayAMERICAN HORROR STORY: DELICATE 10 p.m. on FX. The last few episodes of the 12th season of this Ryan Murphy anthology has followed the fallout of Anna (Emma Roberts) losing a Golden Globe and Siobhan (Kim Kardashian) perhaps killing off her competition. Will Anna get all she has dreamed about? Will Siobhan face any consequences to her actions? This season finale will bring answers.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

    • 100 Shares110 Views

      in Movies

      Lourdes Portillo, Oscar-Nominated Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 80

      by

      Her films centered on Latin American experiences and received wide acclaim.Lourdes Portillo, an Oscar-nominated Mexican-born documentary filmmaker whose work explored Latin American social issues, died on Saturday at her home in San Francisco. She was 80.Her death was confirmed by her friend Soco Aguilar. No cause was given.One of Ms. Portillo’s best-known works is her 1994 documentary “The Devil Never Sleeps,” a murder-mystery in which she investigates the strange death of her multimillionaire uncle, whose widow claimed he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In 2020, the Library of Congress selected the film for the National Film Registry.“Using vintage snapshots, old home movies and interviews, the film builds a biographical portrait of Oscar Ruiz Almeida, a Mexican rancher who amassed a fortune exporting vegetables to the United States and went on to become a powerful politician and businessman,” Stephen Holden, a Times movie critic, wrote in a 1995 review of the film.The documentary had the tenor of a telenovela and presented open questions about Mr. Ruiz Almeida’s mysterious life and death and the people who could have had a motive for the murder.“The more Oscar is discussed, the more enigmatic he seems,” Mr. Holden wrote.Ms. Portillo crafted the film’s story line from the information her mother relayed over the phone while Ms. Portillo was living in New York, she said in a talk at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles last year.The museum screened the movie last year as part of a series honoring Ms. Portillo and other filmmakers who have made significant contributions to cinema.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