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      ‘Asphalt City’ Review: Arbiters of Life and Death

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      Sean Penn plays a flinty paramedic showing a rookie the ropes in this maddening drama about emergency medical workers in New York.Two paramedics — Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan), a wide-eyed rookie, and Gene Rutkovsky (Sean Penn), a gruff veteran of the trade — traverse the mean streets of East New York, Brooklyn, by ambulance in the solemn drama “Asphalt City.” Flooded with neon and sirens, the movie opens during Cross’s first nights on the corps, tracking his and his new partner’s efforts to provide care for an array of challenging patients.Directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire — with evident inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s “Bringing Out the Dead” — this jittery drama wants viewers to appreciate the unique burdens facing emergency medical workers. Its approach to achieving this goal, however, involves a profusion of overly literal allusions to the paramedics as arbiters of life and death. “We are gods,” a colleague insists to Cross in one of several midnight symposiums on ethics and existentialism. As if those weren’t enough, our hero in training also sports a bomber jacket conspicuously embroidered with angel wings.For reasons beyond my understanding, Cross, an aspiring doctor, looks up to Rutkovsky, a flinty old timer with a propensity to aggress when he feels sad or mad or basically anything. Their dynamic is familiar at best and dull at worst, particularly for those who long ago tired of the tragedies of toxic machismo. A couple of women do inhabit “Asphalt City”: the enthralling Katherine Waterston as Rutkovsky’s nettled ex wife, and Cross’s nameless love interest, whose naked body seems to receive more screen time than her face.Asphalt CityRated R for bloody emergencies and graphic nudity. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wicked Little Letters’ Review: Prim, Proper and Profane

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      Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley elevate a comedy about a weird true tale of defamation and dirty words.“This is more true than you’d think,” handwritten text informs us at the start of “Wicked Little Letters.” I looked it up, and they weren’t kidding. The movie involves tweaks and elisions to history, of course. But at least in its major outlines, the true story matches the film, in which a dour spinster named Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) and her raucous next-door neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley) tangle over a series of mysteriously obscene letters that started arriving at the homes of people in the English coast village of Littlehampton in 1920. As you may intuit, this movie belongs to a very particular subgenre summed up in one declaration: boy, small English towns are full of weirdos.Directed by Thea Sharrock (who has an impressive two movies out this week — the other is “The Beautiful Game”) from a screenplay by the comedy writer Jonny Sweet, “Wicked Little Letters” is a darkly funny take on the tale, leaning a lot more toward the farce than the darkness. Edith, the oldest daughter in a large and very pious family, still lives with her parents (Timothy Spall and Gemma Jones). They sleep in three twin beds in the same room. They rarely go anywhere and are constantly scandalized.Edith has been under her father’s thumb so long that any will she possessed has been wholly squashed out, which makes her exactly the ideal of feminine virtue for 1920s England. The men have returned from war — those who survived, anyhow — and retaken the jobs and roles women filled, relegating them back to the kitchen and domestic life. Edith, homely but docile, is everything a good Christian Englishwoman should be.And of course, anyone who deviates from Edith’s type is suspicious. Rose, for instance, has committed a quadruple feat of sin: living with her Black boyfriend (Malachi Kirby), having a daughter (Alisha Weir) who dares the unladylike act of picking up a guitar, enjoying a night at the pub and, most of all, being Irish. When she arrived in Littlehampton, she was a figure of affable curiosity to her neighbors, especially Edith. But by the time we meet them, Edith has accused Rose of sending elegantly written obscene letters to her and to the neighbors — letters containing marvelously inventive strings of epithets so vile that I cannot reproduce them in this newspaper. Edith endures the letters with a visage so saintly that you can practically see her halo: “We worship a Messiah who suffered, so by my suffering, do I not move closer to heaven?” she intones to her parents, eyes modestly cast down.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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      Steve Buscemi’s ‘The Listener’ Looks at Post-Covid Loneliness

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      Tessa Thompson’s still and luminous performance makes this post-Covid drama about loneliness, directed by Steve Buscemi, worth watching.“The Listener” — directed by Steve Buscemi — opens with the sound of an unanswered phone and the thrum of a city before turning its lens on Tessa Thompson’s character, who lies in bed, staring upward, before beginning her late shift as the crisis helpline volunteer “Beth.” Written by Alessandro Camon and shot in 2021, this hushed drama takes on a pandemic many Americans experienced and continue to, even post-quarantine: loneliness.During the shift, callers we never see engage or push against Beth’s patient if practiced prompts. Even amid distress, the callers tend to maintain a frayed, respectful civility. An exception comes in the form of a guy one might call-tag as an incel if insults didn’t feel so at odds with a movie rife with compassion.While some of the characters sound too much like avatars of a cultural moment, there are memorable exchanges: Alia Shawkat voicing a woman whose anguish soars and plunges with a slam poetry lyricism and Jamie Hector portraying a veteran struggling with a recurring nightmare. For their part, Buscemi and Thompson utilize the complementary power of stillness and the close-up to create a portrait of a woman who hears so much and divulges so little.The actor Rebecca Hall brings withering and wry certainty as a college professor working through the philosophical logic and practical logistics of suicide. In a twist, she doesn’t begin with a monologue of despair but with a question that cracks open a mystery that has hung over “The Listener” from the start.The ListenerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Rebecca Hall on ‘Godzilla x Kong’ and Finding Her Way in Hollywood

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      Rebecca Hall stood in front of an easel, her face contemplative. She moved a paintbrush gently on a palette, then applied the paint to the canvas. This was in her studio, a converted barn next door to where Ms. Hall lives in upstate New York with her husband, the actor Morgan Spector, and their 5-year-old daughter, Ida.When she’s not acting, Ms. Hall paints as a way of channeling her creativity. Her father, Sir Peter Hall — who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company — once warned her about dividing her talents. “He said that it’s very hard to do more than one thing, which really haunted me for a really long time,” Ms. Hall said. “Increasingly, though, I refuse to stay in one lane.”This, in many ways, is Ms. Hall in a nutshell: unwilling to be boxed in, an artist at heart. At 41, Ms. Hall is considered by some to be one of her generation’s most talented actresses. She possesses an unnerving maturity and an unparalleled capacity for versatility. She can so thoroughly embody a character that, as the New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis once wrote, “she becomes your way into the movie as well as the reason you keep watching.” But her career choices reveal a circuitous route toward stardom, a push and pull between projects with famous directors and actors and those on a much smaller scale, including independent films and stage productions.Most recently, she appears in this month’s “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” a big-budget monster film. In it, she plays Dr. Ilene Andrews, an anthropological linguist, who serves as a maternal Jane Goodall-type figure for Kong. It’s the type of heavily marketed blockbuster that a younger Rebecca Hall might have objected to altogether. So why did she choose to do it?“The cynical answer is you don’t get to be an artist in this day and age without doing some of those,” she replied. “But I’m also a straight-up lover of cinema, and that involves all kinds of cinema. I don’t have the mentality of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do one for them, and then I can do one for me.’ There’s also a huge amount of fun in it, and I’m proud of the end result.”Ms. Hall in this month’s big-budget film “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” She is “a straight-up lover of cinema, and that involves all kinds of cinema,” she said.Dan McFadden/Warner Bros. PicturesWe 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 is Night Flight Plus? A Streaming Alternative to Netflix and Hulu.

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      If you’ve got six bucks and want to be adventurous, try this streaming service for some wild fringe programming.For this month’s spotlight on lesser-known but worthwhile streaming services, we turn our attention to a name that will mean much to a certain type of Gen-Xer: Night Flight Plus. For those too young to remember (or too old to care), “Night Flight” was a late-night mainstay on the USA cable network from its debut in 1981 through its conclusion in 1988, airing for four to six hours over weekend nights. It was primarily a home for music videos, especially in its early years when the still-nascent MTV had not yet cornered that market. “Night Flight” aired a wider variety of acts, and originated many of the eventual staples of MTV’s programming — video countdowns, artist profiles and the like.But the show was never just a video magazine, and when MTV became a brand unto itself, “Night Flight” proudly proclaimed itself to be “more than just music television.” In fact, it was more like a digital variety show, intermingling music video packages with an assortment of alternative programming: cult and camp movies, aired in their entirety; short films by up-and-coming experimental filmmakers; offbeat cartoons, both new and vintage; segments spotlighting hot new stand-up comedians and sketch artists; and oddball throwback TV episodes. Every episode of “Night Flight” is a wild, unpredictable ride, where the only criteria for inclusion is coolness.Night Flight Plus airs a curated selection of those original episodes, and if that were all it offered, it would still be well worth the $5.99 per month. But Night Flight Plus has extended the anything-goes spirit and mission of the original show, offering up not only those episodes but also the wild, fringe programming that filled its margins; those shows and films are now available at the push of your button, rather than a network’s.So you can choose from a wide array of music documentaries and concert performances, soft-core romps and retro horror favorites, exploitation pictures and forgotten television. There are sidebars of films from the fringe auteurs like Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Andy Milligan and Penelope Spheeris. And several boutique home media labels, including Arrow Video, Blue Underground, Grindhouse Releasing, Something Weird and Vinegar Syndrome, have made their most popular titles available for subscribers.Again, this is all six bucks a month, which makes Night Flight Plus the best overall value among the subscription streamers — at least, for a certain kind of pop-culture obsessed weirdo. (You know who you are). Here are a few recommendations:Night Flight: Full Episode (7/14/84): If you’re an ’80s survivor looking for a full-scale nostalgia overdose, then go directly to the selection of “‘As Aired’ Episodes With Commercials,” which are, as promised, full and original two- and three-hour shows that even include vintage commercial spots (and their distinctive, earworm jingles). All are delightful, but this one is my favorite, and a quintessential example of the show’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. It features a robust assortment of delightfully of-their-moment music videos, including “Magic” by the Cars, “Breakin’ … There’s No Stopping Us” by Ollie & Jerry and “Lucky Star” by Madonna (“one of today’s hottest rising stars”); an episode of the show-within-the-show “Radio 1990,” spotlighting David Lee Roth and Van Halen; a featurette on that summer’s goofy jungle adventure film “Sheena”; and an installment of the 1950s sci-fi adventure series “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.” Throw in those ads, which include both of Michael Jackson’s ’84 Pepsi spots, and it’s like stepping into a time machine.TV Party: “The Sublimely Intolerable Show”: If your tastes veer into even more eclectic realms, Night Flight Plus features a handful of vintage public access TV shows — chief among them “Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party,” a deliciously low-fi, shot-on-tape snapshot of the downtown New York art and punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The show was hosted by the writer and scene chronicler O’Brien and the Blondie co-founder Chris Stein, and was directed by the “No Wave” filmmaker Amos Poe. The hip-hop godfather Fab 5 Freddy was a frequent guest and occasional cameraman, and other guests included Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Byrne and Deborah Harry. You can watch the excellent 2005 documentary on the show — or you can leap right in with this typical episode, in which the energetic music and hip-as-hell cocktail party vibe aren’t even disrupted by the relentless technical difficulties.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 Best of Late Night, at the Movies and Beyond

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      The new horror-thriller “Late Night With the Devil” isn’t the only time late-night hosts, shows and sets become fodder for on-screen moments in film and TV.The new horror-thriller “Late Night With the Devil” stars David Dastmalchian as the host of “Night Owls With Jack Delroy” where, on Halloween night 1977, an occult-themed episode takes a dark turn during the live broadcast. Shot in a found-footage way that unearths the “lost” episode, the movie (now in theaters, streaming on Shudder on April 22) is a satirical throwback to the era’s supernatural and religious fanaticism, with a notable nod to “The Exorcist.” And it is one of the most recent in a string of late-night moments that make their way to the big and small screens.Late-night hosts past and present have lent their sets (and sometimes themselves) to projects, while fictional nods and fake hosts pop up elsewhere. From Gucci campaigns featuring James Corden interviewing Harry Styles to several “Simpsons” cameos and sendups, to David Letterman crossovers on “Seinfeld,” “The Larry Sanders Show” and “Roseanne,” late-night hosts play a particularly present role in popular culture. Below is a select look at the times late-night television has smartly made its way into fictional movies and TV.‘Looking for Love’ (1964)Rent on Apple TV or Amazon.In this film directed by Don Weis, Connie Francis stars as Libby Caruso, an aspiring singer who initially found success peddling a line of women’s clothing. Booked on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson” to talk fashion, Libby makes mention of her singing and sees her life change after Carson invites her to perform a song.‘The King of Comedy’ (1983)Stream it on Hulu.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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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Bachelor’ and ‘The Truth vs. Alex Jones’

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      Joey Graziadei hands out his final rose on ABC, and HBO airs a documentary about the trial of Alex Jones.For those like myself who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, March 25-31. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE BACHELOR 8 p.m. on ABC. After an especially fun and rowdy women-tell-all special last week, it is finally time for Joey Graziadei to hand out his final rose and potentially get down on one knee. The host, Jesse Palmer, keeps teasing that the finale will be like nothing fans have ever seen. But the show is famous for constantly using hyperboles like “the most shocking season” or “jaw-dropping,” but no episode has been that wild since Colton Underwood jumped over a fence to get away from producers and cameras in 2019. I’m still hoping Graziadei gets a happily ever after.Tuesday“The Truth vs. Alex Jones.”Courtesy of HBOTHE TRUTH VS. ALEX JONES 9 p.m. on HBO. On Dec. 14, 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and killed 20 children and six adults. Before long, the radio host Alex Jones started broadcasting conspiracy theories about the shooting that inspired some of his listeners to harass family members of the victims. In 2018, Jones was sued by some of the Sandy Hook families, and in 2022 Jones was ordered to pay eight families a total of nearly $1.5 billion. This documentary talks to parents involved in the lawsuit and chronicles the trial.WednesdayGROWN-ISH 10 p.m. on Freeform. The friends at Cal U are back for one more hurrah. About a year ago, Yara Shahidi, a star of the comedy, announced that Season 6 would be its last, and after a midseason break, a few episodes will tie up the loose ends as Junior (Marcus Scribner) wraps up his college career. Some of the original cast members (including Emily Arlook, Jordan Buhat and Luka Sabbat) will guest star in the final episodes alongside Kelly Rowland, Lil Yachty, and Anderson .Paak.ThursdayFrom left: Darlanne Fluegel, Robert De Niro, James Woods and Tuesday Weld in “Once Upon a Time in America.”Program Content, Artwork and Photography (c) 1984 The Ladd CompanyWe 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 Invention of a Desert Tongue for ‘Dune’

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      Language constructors for the movies started with words Frank Herbert made up for his 1965 novel but went much further, creating an extensive vocabulary and specific grammar rules.In Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi “Dune” movies, Indigenous people known as Fremen use a device to tunnel rapidly through their desert planet’s surface.The instrument is called a “compaction tool” in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, “Dune,” on which the films are based. But the professional language constructors David J. Peterson and Jessie Peterson wanted a more sophisticated word for it as the husband and wife built out the Fremen language, Chakobsa, for “Dune: Part Two,” which premiered earlier this month.They started with a verb they had made up meaning “to press” — “kira” — and, applying rules David Peterson had devised for the language before the first movie, fashioned another verb that means “to compress” or “to free space by compression” — “kiraza.” From there, they used his established suffixes to come up with a noun. Thus was born the Chakobsa word for a sand compressor, “kirzib,” which can be heard in background dialogue in “Dune: Part Two.”For language constructors — conlangers, as they are known — such small touches enhance the verisimilitude of even gigantic edifices like the “Dune” series. If the demand for conlangers’ work is any indication, filmmakers and showrunners agree.“There’s a very big limit to what you can do with anything approaching gibberish,” said Jessie Peterson, who holds a doctorate in linguistics. “If you just shouted one word in gibberish, that would probably be fine. If you shouted a phrase of two words, OK. But if you tried to do a whole sentence structure in gibberish, it would fall apart very quickly. If somebody needed to respond or repeat information, it won’t cohere.”Other languages are a significant part of the “Dune” films as well. For “Part One,” David Peterson devised a chant for the emperor’s fearsome military forces, the Sardaukar, and the sign language of discreet hand gestures employed by the central Atreides family.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