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      Adam Sandler’s ‘Spaceman’ Has an Identity Crisis, Like Many Space Movies

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      With the release of Adam Sandler’s odd, middling and expensive new Netflix film, a look at space movie misfires of the past and how history repeats itself.Not long into “Spaceman,” Adam Sandler’s new somber sci-fi space movie on Netflix, it becomes quite clear that it’s struggling to channel something greater, something better, something already respected.Sandler’s character, a Czech cosmonaut named Jakub, has spent many months alone in a ship investigating a mysterious purple cloud — alone except for an alien arachnid called Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano). Hanus speaks to Jakub — about fear, guilt, pain and the origins of the universe — in a soothing yet stilted tone, evoking the voice of HAL 9000, the conflicted A.I. entity in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” from 1968.The central themes in “Spaceman,” loneliness and disconnection, are fundamental in many cerebral space movies including “2001,” but perhaps more so in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet space drama, “Solaris,” about a small crew of scientists who come mentally undone. “Spaceman” also has some “Gravity,” some “Interstellar,” some “First Man,” some “Ad Astra,” the New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her review.Many middling sci-fi space movies have faced such fates: measured not by what they are but by what they wished they were. Often these films have the potential to be brilliant. “Spaceman” was directed by Johan Renck, who won two Emmys in 2019 for his work on the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl”; Sandler, while a comedian, has soared in complex dramatic roles, notably in “Uncut Gems” and “Punch-Drunk Love”; Jakub’s wife is played by Carey Mulligan, who is up for a best actress Oscar this month for “Maestro.”What is toughest to forgive, though, is that “Spaceman” commits the biggest movie no-no of all: It’s boring. “It is not fun-bad,” Wilkinson writes. “It is maudlin-bad, belabored-bad and also pretty boring-bad.”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 ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘The Zone of Interest,’ We Hear What We Are

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      Humans have spent much of history coming up with novel ways to exterminate one another, but the defining feature of modern violence is its technologization. With a chilling practicality, systems and tools designed to enhance productivity can also separate the killers from the killing, stifling pesky human impulses like empathy and conscience. But a bomb has only one purpose. So does a concentration camp.Both “Oppenheimer” and “The Zone of Interest” tangle with the psychology involved in creating highly efficient killing machines. Choosing to center on people who make and deploy lethal tools at roughly the same historical moment — an era of unprecedented technological advancement — the filmmakers faced a challenge. Viscerally depicting the psychic gulf between methods of massacre and their creators is not simple in a medium like film. Cinema tends to enforce closeness between us and the characters; we see the wrinkles in their skin, understand them as humans, feel their emotions and project our own onto them. To portray cognitive dissonance requires something unexpected.The solution, for both of these movies, lay in the second most powerful tool available to filmmakers: sound. Not the music, but the knocks and steps and whizzes and shrieks. Generally we’re used to the sound in a film supporting the images. In both “Zone” and “Oppenheimer,” though, sound plays against image in a way that draws attention to itself, disconcerting the audience. Both films are up for Academy Awards in multiple categories, including best picture, which means their nominations for sound design are easy to overlook. But the way each uses sound is striking. It’s engineered as an unsettling agent, a means to carry moral weight from the screen to the audience on a level that approaches the subconscious.THE DIRECTOR OF “OPPENHEIMER,” Christopher Nolan, has long played around with sound in his films, which are often very loud and propelled by an intense, driving score. (Watching one of his films can feel at times as if you’re immersed in one very, very long montage.) Nolan also prefers not to rerecord actors’ dialogue, leaving them mixed into the sound as they were recorded during the performance, which can make them a little hard to hear. He knows, and he doesn’t mind.“Oppenheimer,” with sound design by the frequent Nolan collaborator Richard King, is no different. Most of the three-hour movie, about the creation of the atomic bomb, is guys in suits, talking about fission and geopolitics and other brainy matters over a pulsating score by Ludwig Goransson. But right around the two-hour mark, something startling occurs.If you’ve seen the film, you know the moment. The scientists of the Manhattan Project and select military officials have gathered in the New Mexico desert for the Trinity test, the first trial detonation of a nuclear bomb. It is the wee hours of July 16, 1945. If the test goes well, two more bombs will be deployed in mere weeks to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese — and, the scientists hope, end the war.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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      Robert M. Young, Filmmaker Who Indulged His Wanderlust, Dies at 99

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      The subjects of his documentaries included Indigenous peoples, civil rights sit-ins and the war in Angola. His narrative films included “Extremities” and “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.”Robert M. Young, an eclectic director whose documentary subjects included civil rights lunch counter sit-ins and sharks, and whose feature films included one about a Mexican American farmer who kills a Texas lawman and one about a woman who takes revenge on her attacker, died on Feb. 6 in Los Angeles. He was 99.The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Andrew.In an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2005, Mr. Young recalled what attracted him to filmmaking.“I wanted to be in life,” he said. “I wanted to be having adventures, I wanted to be living in the world.”He more than fulfilled that ambition.In the 1950s, he created educational films with two partners, most notably “Secrets of the Reef” (1956), an underwater documentary made at Marineland Studios in Florida and at a reef near the Bahamas that portrayed the life cycles of octopuses, sea horses, lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.Mr. Young, center, working on the 1956 documentary “Secrets Of The Reef,” which portrayed the life cycles of octopuses, sea horses, lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.Everette CollectionIn 1960, he was hired by NBC News for its new documentary series, “White Paper.” That year he directed “Sit-In,” about the Black college students whose protests led to the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Nashville. The next year he worked on a report about the Angolan war for independence against Portugal, for which he walked hundreds of miles with Angolan rebels. The Portuguese government was unhappy with the report.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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      How an Argument Resonates in ‘Anatomy of a Fall’

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      The director Justine Triet narrates a sequence from her film, which is nominated for best picture. Triet is also nominated for best director.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 couple has an argument that escalates in this scene from “Anatomy of a Fall,” the drama from Justine Triet that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2023, then went on to receive five Oscar nominations this year, including best picture.In the film, the couple’s fight begins as audio that is presented in court where Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is on trial for the death of her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis).Then, Triet makes the choice to show visuals of the fight, rather than only providing us the sound. We move from the courtroom into this domestic scene in the kitchen. Narrating the sequence, she explained that “sound has the power to give the perfect illusion of the present,” so she wanted to add visuals to give a more complete picture of the fractures between these two people.Triet decided to shoot the scene with two cameras, “not to lose any of their energy,” she said. And she wanted to the scene to take place during daylight, with the sun shining through a window.“Often, very dramatic, intimate scenes are used to being filmed at night, as if intimacy were separate from the rest of life,” she said. “And here, I choose the opposite. And the contrast between light and violence is even stronger for me.”Read the “Anatomy of a Fall” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Amazon, Disney+, Hulu, Max and More in March

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      A “Road House” remake, and the satires “Palm Royale” and “The Regime” start streaming.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of March’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Road House’Starts streaming: March 21The original 1989 “Road House” is one of those movies that became a pop culture classic through brute force. The story of a nightclub bouncer fighting small-town corruption is by no means high art; but it’s a solidly crafted, entertaining pulp melodrama, which won fans thanks to its ubiquity on cable television and its winning Patrick Swayze performance. The veteran action film director Doug Liman directs the remake, which moves all the macho bluster and street-fights to Florida from Missouri and casts Jake Gyllenhaal in the Swayze role. An eclectic cast includes the comedian Jessica Williams as a bar owner looking for protection from a cocky crime boss (Billy Magnussen) and his ferocious henchman (played by the U.F.C. champ Conor McGregor).Also arriving:March 7“Ricky Stanicky”March 12“Boat Story”March 14“Frida”March 19“Dinner Party Diaries with José Andrés” Season 1March 22“My Undead Yokai Girlfriend” Season 1March 26“Tig Notaro: Hello Again”March 28“American Rust: Broken Justice” Season 2“The Baxters” Season 1Giancarlo Esposito in “Parish.”Alyssa Moran/AMCNew to AMC+‘Parish’Starts streaming: March 31Based on the British crime series “The Driver,” “Parish” stars Giancarlo Esposito as Gray Parish, a down-on-his-luck New Orleans limousine service owner. With cash flow low — and with his wife (Paula Malcomson) and daughter (Arica Himmel) worrying that he has become too emotionally distant since his son was murdered — Gray is persuaded by a friend and former criminal associate (Skeet Ulrich) to take a job driving for a gangster known as The Horse (Zackary Momoh). This moody neo-noir is peppered with car chases and local color, though it’s primarily a character study, about a man forced by circumstance to confront the failures of his past.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 is Mubi? A Streaming Alternative to Netflix, Hulu and More.

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      We highlight one of the lesser-known places to discover great movies.Once upon a time, we were promised a movie lover’s utopia: a streaming universe where any movie you could want would be available at the click of a button. But with each passing year, that promise feels more like a pipe dream. The high-profile subscription streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Hulu and others) have slowly decreased the volume of their cinematic catalogs to spend more heavily on original films. (They’ve now taken to deleting those originals, or not streaming them at all, for tax benefits.)So what’s the serious cinephile to do? Those who are looking for more than shrinking libraries and perpetually shuffling titles are increasingly casting their eyes — and subscription dollars — toward the specialty services that offer more offbeat and niche movies. Each month, we’ll spotlight these services: what makes them unique, what kind of bang you’ll get for your buck and what some of their best titles are.We begin with Mubi, which is one of the older streaming services, beginning in 2007 as the Auteurs and partnering with the Criterion Collection the next year as a video-on-demand platform. Now a subscription streamer, Mubi sells itself with one simple promise: “We show the best of international cinema.” But in this instance — as opposed to, say, the year-end awards race — “international cinema” is an all-inclusive label. The service showcases a robust variety of films, from America and abroad, mainstream and independent, award-winners and exploitation flicks, classics and new releases.The only real qualification is quality; Mubi is wide-ranging, but it’s also well curated. For several years, the service was on a ticking clock programming plan, adding one new movie every day, streaming it for 30 days and then removing it. It kept its library vibrant, but caused anxiety for some viewers (and critics) who didn’t want to miss films before they were removed; it has since become a less time-sensitive format, with titles spending much longer in its regular collection, though films are still rotated in and out frequently. Regardless of the turnaround, the selection is wide — a Mubi representative pegged its current library at more than 750 titles. That’s less than Netflix or Prime, yes. But, key difference, they’re all worth watching.Among the more permanent selections are Mubi’s own releases. In recent years, the company began acquiring well-received films on the festival circuit, for both theatrical distribution and streaming, including Park Chan-wook’s riveting “Decision to Leave,” Ira Sachs’s sensuous “Passages” and Aki Kaurismaki’s “Fallen Leaves,” which won the Jury Prize at Cannes.Alma Poysti, left, and Jussi Vatanen in “Fallen Leaves,” from Aki Kaurismaki and streaming on Mubi.Malla Hukkanen/SputnikWe 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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      ‘Shayda’ Review: Finding Refuge in Community

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      This stirring film from Noora Niasari follows an Iranian woman and her daughter living in a women’s shelter in Australia.In Noora Niasari’s deeply felt drama “Shayda,” an Iranian mother finds sanctuary in culture and community while seeking liberation from an abusive marriage. The film unfolds during Nowruz, a regenerative Persian holiday set on the spring equinox. But in Australia, where Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) and her young daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) are temporarily residing in a women’s shelter, Nowruz falls in autumn. Like a deciduous tree, Shayda can only access renewal by shedding the life she once knew.In her first narrative feature, Niasari, who based the story in part on her own experiences, demonstrates an astounding control of pacing and mood. Where other films about abuse insist on stakes through violence, “Shayda” conveys isolation or danger in small visual cues: images in silhouette, wordless long takes, strategically-placed jump cuts. And while the film shows that Shayda’s ex, Hossein (Osamah Sami), poses a visceral threat, Niasari locates the heart of the film in the reinforced connections — to heritage and other women in the shelter — that enable the duo’s survival.Throughout, our protagonist faces pressure to return to Hossein, both from pervasive scorn in the Iranian diaspora community and from the many legal impediments to her independence. As Shayda weathers these storms, the film surrounding her evolves into an understated chronicle of female conviction. When all else fails, Shayda turns to Persian music and dance, where, side by side with Mona, she takes refuge from doubt in exuberant movement.ShaydaRated PG-13 for stories of domestic abuse. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. More