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      7 Father’s Day Movies to Watch in Theaters

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      Whether you’re in the mood for dragons or a new Wes Anderson, theaters this weekend are filled with fatherly flicks.It’s tough being a dad, but you can at least be assured that you don’t have to contend with fire-breathing dragons, rooftop body slams or assassination attempts (we hope).Instead, you can enjoy watching other dads — and surrogate dads — confront those thrills this month in theaters.Here’s a roundup of what to watch with the father figure in your life.The Heartwarming‘How to Train Your Dragon’Hiccup isn’t like the other vikings. He can barely lift a battle ax, much less wield one; he’d rather tinker than trade insults with his peers, and he’s more clumsy than courageous. He is, in other words, tough for his manly-man village chief father (played by Gerard Butler), to love. But when he unexpectedly vaults to the top of his dragon-fighting training class — using mysterious means — his father is over the moon. However, when Hiccup suggests NOT killing dragons? Cue the shame. In theaters.‘Elio’Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) with Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in “Elio.”Pixar/Disney/Pixar, via Associated PressWhen your dad is a warlord, and you just want to make him proud — preferably without the need for intergalactic conquest — well, it’s not easy for either father or son. But that’s the case among Glordon, a sluglike purple alien with no eyelids, and his dad, the fearsome space ruler Lord Grigon, in the latest Pixar film “Elio.”When Glordon and the titular protagonist, 11-year-old Elio, who must negotiate with Lord Grigon to prevent him from destroying the universe, become fast friends, loyalties will be tested. Will Glordon’s dad come around when his son is kidnapped and agrees to be used as a bargaining chip? Or will he abandon the kid to fate? (Yes, this one isn’t quite out yet, but no one says you can’t buy your dad advance tickets!) In theaters June 20.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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      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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      Celine Song’s New Rom-Com ‘Materialists’ Takes a Deep Look at Love and Value

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      In her 20s, long before she wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “Past Lives,” Celine Song spent six months working as a matchmaker in New York. By day, she’d meet with single women rattling off requirements for a potential mate, from appearance and height to income. By night, over beers with her artist friends, she couldn’t help but notice a disconnect: Many of her favorite people would be instantly rejected based on those criteria.“I’d be like, ‘You guys would be not good mates for any of my clients,’” she said. “I spent all day listening to these women describe them as worthless people they do not want to meet, even though I ascribe so much worth to them because they are creative and brilliant and amazing.”That tension lies at the heart of Song’s new rom-com, “Materialists,” which stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York City matchmaker with an enviable track record of steering single women toward successful men. But when Lucy meets the handsome and rich Harry (Pedro Pascal), who’d prefer to woo Lucy instead of her clients, she must decide if the material things he can offer are more valuable than the deeper connection she feels with John (Chris Evans), her broke ex-boyfriend.Before making movies, Song worked as a matchmaker. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSong wrote the screenplay for “Materialists” in 2022 as she awaited the release of “Past Lives,” about a South Korean immigrant reunited with the childhood friend who still carries a torch for her. When I met Song last month over drinks at a West Hollywood hotel, she spoke candidly about love and longing as a creative through line in her work.“When I talk to people who are really, really smart, who seem to know everything, if you start asking them about their romantic life, everything falls apart,” she said. “They’ll just admit that they don’t know things about love, or they’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, she makes me feel like a kid.’ They’ll say things that are not becoming of the put-together, intelligent people they are, because love is a mystery.”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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      Enzo Staiola, Who Starred in ‘Bicycle Thieves’ as a Child, Dies at 85

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      Discovered on the street in Rome, he had a brush with stardom when he was cast in what many consider one of the greatest films of all time.Enzo Staiola, who played the staunch 8-year-old accompanying his father on a quest to recover a stolen bicycle in Vittorio De Sica’s classic 1948 film, “Bicycle Thieves,” died on June 4 in Rome. He was 85.His death, in a hospital, was widely reported in the Italian press.The father’s character, played by a sad-eyed real-life factory worker, Lamberto Maggiorani, is the star of the film, which was originally released in the United States as “The Bicycle Thief” and is routinely cited as one of the greatest films of all time.But Mr. Staiola (pronounced STY-ola), who played the child, Bruno, is in many ways the emotional center of De Sica’s work, which is considered a founding document of Italian neorealism and “a fundamental staging post in the history of the European cinema,” the film historian Robert S.C. Gordon wrote in his 2008 book, “Bicycle Thieves.”The story, set in impoverished postwar Rome, revolves around Antonio Ricci, Mr. Maggiorani’s struggling character, who must get his bicycle back to keep his new job hanging advertising bills around the city. The job requires the use of a bicycle. But he must also retrieve the bike to avoid disappointing his trusting son.The character of Bruno is portrayed with poise and vulnerability by a little boy who, until then, had been more interested in playing soccer in his working-class Roman neighborhood than in acting.The father’s quest, unfolding through a series of sharply etched mishaps in the streets of the city, takes on weight for the audience as the despair becomes not just that of an adult but also of a plucky boy with expressive eyes, the young Mr. Staiola.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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      ‘Sex’ Review: Two Men Talk About and Around the Subject

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      A chimney sweep and his colleague get deep on the roofs of Oslo in Dag Johan Haugerud’s curious meditation on marriage and masculinity.The two men who circle each other in the serious, deliberate Norwegian talkathon “Sex” chat about different things, including life, love, desire, freedom and fidelity. Their discussions are searching, at times surprisingly intimate — especially for male characters — sometimes naturalistic and often sufficiently self-consciously mannered to make you aware of just how written the material is. At once specific and general, the story charts the lives of these two, who while they appear contentedly married to women, are each experiencing difficulties that, for all their words, neither can fully articulate, including to themselves.The men are colleagues in Oslo, which is never identified in the movie. They and their wives are similarly unnamed, although a smattering of other characters do have proper names. The men work as chimney sweeps, a strikingly novel profession, at least in American cinema; the only other one who comes easily to mind is Dick Van Dyke’s sooty charmer in the original “Mary Poppins.” At one point, the men in “Sex” sit on a roof together after one suffers a dizzy spell, but they simply talk and talk some more. The only fires that they seem to be trying to prevent are their own.“Sex” is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting. Its strengths are the largely appealing performances from the two principals, Jan Gunnar Roise (called “sweep” in the end credits) and Thorbjorn Harr (“department head”). Tall and lean, with a blond mustache to match his hair, Harr’s character is thoughtful, interested and religious. He’s also a committed, solicitous father to his only child, Klaus (Theo Dahl), a sweet teenager. His wife (billed as “social worker” and played by Birgitte Larsen) is a secondary character who registers as an afterthought.The movie’s first long conversation begins during some place-setting images of Oslo, with geometric shots of buildings, sweeps working on roofs and cars zipping on a freeway. As if tethered to a drone, the camera drops down and pushes toward a building window that frames two obscured figures. Inside, Harr’s character is telling Roise’s about a recent, unsettling, if amusing dream. David Bowie, he explains while seated before the window, appeared to him with some gnomic utterances, starting with the mysteriously fragmentary: “If you, as a human being, have the capacity to recognize goodness and beauty, and be excited by it.”It’s fuzzy which iteration of Bowie (Ziggy Stardust? The Thin White Duke?) graced the department head’s dreams. He isn’t a fan, and he isn’t entirely sure, he admits, if it was even the musician. “I thought it was God,” he says (a fair assumption). As he continues talking, he explains that what made the dream so unsettling for him was that Bowie looked at Harr’s character as if he were a woman. The other man, the sweep, asks if the dream was sexual. It wasn’t, but shortly thereafter, the camera pans to the sweep, who tells his colleague that the day before, he had sex with a man for the first time. And then, the sweep says, he told his wife.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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      ‘Tatami’ Review: A Bitter Fight, Both on and Off the Mat

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      A flinty Iranian judoka competing in the World Judo Championships is menaced by her government in this absorbing political thriller.In the beginning of “Tatami,” Leila (Arienne Mandi), a flinty Iranian judoka competing in the World Judo Championships, looks unstoppable. A gold medal seems within reach, which would be a first for Iran in the tournament’s history.Unfortunately for Leila, hers isn’t a feel-good underdog story — more like a Kafkaesque nightmare. Winning gold is negligible to her authoritarian government; it’s more concerned with her obedience.Directed by Guy Nattiv and Zar Amir (a rare collaboration between an Israeli and an Iranian filmmaker), “Tatami” draws inspiration from the real-life experiences of Iranian athletes who were punished or forced to seek asylum abroad after refusing to wear a hijab during their international sporting events. We see Leila defiantly release her black mane of hair on several occasions — as in flashbacks to her life in Tehran in which she’s in bed with her husband or partying at an underground club.But it’s not Leila’s hijab that’s the problem: Midway through the tournament, Leila’s coach, Maryam (Amir, an Iranian exile herself), gets a call from the Iranian authorities demanding that Leila fake an injury and drop out immediately to avoid competing against an Israeli athlete. (Iran doesn’t recognize Israel, and forbids its athletes from competition with Israeli athletes.)The script is annoyingly fuzzy on these details, brushing knotty geopolitics aside for a more straightforward story about the oppression of Iranian women and the menacing, absurd ways in which they’re policed. We see plenty of Leila’s scuffles on the mat, shot stylishly in velvety black and white, but the meat of the conflict happens on the sidelines and in the corridors of the stadium. That is where Leila (who refuses to to stop competing) and Maryam lock horns; the Iranian government’s cronies appear dressed as plain-clothed spectators; and the tournament’s organizers struggle to decide how best to protect Leila.The mounting tensions of these moving parts — and steely performances by Mandi and Amir — make for an engrossing thriller fueled by female rage.TatamiNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Deep Cover’ Review: Fighting Crime With Improv

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      Three hapless comics, played by Orlando Bloom, Bryce Dallas Howard and Nick Mohammed, infiltrate the criminal underworld.The movie opens with a furious cops-and-robbers car chase through London that eventually draws in a helicopter. Flying low, the chopper zips past a busy brokerage floor where Hugh (Nick Mohammed), a weary drone, watches it in awe and terror. In a relatively short amount of time he’ll be drawn into an underworld that will place him in between lines of fire from opposite sides of the law.In “Deep Cover,” directed by Tom Kingsley, Hugh determines to boost his social confidence by taking a course in improv comedy run by Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard), whose chipper exterior barely masks her befuddlement at how she wound up in her position. Orlando Bloom plays Marlon, who wants to hone the extemporizing “skills” that his TV-ad-booking agent wished he would bury. The three are soon scouted by Sean Bean’s hard-bitten cop Billings, who enlists them to run a small sting.The gang get so carried away trying to entrap a low-level dealer that they wind up being taken for major players, and infiltrating a network overseen by a relatively amiable Paddy Considine and a typically no-nonsense Ian McShane. The plot convolutions test the trio’s survival skills — and their improv chops.Nowadays crime comedies don’t so much toggle between horror and hilarity as try to intermingle them: One example is a scene in which a corpse needs to be chopped up and disposed of, and poor Hugh is handed the chain saw. Humor is also derived from the fact that the crew is frequently called upon to ingest various intoxicants, legal and taboo. The ensemble is packed with seasoned acting professionals across the board, who more than sell their drunk scenes and deliver more than a few laughs on their way to redemption.Deep CoverRated R for language, corpse dismemberment, other violence, crime in general. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More