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      ‘Stopmotion’ Review: Her Dark Materials

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      A fraying animator becomes the victim of her own creations in this visually sophisticated horror movie.There’s a dreadful innocence to the tiny puppets that drive “Stopmotion,” an unusually resolute horror tale that places a spiraling animator at the mercy of her handmade figures and her own disturbed mind.Ella (Aisling Franciosi), a talented artist, is herself a puppet, forced to act as the hands of her fearsome mother (Stella Gonet), a storied animator who’s suffering from a degenerative disease.“I don’t have my own voice,” Ella complains, resentfully moving the dolls millimeter by millimeter on her mother’s barked instructions. But when tragedy frees Ella to make her own stop-motion film and she moves her materials into a vacant housing block, she becomes anxious and hesitant. Accustomed to taking orders, she’s easily compliant when a strange little girl (Caolinn Springall) from a neighboring apartment suggests a darker direction for Ella’s film, one that requires mortician’s wax and a dead fox. This is exactly as gruesome as you might imagine.Weaving an eerily single-minded spell from the puppets’ squished-jellybean faces and misshapen limbs, the director and animator Robert Morgan has crafted a narratively slender, visually sophisticated first feature. Like the art form it celebrates, “Stopmotion” is careful, patient and almost punishingly focused, with Franciosi bringing the same intensity that made her role in “The Nightingale” (2019) so devastating. As Ella’s grip on reality loosens and she begins to cannibalize her own body to give life to her dolls, the movie erases any distinction between the desire to create and the will to destroy.A bloody meditation on artistic agency and its submission (especially when it comes to female artists), “Stopmotion” isn’t perfect, but each element moves in lock step to forge a deeply troubling intimacy between Ella and her repellent figurines. I could have done without that fox, though.StopmotionRated R for self abuse and stolen innards. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Invisible Fight’ Review: Iron Fist vs. Iron Curtain

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      This action comedy set in the 1970s satisfyingly blends kung fu, heavy metal and Orthodox Christianity.Raphael (Ursel Tilk), the poseur metalhead at the center of Rainer Sarnet’s subversively earnest comedy “The Invisible Fight,” set in 1970s Estonia, swaggers around flaunting a golden cross and fumbling kung fu kicks over a Black Sabbath soundtrack. To modern audiences, he’s just some doofus. But back in the U.S.S.R. — which, at various times, outlawed Eastern martial arts, Western rock music, and religion — he’s a threat to the state.Once, kids like Raphael were mocked on propaganda posters and locked in psychiatric hospitals. “Everything cool is banned in the Soviet Union,” he huffs. And so Raphael ditches the pastel conformity of mainstream Communist society for a secretive chop-socking Orthodox monastery where black-frocked monks fling pelmeni like throwing stars and make we’re-not-worthy genuflections in a catacomb of skulls.This political context is vital to appreciate the rebellion underneath Sarnet’s romp; otherwise, it’s easy to dismiss it as merely a goofy riff on the Shaw Brothers Studios’ landmark Hong Kong hit “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin,” which likewise followed a novice’s hard-earned spiritual and gymnastic growth. Of course, it is that, too, with Sarnet seizing onto over-the-top genre tropes like dramatic zooms and sound effects that cling and clang whenever someone blinks.But the film’s heart is in the sincere moments where our hero is humbled by his own ignorant zeal. Here, balancing vodka shots on your toes is easy — what’s hard is the daily practice of sacrifice and love. And for wuxia fans unconvinced by the shift from Buddhism to the Bible, Sarnet inserts a reading of Matthew 14:26 to remind us that walking on water is a skill shared by both Jet Li and Jesus.The Invisible FightNot rated. In Estonia and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jennifer Lopez and ‘This Is Me … Now’: Is She for Real?

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      “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a movie built on her latest album, is a showcase for the exhausting, never-ending, hazardous work of being Jennifer Lopez.Nobody who winds up at a “what’s the strangest moment in this new J. Lo thingy” contest should worry. There are no wrong answers.The parts in which Fat Joe plays Dr. Melfi to Jennifer Lopez’s Tony Soprano bewilder as intensely as the too-many scenes in which Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, Keke Palmer, Post Malone, Kim Petras and Neil deGrasse Tyson (to pick merely six of a dozen names) bickeringly represent the astrological signs. None of these people appears to have been on the set at the same time. The only performers persuasively sharing the screen are Jenifer Lewis and Jenifer Lewis, and that’s only because she’s doing Gemini.A number about a quickie wedding is called “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but the groom has already hand-delivered Lopez’s invitation. It’s “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but first with a stop at what could be Westeros or Themyscira or “The Cell.” Least forgettable is the sight of our star, in a tank top and up to her neck in elbow warmers, riding a headache ball to squelch a power-plant disaster.Lopez has titled these 53 minutes (and an additional 10-minute-plus credits sequence) “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.” She’s released it, on Amazon, alongside an album of new songs, a few of which provide grist for the visual component. The album is a so-so buffet of sounds that get called contemporary or urban: music that could have been produced at any point in the last 25 years, which isn’t the same as calling it timeless. Lopez has been never on any sort of cutting edge. She’s often where music just was; and that can leave her stranded the way she is here.For “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” she gives “just was” both frenetic cinematic accompaniment and her physical all. In addition cowriting, Lopez goes out on a limb and takes the role of what can rightly be called “Me,” a husband-hunter jailed in such metaphorical music-video scenarios as “glass house” and “love factory.” In that second one, she and two dozen coveralled co-workers bang out some electrocuted, hydraulic choreography while the operation’s giant, once-malfunctioning heart sputters back to life and spews radioactive positivity. These are the only vaguely satisfying numbers. If the wishy-washy, parable-making and haywire everything else won’t cohere into true beauty or credible horror, then camp it is. Ladies and gentlemen: Jennifer Lopez and her Oppenheimer Dancers!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 Internet Is Obsessed With ‘Madame Web.’ The Box Office? Well …

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      The new addition to the Spider-Man franchise has been panned by critics and mocked on social media. But if all press is good press, why are its ticket sales so dismal?Ricky Valero walked into a mostly empty showing of “Madame Web” with a bucket of popcorn and an open mind.He had some idea of what he was getting into. The movie, which stars Dakota Johnson as a clairvoyant character from the Spider-Man comics, has been gleefully panned in the week since its release.The reviews were lousy, with critics calling the movie “a genuine Chernobyl-level disaster” that is “full of bad dialogue delivered badly.” The box office numbers were somehow worse, landing “Madame Web” among the lowest ticket sales ever for a superhero movie.The movie has been jeered on social media, where Mr. Valero, 37, had been seeing negative posts about it for weeks. But when he attended a showing on Thursday at a theater in Nashville, he was pleasantly surprised.“There’s a level of terrible that can be enjoyable,” he said, adding that he would rate the movie three out of five stars despite some cheesy dialogue. When he voiced mild appreciation for the movie on X, the responses were so vicious that he ended up muting them.“You feel like you’re standing alone on an island,” he said.Sony’s latest addition to the Spider-Man franchise has been inspiring memes for months. But after a dismal first week in theaters, it has come to occupy an odd perch in popular culture: It’s dominating online conversation, but not drawing all that many viewers to theaters.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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      ‘They Shot the Piano Player’ Review: Taking on a Bossa Nova Mystery

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      The pianist Francisco Tenório Júnior, on tour in Argentina during the right-wing dictatorship of the 1970s, vanished. This animated feature picks up the trail.Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba’s “They Shot the Piano Player” is an astoundingly vibrant animated project, fitting for its subject matter: the history and legacy of Brazilian bossa nova told through the story of the disappearance and presumed death of Francisco Tenório Júnior, one of the genre’s most celebrated pianists and composers.The film, actually a documentary set in a fictional context, begins in 2010, with Jeff Goldblum voicing the made-up music journalist Jeff Harris, whose article on bossa nova in The New Yorker lands him a book deal and a trip to Rio de Janeiro to investigate the fate one of the genre’s most celebrated pianists.Unlike the last Mariscal-Trueba collaboration, the Academy Award-nominated Cuban drama “Chico and Rita,” the story at the center of “They Shot the Piano Player” is all too real. Tenório Júnior vanished in Argentina during the height of a military dictatorship known for erasing people who didn’t embrace its politics. Equally real, and vivid are the over 150 interviews that Trueba conducted for the film, with friends, family and colleagues of the pianist, some of whom are the best-known names in bossa nova history: João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento and more.The interviews appear, largely unaltered, in animated form, and getting to hear these musicians remember Tenório Júnior in their own words against the backdrop of the film’s gorgeous art direction brings them more to life better than a standard live-action talking head interview ever could. Even something as simple as the painted Arizona sunset descending behind Bud Shank as he recalls seeing Tenório Júnior play adds extra depth to his words.Goldblum’s character works as a surrogate for Trueba, jetting across the world to get to the bottom of his story and enthusiastically asking questions. But his character is never as interesting as the tale he’s trying to tell, and his vocal interjections — when Jeff Harris becomes, unmistakably, Jeff Goldblum — can be distracting. The film’s most memorable moments, by far, are when it just lets the music play on.They Shot the Piano PlayerRated PG-13 for language and suggested violence. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ordinary Angels’ Review: A Hairdresser Turns Lifesaver

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      When a 5-year-old girl’s life is in danger if she doesn’t get surgery urgently, help arrives from unexpected places.This based-on-a-true-story drama begins with the birth of a baby girl, cuts almost directly to a death five years later — that of the child’s mother — and cuts again to a bar in Louisville, Ky., where a flashy local hairdresser is buying drinks for the house as she contrives her next hangover, which will be a doozy.The mother’s death leaves her husband, Ed Schmitt (Alan Ritchson), a roofer, as a single parent with a stack of medical bills and a daughter, Michelle, 5, who has a congenital condition that requires a liver transplant.Sharon — the hairdresser, played by Hilary Swank — learns of Schmitt’s plight and decides to help the family as a focus for her energies after reluctantly attending an A.A. meeting.While this is not a legal thriller, Swank’s brassy character gives off heavy “Erin Brockovich” vibes. “I’m good at a lot of things; taking ‘no’ for an answer is not one of them,” she advises the stolid, wary Ed when she insists on commandeering his finances. There’s a hospital conference room sequence in which Sharon snaps “Was that funny?” at a smirking bureaucrat who laughs at the idea of wiping out Ed’s medical debt because of the family’s hardships.The filmmakers — Jon Gunn directed from a script by Kelly Fremon Craig and Meg Tilly (of “Agnes of God”) streamline the real-life events: In fact, both of Schmitt’s daughters suffered from the same illness, biliary atresia. Only Michelle’s story, however, provides the opportunity for movie-friendly dialogue like “We need a plane.”Despite its bona fides, the movies narrative and characterizations practically gorge on clichés. They break free of them once in a relatively bracing scene that demonstrates that Sharon’s altruism is at least in part a form of addiction behavior.Ordinary AngelsRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: A Mirthless Joyride

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      Directing without his brother, Ethan Coen brings the usual mix of highbrow references and petty crimes, but this road movie just stalls out.The title of Ethan Coen’s leaden romp “Drive-Away Dolls” summons up the vulgar excesses of old-school exploitation cinema, with its horrors and pleasures, carnage and flesh. If only! The promising setup involves two friends — the dreary duo of Margaret Qualley as Jamie and Geraldine Viswanathan as Marian — who, during a 1999 road trip from Philadelphia to Florida, come into possession of a briefcase wanted by some bad, violent men. There will be blood, yup, if not enough to obscure the inert staging, D.O.A. jokes and wooden performances.This is the most recent movie that Ethan Coen has made without his brother, Joel, his longtime collaborator. (Ethan also made the 2022 documentary “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind.”) To a degree, “Drive-Away Dolls” seems of a piece with the Coens’ practice of playing with story forms (film genres and otherwise), which they have consistently satirized, upended and all but gutted. Mixing the ostensibly high with the putatively low, they sample and riff on populist and rarefied sources, the spiritual and the material. This can create a fascinating doubling in the sense that there’s the movie in front of you and its layered references, all of which can flow together when they don’t congeal, which alas happens here.Written by Coen and his wife, Tricia Cooke, “Drive-Away Dolls” opens on an old-style neon bar sign spelling out the word “Cicero,” immediately suggesting that you’re in familiar Coen territory. This nod to the philosopher puts you on alert, but it also feels like bait for those aficionados eager to sift through signs and meanings (which can be a self-flattering exercise for filmmakers and for viewers). Soon enough, the camera is prowling inside the bar where a panicked-looking man (Pedro Pascal as the Collector) sits in a booth clutching a briefcase to his body. After exchanging words with a curiously hostile waiter, the Collector scurries down a shadowy Chandleresque mean street before taking a fatal turn into a nightmarish alley.This particular briefcase contains another of moviedom’s great whatsits, one of those mysteries that, like knowledge itself, some people have, others are desperate to obtain and still others eventually regret having. After some character introductions — enter Jamie, Marian et. al. — and pro forma scene-setting, the movie gets down to business and the briefcase changes hands. For reasons that make sense mostly as a screenwriting contrivance, the two friends secure a car from a guy named Curlie (Bill Camp) and hit the road, with plans to visit Marian’s aunt in Tallahassee. There’s some sweet, sticky stuff, too: Jamie, who has broken up with her girlfriend, a tough cop named Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), thinks Marian needs to get laid. Marian does too, so there are more bars in their future.The women’s journey proves eventful; yet while they rack up both miles and conquests, and despite some flashy editing, “Drive-Away Dolls” remains inert. After their car blows a tire, Jamie and Marian find the briefcase in the trunk along with a hatbox. The two cases contain clues — by turns grisly and notionally amusing — which fit into a larger story that incorporates enough dildos to secure the movie its R rating; nods to Henry James; a dog named after Alice B. Toklas; and assorted attractions, including a family-values politician (Matt Damon), a dapper gangland boss (Colman Domingo as the Chief) and a couple of quarrelsome cartoon minions (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson as the Chief’s Goons).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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      Review: ‘Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Hashira Training’

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      The popular anime returns to the big screen in a somewhat lopsided feature presentation of two stand-alone episodes from the TV series.“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Hashira Training,” from the director Haruo Sotozaki and the Japanese animation studio Ufotable, isn’t actually a movie: It’s a feature-length presentation of two episodes from the popular “Demon Slayer” television series, neatly spliced together but otherwise unchanged in the transition to the big screen.It’s the second such theatrical special, after last year’s “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Swordsmith Village,” which combined the ending of the show’s second season with the premiere of the third. “To the Hashira Training” jams together the third-season finale and the fourth-season premiere, both of which are a little under an hour long; the fourth season hasn’t aired on TV yet. As you might imagine, the movie is meant for fans.A compilation of small-screen anime action could theoretically work as a feature film, especially when the action is as rousing and well-realized as the ultraviolent, stylized swordplay depicted here — there’s some good demon slaying in “Demon Slayer.”But the combination of finale and premiere inevitably feels lopsided, as the exhilarating climax of the previous season, in which the young hero Tanjiro (Natsuki Hanae) vanquishes the fierce Upper Four demon Hantengu (Toshio Furukawa), wraps up halfway through the running time, leaving the somewhat slow-paced beginning of the next arc to feel like a glacial denouement. Tanjiro spends the back half of “To the Hashira Training” recovering from battle in bed, while the Hashira training in question is merely teed up, to be continued in the following episodes. It makes you wish it were a real movie instead.Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Hashira TrainingRated R for graphic cartoon violence and some strong language. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More