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      ‘Godzilla Minus One’ and Other Science Fiction Movies to Stream

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      This month’s sci-fi picks include alienoids, bionic athletes and a little creature named Godzilla.‘Godzilla Minus One’Stream it on Netflix.Despite a surprisingly successful box-office run at the end of 2023, this evocative, often poignant take on one of the most famous screen creatures of all time was abruptly pulled from theaters. Then the film remained AWOL from streaming for months, until it popped up last week with no advance fanfare — a bit like Godzilla himself emerging from out of nowhere, actually. Takashi Yamazaki’s movie is set a couple of years after World War II, as a traumatized Japan slowly rebuilds and tries to overcome the physical and mental devastation caused by the atomic bombings. The lead character, Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), is a former kamikaze pilot who managed to survive and is guilt-ridden — though, of course, it’s easy to argue that the actual lead is the title monster. Koichi joins the ad hoc forces gathered to prevent Godzilla from finishing off the reeling Japan, and the final battle, which takes place at sea, is masterfully directed by Yamazaki (who also supervised the Academy Award-winning visual effects).Note that the movie’s incredible black-and-white version, “Godzilla Minus One Minus Color,” is available on Amazon and other platforms, and is expected on Netflix sometime this summer.‘The Mill’Stream it on Hulu.“Average person must survive a hostile environment by any means necessary” is a pretty familiar trope, and it is heightened when said environment is a single location — a boat, an elevator, a car trunk, a phone booth or, in the case of Sean King O’Grady’s “The Mill,” a grim courtyard enclosed by grim walls. That is where Joe (Lil Rel Howery) wakes up one day. His only company is an unseen neighbor (voiced by Patrick Fischler), whom Joe hears through a duct. Food and water get pushed through a slot in the door. Soon enough, Joe is told that his performance at work has declined so he’s been sent to “advanced career training.” His task is to complete a minimum of 50 revolutions a day on a large mill: He has become a beast of burden tethered to his yoke and reduced to mindless effort. Worse, he competes against other prisoners kept in similar yards. Howery is effective as a regular, ahem, Joe who must both make it to the end of each day and figure out what’s going on. While it ends on a note that feels rushed (but suggests a potential sequel that could be intriguing), “The Mill” is a fairly tight sci-fi thriller that argues for collective action over individualism in the face of faceless corporate power. It’s not Ken Loach, but it might reach more people.‘Alienoid: Return to the Future’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.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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      Jenny Nicholson’s Review of Disney’s Star Wars Hotel Is Worth Watching

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      Jenny Nicholson’s granular critique of Disney’s Galactic Starcruiser experience reflects the fraught relationship between studios and fans right now.One of the most captivating pieces of entertainment I’ve seen so far this year is a four-hour-long YouTube video in which one woman describes her stay at a Disney World hotel. I’m as shocked by this as anyone.To be clear: I was initially resistant when my partner encouraged me to watch Jenny Nicholson’s epic “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” which breaks down in microscopic detail her visit to Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. During the experience, now closed, guests on vacation were encouraged to live out their George Lucas dreams by participating in a role-playing game while staying in a structure on the outskirts of the park near Orlando, Fla.Nicholson’s monologue, which runs longer than “Lawrence of Arabia,” has been viewed more than seven million times since it was uploaded last month and has been the talk of social media, yet I was still unprepared for how absolutely riveting it was. While it highlights a litany of problems with the hotel itself, the video can also be viewed as a diagnosis of the entertainment industry’s current ills writ large. In her frustration, Nicholson becomes a valiant truth teller, clearly articulating how corporate greed betrays loyal fans to sell a cheaper and less emotionally enriching product. And she does this against a backdrop of stuffed animals and while wearing various costumes, including, at one point, a giant suit resembling a Porg, the puffin-like creature in “The Last Jedi.”The Galactic Starcruiser experience, now closed, was intended to be immersive.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesNicholson is a great storyteller, even in Twi’lek head-tails and a Rodian beanie. She lands somewhere between a friend letting you in on some great gossip and a Homerian poet of 21st-century pop culture, engaging in the oral traditions of the ancients, only the subject is theme parks and “Star Wars.”Here’s the very abridged version of what she’s talking about: In 2022, Disney opened the Galactic Starcruiser, billed as a “two-night adventure.” (Think: A cruise, but on land.) Guests would spend their days and nights inside a largely windowless hotel built to look like a spaceship, and actors would engage them in a story in which the Resistance battles the Empire for control of the vessel. As Stormtroopers and aliens roamed the halls, the visitors would play games immersing them in the world via an app on their phones.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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      Will Smith Taps Nostalgia as He Attempts a Post-Slap Comeback

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      “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the latest entry in a nearly three-decade- old franchise, will be Smith’s first wide-release film since he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022.During the Latin pop star J Balvin’s set at Coachella in April, a surprise guest star suddenly appeared onstage: Will Smith, wearing a familiar black suit and sunglasses, launched into the title song of “Men in Black,” his 1997 Hollywood blockbuster.It was the beginning of a frenetic spring for Smith as he carefully re-enters the public eye to promote “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” his first wide-release movie since he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022, a move that threatened to derail his career.Smith has been back walking red carpets, bantering on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” and eating spicy chicken until his eyes watered on “Hot Ones,” the popular YouTube show. He told Fallon his publicity tour had taken him to eight cities in 12 days, with stops in Dubai and in Riyadh for what he described as the first Hollywood premiere in Saudi Arabia.“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the latest entry in a nearly three-decade old franchise, is opening nationwide on Friday. The film industry will be closely watching how it does to see whether the moviegoing public is ready to welcome Smith back after an event so shocking and ignominious that it achieved proper-noun status: the Slap.Whether by accident or agreement, the Slap has not come up much in Smith’s prerelease publicity blitz. But the film itself seems to refer to it, archly, as several critics have noted: In it, Smith gets slapped by his co-star, Martin Lawrence, and called a “bad boy.”Lawrence appeared on “The Tonight Show” with Smith and praised him effusively. “He is one of the most professional actors out there, most talented actors out there, he has a brilliant mind, he’s a genius and he’s upstanding,” he said.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 Watchers’ Review: Now They See You

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      The folk-horror genre welcomes a young new voice in the director Ishana Night Shyamalan, but she’s singing a familiar old tune.Seeing the name Shyamalan on a movie trailer leads to certain expectations: plot twists, incremental reveals that change the nature of reality, foreboding supernatural vibe. Check, check and check with “The Watchers” — even though in this case the filmmaker isn’t M. Night Shyamalan, of “The Sixth Sense” and “Split” fame, but his daughter Ishana.After making her debut as a director on “Servant, an Apple TV+ series Ishana has moved on to features with this folk-horror tale about a troubled young woman, Mina (Dakota Fanning, fresh from a big turn in the Netflix series “Ripley”), who finds herself stranded when her car breaks down in foreboding Irish woods while she was ferrying a parrot (you read that right) from Galway to Belfast.Ishana is 24, and “The Watchers” shows that she truly is Jung at heart: At times the movie feels as if an eager undergraduate patched it together from the greatest hits of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, most notably the forest as both physical and psychological place, the mirror as revelator and the presence of the double.Fine, so this is a lofty way to say that the film is a little bit frightening and a big bit comically grandiose.As dusk sets in, Mina is rescued from the forest’s terrifying noises and encroaching shadows by Madeline (Olwen Fouere), Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), who live in a Brutalist house where an entire wall is a one-way mirror. This is so that every night, mysterious creatures called the Watchers can observe those who are, in effect, their prisoners; as Madeline tells Mina, whoever goes out after sunset dies. Fleeing at dawn isn’t an option because there is no escape from the forest within a day’s walk.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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      ‘Banel & Adama’ Review: A Parable of Two Young Lovers

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      The filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy illuminates this elliptical story, set in unnamed Senegalese village, with daubs of strong colors and strikingly vivid imagery.A love story suffused in beauty and mystery, “Banel & Adama” draws you in right from the start. Set in an unnamed Senegal village during an unspecified time, it opens on two young lovers quietly blissing out on each other. The two are first seen in striking close-up — early on, the movie cuts from an image of her lush, pretty mouth to a shot of one of his steadily adoring eyes — like puzzle pieces that the movie bids you to fit together. Given the dreamy vibe as well as the bright, vivid palette, it is an invitation that you readily take up.Banel and Adama — played by the appealing Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo, both nonprofessionals — live in a small house in a small village that looks like it could exist today but also decades earlier. (The villagers use kerosene lamps, and I don’t recall anyone using a cellphone.) There, Adama tends a modest herd of cattle as Banel keeps him company, their smiles, laughs and movements pleasantly in sync. Like all besotted lovers, they seem to exist in a private realm, one that the French-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy illuminates with cozy framing, daubs of strong colors and a bold, graphic sensibility.The story emerges in morsels of naturalistic dialogue and brief, on-point scenes that incrementally sketch in the characters’ intimacy, shared history, familial relationships and distinct temperaments. Two years earlier, Adama, now 19, married Banel, his brother’s widow and second wife. Tradition, as his mother and others insist, decrees that he now assume the role of the village chief, a position he refuses. He’s content simply to be with Banel, and together they plan to move out of the village once they dig a nearby house out of a mountain of sand. Each day, they dig and they dig, a task that soon groans with portentous symbolism.Sy has a terrific eye and, working with her cinematographer Amine Berrada, she quickly hooks you with the beauty of Banel and Adama’s world, pulling you into their everyday life with hints of drama and myth, though mostly with the graceful compositions and the region’s natural riches, its green fields and blue skies. The camera moves just so, never racing or crawling, which allows you to luxuriate in the details that fill in the picture and deepen the realism. Sy’s attention to physical surfaces — shimmering water, nubby cloth, smooth bark — is particularly adept and helps create a sense of texture so strong you can almost feel it in your hands.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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      Erich Anderson, Actor in ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Felicity,’ Dies at 67

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      Mr. Anderson had a breakout role in “Friday the 13th” and went on to appear in more than 300 TV episodes, including a recurring role as the father on “Felicity.”Erich Anderson, an actor known for his breakout role in the “Friday the 13th” franchise and recurring appearances on television series like “Felicity” and “Thirtysomething,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 67.His brother-in-law, Michael O’Malley, said the cause was esophageal cancer.In the late 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Anderson played a recurring love interest on “Thirtysomething,” a drama about a group of friends navigating life and love in Philadelphia;the ex-husband of a detective on “NYPD Blue”; and the father to Keri Russell’s lead role on “Felicity,” a series about an introverted high school student who follows her dream guy to college in New York City.By 2013, he had appeared in roughly 300 episodes of television shows including “Boston Public,” “The X-Files,” “CSI,” “ER,” “7th Heaven,” “Star Trek,” “Monk,” “Tour of Duty” and “Murder, She Wrote.”But it was his first feature film role, in “Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter” — the fourth film in the franchise, which follows the serial killer Jason Voorhees — that stuck with fans throughout his career.When the film was released in 1984, Mr. Anderson thought, “I had a good time and really enjoyed the process and learning about it,” he told a “Friday the 13th” podcast in 2013. “This is out in the world now.”But over the years, especially as he began attending fan conventions, Mr. Anderson came to realize that his role as Rob Dier, who seeks to avenge his sister’s death only to be killed by Jason himself, was “by far the most enduring thing” he had done.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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      ‘Longing’ Review: A Test of Paternity

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      Richard Gere plays it way too cool as a man learning about the son he didn’t know he had.Plausibility complaints always feel cheap, but “Longing” strains credulity well past the breaking point. This is the Israeli writer-director Savi Gabizon’s second try at this premise — he is remaking his 2017 feature of the same title — but it is difficult to imagine that it ever made sense.The movie opens with Daniel (Richard Gere) meeting a former partner, Rachel (Suzanne Clément). He has little time for her, until she drops a bombshell. When they separated, she was pregnant, and their son, Allen, unknown to Daniel, has just died at 19 in a car accident.Daniel travels to Hamilton, Ontario, where they lived, and things get even stranger. Daniel arrives for a graveside memorial service, but no one is present except a priest. Rachel’s husband, Robert (Kevin Hanchard), later informs Daniel that Rachel has been in the hospital for two days. But did Allen have no other friends or relatives?“Longing” soon turns into a series of mostly one-on-one interactions in which people tell Daniel about Allen. Allen’s friend (Wayne Burns) asks Daniel for money that he and Allen owed a drug dealer. Daniel finds that Allen had an obsession with a teacher (Diane Kruger) that escalated to the point of expulsion and possible police involvement. Most disturbingly, Daniel learns that Allen had been staying long-term not with Rachel and Robert but with another family and may have been preying on the family’s underage daughter (Jessica Clement). Unfathomably, Daniel does not immediately question Rachel and Robert about this news.Is the city of Hamilton playing an elaborate prank on the self-absorbed Daniel? No, everything is on the level. Gere coasts on movie star charisma, a quality that apparently enables Daniel to remain cool when any rational person would be continually enraged.LongingRated R. Dark themes concerning teenagers. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I Used to Be Funny’ Review: Bruising Punchlines

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      The film, which stars Rachel Sennott as a stand-up comedian, looks at the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield.The perceptive dramedy “I Used to Be Funny” features a mic-drop performance by Rachel Sennott as a rising stand-up comedian derailed by a vague, internet-viral crime. What happened to Sam (Sennott) is no laughing matter. But she and her fellow comics crack oblique jokes about it, anyway. Making her first feature, the writer-director Ally Pankiw lets most zingers land. Comedy is just how these strivers communicate — it’s how they break awkwardness, bond, fight, forgive and heal.Pankiw warms up the audience with Sam’s roommates Paige and Philip (Sabrina Jalees and Caleb Hearon, both terrific) poking fun at a 14-year-old runaway, Brooke (Olga Petsa), last seen smashing in their front door. “She’s probably loving the missing person posters,” Paige drolls. “They used a selfie, she looks great.”Before she was a recluse, Sam was the lost girl’s nanny. The film is peppered with happier flashbacks to when Sam and Brooke were best pals, a team-up that annoyed Brooke’s humorless dad (Jason Jones). We track time through the perkiness of Sam’s posture and ponytail. Depression films can be a drag. Fortunately, Sennott is entertaining even as a mope.The script takes an annoyingly long time revealing what went wrong (and then rushes the resolution). Pankiw is more focused on the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield. A former stand-up herself, Sennott holds a stage with command. Off-duty, unshowered and unable to move on, Sam is self-aware enough to know that she is exhausting her friends — and the film keeps tabs on how often she and her gang must claim they’re just kidding around.I Used to Be FunnyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More