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      ‘Sight’ Review: An Eye Doctor’s (Inner) Journey From China

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      Based on the real life of the pioneering ophthalmologist Ming Wang, this movie follows the character’s struggle to see inside himself.Ming Wang, the real-life physician whose biography is the basis for this fictional feature, is a Nashville-based ophthalmologist whose degree in laser physics has presumably been a boon in his work restoring sight to visually impaired patients, many of whom are children.As is the custom with inspirational medical movies, however, the new film “Sight,” directed by Andrew Hyatt, leans hard into uplift — it provides only the narrative-necessary minimum of the science. Wang’s achievement in developing innovative technology is central to one of the stories here, yes. But the dominating narrative is one of personal growth.Weaving several decades’ worth of flashbacks into its action, otherwise set in 2006, the movie shows Wang’s traumatic childhood in China’s Hangzhou province, where he and his friend Lili are terrorized by the Cultural Revolution’s Red Guard. He wants to be a doctor like his father, who tells him his best “chance” in life is to “become a musician.” You don’t hear that too often.Brilliant at school, Wang is able to make his way to M.I.T., but even in the elite educational environments he passes through, he’s discouraged from pursuing his dreams of becoming a physician. These trials leave Wang with a defensive ego and a tendency to shut out others emotionally. He’s forced to deal with failure and to learn to trust.All of this is laid out in competent commonplace fashion, with the principal actors Terry Chen, Greg Kinnear and the always welcome Fionnula Flanagan displaying the expected professionalism.Wang has written a memoir in which he discusses his Christian faith in some detail. The film proper does not. But the faith-friendly distributor, Angel Films, has appended to the feature a “Pay It Forward” coda (similar to that on their 2023 release “Sound of Freedom”) in which the real Wang testifies to his spirituality.SightRated PG-13 for thematic material, mild violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hit Man’ Review: It’s a Hit, Man

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      Glen Powell stars in one of the year’s funniest, sexiest, most enjoyable movies — and somehow it’s surprisingly deep, too.If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now. It’s got the cheeky verve of a 1940s screwball rom-com in a thoroughly contemporary (and slightly racier) package. I’ve seen it twice, and a huge grin plastered itself across my face both times.That’s why it’s a shame most people will see it at home — Netflix is barely giving it a theatrical release before it hits streaming even though it’s the sort of movie that begs for the experience of collective gut-splitting joy. Oh well. If you can see it in a theater, it’s worth it. If not, then get your friends together, pop some popcorn and settle in for a good old-fashioned movie for grown-ups.The director Richard Linklater and Powell collaborated on the “Hit Man” script, which is loosely based on Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a faux hit man who actually worked for the Houston Police Department. In the movie version, Gary (Powell) is a mild-mannered philosophy professor in New Orleans with a part-time side gig doing tech work for law enforcement. One day, he is accidentally pulled into pretending to be a hit man in a sting operation, and soon realizes he loves playing the role.Or roles, really: The more Gary gets into it, the more he realizes that each person’s fantasy of a hit man is different, and he starts to dress up, preparing for the part before he meets with the client. (If this movie were solely constructed as a de facto reel demonstrating Powell’s range, it would work just fine.) Then, one day, pretending to be a sexy, confident hit man named Ron, he meets Madison (Adria Arjona, practically glowing from within), a put-upon housewife seeking his services. And everything changes for Gary.A great deal of the enjoyment of “Hit Man” comes from simply witnessing Powell and Arjona’s white-hot chemistry. Seeing Powell transmogrify from nerdy Gary to five o’clock shadow Ron and back again is both hilarious and tantalizing, while Arjona has a big-eyed innocence crossed with wily smarts that keeps everyone, including Gary, guessing. Multiple layers of deception keep the movie from feeling formulaic — you’re always trying to keep track of who thinks what, and why. Eventually, when “Hit Man” morphs into a kind of caper comedy, part of the joy is rooting for characters as they make choices that are, at best, flexibly ethical. In doing so, we get to be naughty too. In a movie starring a philosophy professor, that’s especially funny, a wry joke on us all.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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      ‘Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara’ Review: Church vs. State

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      This film, based on a true story about the kidnapping of a Jewish child in 19th-century Italy, underscores the devastating consequences of family separation.In the film “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” a representative of Pope Pius IX arrives at a Jewish family’s home in Bologna, Italy, on a June night in 1858. This unsettling intrusion quickly gains force as it becomes clear the representative intends to take their 6-year-old son, Edgardo (Enea Sala).Unbeknown to Salomone and Marianna Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi), a housekeeper had their son Edgardo baptized as an infant. In the parts of Italy that were under papal rule at the time, it was illegal for Christian children to be raised in non-Christian households. The Mortara case — covered by the Italian author Daniele Scalise, whose book the film is based upon, and by David Kertzer, an American scholar and expert on the papacy and antisemitism — became an international cause for Jewish organizations in Europe as well as proponents of the unification of Italy, including the papal states, into a kingdom. Even Napoleon III, an ally of the pope, expressed concern.The director, Marco Bellocchio, anchors the period with a somber visual elegance and employs surreal gestures to tease out the psychological and spiritual aspects of the tragedy. Political cartoons lambasting Pope Pius IX come to life through animation. During an especially sorrowful moment in Edgardo’s confinement, one of the figures of the crucified Christ in the Roman dormitory for child converts takes leave of his cross with the help of little Edgardo.Throughout his life, Edgardo remained faithful to the church. In the film, one gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo MortaraNot rated. In Italian and Hebrew. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Substance’ and ‘Emilia Pérez’ Cause a Stir at Cannes

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      “The Substance” features Demi Moore in go-for-broke mode, while “Emilia Pérez” is a musical crime drama that defies description.Maybe “Megalopolis” was just an amuse-bouche.After Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million movie polarized audiences during the first week of the Cannes Film Festival, the big swings have continued with “The Substance” and “Emilia Pérez,” two much-discussed films that are either stone-cold classics or total fiascos depending on whom you talk to here.But at a festival where a dozen new movies arrive every day and each title is in danger of being overshadowed, there’s nothing more effective than causing a commotion.The gory horror-comedy “The Substance” casts Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, an Oscar-winning actress who, as she ages, can find no better work than hosting an aerobics program. Even that gig is in danger thanks to an unscrupulous network executive (Dennis Quaid) who’s dead set on replacing Sparkle with someone younger and hotter. Backed into a corner, Sparkle decides to inject herself with the Substance, a mysterious fluid that promises a path to rejuvenation.But this procedure goes several steps beyond Botox and fillers. After taking the Substance, Sparkle’s younger self (Margaret Qualley) emerges painfully from her body and sets about reclaiming the aerobics gig that the network yanked away. The only catch is that Sparkle’s younger and older selves must trade off every week, agreeing to hibernate while the other one goes out on the town. Failure to maintain that balance could have gruesome effects on their bodies, and it isn’t long before this peaceful trade-off becomes an increasingly disfiguring tug of war.“The Substance,” directed by Coralie Fargeat, offers plenty to talk about, from Moore’s go-for-broke, bare-it-all performance to an outrageous finale that consistently pushes the line on gross-out gore. But the most spirited discussions at Cannes are over whether the movie is trenchant or skin-deep. David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised it as the best of the fest, but several people I’ve spoken to were positively angry about having watched it. Maybe any reaction is the right one when it comes to something so gleefully provocative: In a post online, the writer Iana Murray called the film “shallow” and “painfully unsubtle” but added, “i had a hell of a time though why lie.”“The Substance” is one of the higher-rated movies on the Screen International critics’ grid, a compilation of reactions that often presages the winner of the Palme d’Or, Cannes’ top prize. But another Palme contender, Jacques Audiard’s audacious “Emilia Pérez,” has prompted nearly as much conversation and debate. A crime drama that’s also a trans empowerment epic that’s also a full-blown movie musical, “Emilia Pérez” is virtually impossible to sum up: Imagine Pedro Almodóvar meets “Sicario” meets Jennifer Lopez’s wacky visual album “This is Me … Now: A Love Story,” and you’re only halfway there.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 Cultpix? A Streaming Alternative to Netflix and Hulu

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      This streaming service collects low-budget, high-creativity movies with outsider status. We single out some of the best on offer.Few words in the cinematic sphere are misappropriated as frequently and as flagrantly as “cult” (no, friends, “Mean Girls,” a pop culture phenomenon as well as critical and commercial success upon its initial release, is not a “cult classic”), so one of the many refreshing pleasures of the streaming service Cultpix is that the titles it streams are honest-to-God cult movies.And what exactly is a cult movie? Definitions and explanations vary, of course; Danny Peary, who literally wrote the book on the subject, defined them as “special films which for one reason or another have been taken to heart by segments of the movie audience, cherished, protected, and most of all, enthusiastically championed.” This is a generously broad definition, however; most blue-blood cinephiles consider low budgets, outsider status, commercial indifference, critical hostility or obscurity to be important factors as well. When the question is posed more directly on Cultpix’s FAQ page, the answer is even simpler: “We decide what is a cult film. This is not a democracy, this is a cult.”Cult movies and the internet have gone hand in hand since the latter’s beginning — in fact, the first feature film ever streamed online was the 1992 cult film “Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees” — and while the click-of-a-button ease of online interactions (from streaming to torrenting to disc rental and purchase) has reduced the obscurity factor, it has also allowed online communities of cult film fans to flourish.Our monthly spotlight on lesser-known but worthwhile streaming services has included a fair amount of fringe programming for viewers tired of the same titles rotating between Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Max and Hulu, but Cultpix (which launched in 2021) offers the wildest variety of options to date: long-forgotten crime thrillers, horror oddities, cheapo fantasy flicks, documentaries of dubious merit, women-in-prison pictures, weirdo westerns, drug dramas, kung fu galore, kaiju city-smashers, and erotica of various shapes and styles. (Consider yourself warned: There are plenty of firmly adults-only titles.)Other collections are even more specialized. To honor the recent loss of Roger Corman, the king of exploitation cinema, the service has re-upped its birthday tribute to the filmmaker. There is a spotlight on “Video Nasties,” films of extreme violence targeted and banned in England in the 1980s and 1990s. The “Background Films for Parties” section offers exactly what it promises — collections of trailers, shorts, adult film “loops,” “soundies” (jukebox musical shorts that were, put simply, the first music videos), and other cinematic ephemera. They also boast a wide enough variety to present a handful of genuinely amusing sub-sub-genres, including “Juvenile Delinquent,” “Fake Gorilla Suit,” “Mad Scientist” and “Women in Fur Bikini”; if you don’t have to have those explained to you, well, you’re the target audience.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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      Pixar Lays Off 14% of Its Staff and Will Stop Making Shows for Disney+

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      The animation studio, which has struggled over the past few years, will stop making original shows for Disney+.Pixar will stop making original shows for Disney+ as part of a broader retrenchment, resulting in layoffs that will reduce its work force by 14 percent.Jim Morris, the president of Pixar, announced the layoffs in an internal memo on Tuesday that was viewed by The New York Times. He cited “the return to our focus on feature films.” About 175 employees will be let go.Questions about Pixar’s health have swirled in Hollywood and among investors since June 2022, when the Disney-owned studio released “Lightyear” to disastrous results. How could Pixar, the gold standard of animation studios for nearly three decades, have gotten a movie so wrong — especially one about Buzz Lightyear, a bedrock “Toy Story” character?Pixar’s next film, “Elemental,” an opposites-attract love story, arrived to alarmingly low ticket sales in June 2023, but ultimately generated a solid $500 million at the box office.One problem: Disney had weakened the Pixar brand by using its films to build the Disney+ streaming service. Starting in late 2020, when many multiplexes were still closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, Disney debuted three Pixar films in a row (“Soul,” “Turning Red” and “Luca”) online, bypassing theaters altogether.The layoffs on Tuesday, which were reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter, acknowledged another reality: Pixar, like other Disney-owned studios, including Marvel, lost its focus when it was pushed to create original programming for Disney+. At the time — around December 2020 — Disney was pouring money into the streaming service in a wild and ultimately unsuccessful effort to attract up to 260 million subscribers worldwide. It had 87 million at the time. It has about 154 million today.Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of Disney, has since reversed course, emphasizing cost containment and quality — less can be more, if the standards are high. He has said repeatedly over the past year that the creative teams at Disney were stretched too thin by the streaming strategy.As part of the retrenchment at Pixar, “Elio,” a movie about an 11-year-old boy who is inadvertently beamed into space, was delayed. It was supposed to arrive this March. Disney pushed it to June 2025. (Pixar’s next film in theaters will be “Inside Out 2.” It is scheduled for release on June 14.)Pixar’s original series for Disney+ included “Cars on the Road,” focused on the “Cars” characters Lightning McQueen and Mater, and “Dug Days,” a series of shorts about the dog from the movie “Up.” The studio’s last original Disney+ series, “Win or Lose,” about a coed middle school softball team, will arrive late this year.Pixar will continue to make the occasional short film for Disney+. More

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      Trump Calls ‘Apprentice’ Biopic at Cannes ‘Garbage’ and Plans to Sue

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      The director of “The Apprentice” was unfazed by the threat to the film, which covers the ex-president’s relationships with his first wife and the fixer Roy Cohn.The day after the Cannes Film Festival premiered “The Apprentice,” a biopic of Donald J. Trump, the former president hit back at the movie, calling it “malicious defamation” and threatening legal action.“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign.Directed by Ali Abbasi and written by the author Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” follows Trump (Sebastian Stan) as an ambitious young man seeking to establish himself as a real estate magnate. He finds a mentor in the wily lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and a first wife in the fashion model Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova), though Trump is willing to discard both once they’re no longer of use to him.The film is hardly a flattering portrait of the former president, and includes scenes where the business mogul goes under the knife for liposuction and a scalp procedure to fix his bald spot. In its most controversial sequence, the Trump character sexually assaults his wife after she criticizes his looks. (Ivana, who died in 2022, accused Trump of rape in her divorce deposition, though she disavowed the claim later.)Cheung said the Trump team plans to file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”Though the threat could affect the release of “The Apprentice,” which currently has no distributor, Abbasi sounded unfazed at the film’s news conference on Tuesday.“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people,” the director said. “They don’t talk about his success rate, though.” More

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      At Cannes, the Dogs Were Good Again This Year

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      The festival has long embraced canine stars like Messi, the hero of “Anatomy of a Fall,” while human stars are happy to take their furry friends along.On the morning the Cannes Film Festival opened, Messi, the canine hero of last year’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anatomy of a Fall,” was practicing climbing the stairs of the Grand Lumière Theater. The majestic entry is typically reserved for stars dressed in their finery, but the official red carpet had not yet been rolled out. Messi’s owner and trainer, Laura Martin Contini, coached him to bound up to the first landing and pose. He wasn’t quite hitting his mark, stopping just one step below, but he eventually got the hang of it. Contini rewarded him with coos of “Oui, jolie” and “Oui, bravo” and a squeaky soccer ball toy he seemed to particularly enjoy, his blue eyes growing even more intense at the sight of it.Messi was rehearsing for the opening credits of his new talk show, “Messi: The Cannes Film Festival From a Dog’s Eye View.” In the series of shorts for French TV, the star was going to interview talent (using the voice of a human actor).His presence was proof of an incontrovertible fact about the festival, now in its second week: Cannes loves dogs. You could see that as Demi Moore, star of this year’s “The Substance,” brought her Chihuahua, Pilaf, to the photo call. And you could see it as Messi went through his paces, occasionally carrying a camera in his mouth, and onlookers just outside the barricades took photos. “It’s like if I had George Clooney with me, but it’s just a dog,” said Tim Newman, a producer who came up with the idea for Messi’s program.Demi Moore brought Pilaf along during a photo call Monday for her new film, “The Substance.”Sebastien Nogier/EPA, via ShutterstockThe talk show is something of a victory lap for the pooch, who emerged as one of the biggest stars of the 2023 festival, even receiving the Palm Dog Award, given annually to the premier canine performer, though he couldn’t make that ceremony. “Last year we were not able to climb the famed steps of the Cannes arena, so this time we are returning and we are able to be at the red carpet and to support all of the dogs that will be considered for the Palm Dog,” Contini said, speaking through a translator.So why is this particular festival so friendly to pups? “Cannes is a good place for dogs to get a showcase because the French have a very sensible approach to dogs,” the Palm Dog founder Toby Rose said, explaining, “They are always pretty much without exception welcome to join in restaurants, which I know to the Anglo-Saxon American and Brits is almost heresy.” (Indeed, on the first day of my stay in Cannes this year a regal greyhound tottered in and out of a creperie while I ate.)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