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      in Movies

      ‘Allswell in New York’ Review: Siblings and Their Struggles

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      This overstuffed movie fails to wrap up its myriad professional and domestic dramas, despite a few moments of promise.A series of unfortunate domestic events befalls three adult siblings in Ben Snyder’s “Allswell in New York,” which plays like a family sitcom that forgot the comedy.Daisy (Elizabeth Rodriguez, who co-wrote the screenplay) owns a restaurant named Allswell and longs to be a mother. Her sister, Ida (Liza Colón-Zayas of “The Bear”), is a clinical counselor searching for their elder brother, who disappeared years earlier. And their sister-in-law, Serene (Daphne Rubin-Vega), is busy trying to rein in her defiant daughter, Connie (Shyrley Rodriguez), who’s blazing a trail through her terrible 20s.When we drop into this picture of present-day New York City, Daisy and Ida are facing work strains and Serene is unable to locate Connie; on top of all that, Daisy has invited a young pregnant woman from Craigslist into her home. The expectant mother (Mackenzie Lansing) intends to have Daisy adopt her child, but hesitates to put the agreement in writing.If few of the melodramatic plot lines wrap up by the end, at least the members of the ensemble cast commit to their roles with naturalistic gusto. Moments of promise outshine the gloomy chaos, as when a nurse named Clint (J. Cameron Barnett, stealing many scenes) pantomimes words of solace for Ray (Michael Rispoli), Ida’s emotionally dense boyfriend, to recite to her while she weeps. The brief exchange achieves an admirable balance of pathos and play to which the rest of the movie can only aspire.Allswell in New YorkRated R for family feuds. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Brothers’ Review: Two-Bit Criminals

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      Moke (Josh Brolin) is a reformed thief who gets roped into one last job with his twin brother, Jady (Peter Dinklage).For a road-trip buddy comedy, a greater crime than being unfunny is perhaps, amid all of the shenanigans, being dull. That is partly the feeling one is left with in the R-rated movie “Brothers,” which, even with an A-list cast, seems to move on autopilot through all of its pit stops.There’s the slapstick violence; there’s a sexually excited orangutan named Samuel; there’s Glenn Close as a two-bit criminal scaring a naked Josh Brolin off a motel balcony. But one is ultimately left with the prevailing feeling that this comedy, directed by Max Barbakow, is not particularly bad, but rather just fine.In a one-last-job setup, Moke (Brolin), a reformed thief trying to go straight, teams up with his twin brother, Jady (Peter Dinklage), to track down a stash of valuable jewels. Family issues between the brothers get in the way, and then get complicated when their long-lost mother (Close) comes into the picture.Their road-movie antics all play out with little comic imagination, making for a disappointing answer to the invigorating originality of Barbakow’s last comedy, “Palm Springs.” Brolin and Dinklage might seem like a magnetic pair of bickering twins — and they are what is keeping this ship from sinking — but mostly it’s dismaying to see such strong dramatic actors stifled in such a sedate comedy.The same can be said of the entire cast, which includes Marisa Tomei as a kooky lover and Brendan Fraser as the villain on their heels. The silver lining is seeing Fraser in a comedic role, showing flashes of that easy charisma from his blockbuster days.BrothersRated R for language, sexual content and drug use. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      Mikey Madison Finds Common Ground With Her Character in ‘Anora’

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      Mikey Madison, by her own admission, cries a lot — whether she’s happy or sad, that’s how she expresses herself.During our conversation at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, the star of the Palme d’Or-winning “Anora” told me a number of stories that involved weeping. She cried on the way home from a horseback-riding competition when she was a teenager and realized she would have to choose between life as an equestrian or an actor. (She was too single-minded to do both.) She cried after every single acting class in the early days of her career. She cried after her first Russian language session in preparation for this latest role.But when she was living in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach to shoot “Anora,” Sean Baker’s film about a tough-as-nails sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son, she found that the tears didn’t come easily. “I was, like, holding it in in a way that I hadn’t done before,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Am I numb? What’s happening here?’” She ultimately realized it was something different: the title character, known as Ani, was taking hold of her in a way that had never happened in her career. She had heard fellow actors talk about that kind of thing, but had never related to it before.Mikey Madison with Mark Eydelshteyn in “Anora,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.NeonIt makes sense that Ani would exert a certain power over Madison because “Anora” is a monumental film in the 25-year-old’s career. Though she had memorable parts in the movies “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019) and “Scream” (2022) and a crucial role on “Better Things,” the critically acclaimed FX series, “Anora” raises her to a new echelon in Hollywood. Almost as soon as the film premiered at Cannes, Madison was given the “star is born” treatment and declared a potential Oscar nominee. When “Anora” hit the Telluride Film Festival a few months later, a producer told Variety, “I need to work with Mikey Madison ASAP.”The film begins one night at her strip club gig, when her boss instructs her to talk to a patron, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who asked for a Russian-speaking girl. Turns out he’s wildly rich, and their whirlwind romance leads to a quickie marriage. But when his parents learn of it and send heavies to arrange their annulment, Ani refuses to go quietly. She fights off men twice her size with piercing screams and shockingly powerful kicks. For all that ferociousness, Madison also conveys how Ani’s thick skin is a form of self-defense against a world that rewards those, like Ivan, with easy access to money and finds new ways to punish those who don’t. Over the course of the action, you watch exhaustion seep into her face, which once glowed with the possibility of a fairy-tale ending.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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      Hugh Grant on the ‘Freak-Show Era’ of His Career and Being a Family Man

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      Hugh Grant has been suffering from brand confusion since 1994, when his performance in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” established him as a quintessentially British romantic hero of winning charm and diffidence. But his recent run of strange and sometimes creepy characters plays so effectively against type that you begin to suspect you were mistaken about his type all along.He would be the first to say that something darker and more complicated lurks beneath his easy surface.“At school I had a teacher who used to take me aside and say, ‘Who is the real Hugh Grant? Because I think the one we’re seeing might be insincere,’” Grant said as he strolled through Central Park last month. He was comparing himself — or at least his powers of persuasion — to Mr. Reed, the charismatically articulate villain he plays in “Heretic,” a religious-horror movie due in theaters on Nov. 15. “The ability to manipulate and sort of seduce — I might be guilty of that.”At 64, Grant is enjoying what he calls “the freak-show era” of his career, playing an unlikely rogue’s gallery of suave miscreants (“The Undoing,” “A Very English Scandal”), seedy gangsters (“The Gentlemen”), power-hungry tricksters (“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”) and self-deluded thespians (“Paddington 2” and “Unfrosted”), not to mention the bumptious little Oompa-Loompa in “Wonka.” That abashed, floppy-haired, benign early version of himself — that was never who he was anyway, he says.“My mistake was that I suddenly got this massive success with ‘Four Weddings’ and I thought, ah, well, if that’s what people love so much, I’ll be that person in real life, too,” he said. “So I used to do interviews where I was Mr. Stuttery Blinky, and it’s my fault that I was then shoved into a box marked ‘Mr. Stuttery Blinky.’ And people were, quite rightly, repelled by it in the end.”Grant had just come from Toronto, where “Heretic” had its premiere. In New York it was a blazingly beautiful day, and he greeted the park like an old friend, passing some of his favorite landmarks: the Delacorte Clock, whose bronze animals were doing their delightful dance to music to mark the hour, and the statue of Balto, the heroic medicine-transporting Siberian husky posing imperiously on his rock not far from the children’s zoo.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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      ‘Smile 2’ Review: A Bigger and Bloodier Spotlight

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      In this sequel, the pop sensation Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is preparing to begin her comeback tour a year after a brutal car accident.If ordinary women often feel pressured to smile, then imagine how a pop star feels about constantly needing to project poise and affability? This emotional high-wire act is enough to make anyone crumble, even without a malevolent monster preying on her fears and traumas.This is how “Smile 2,” a bigger, bloodier — and more compelling — sequel to “Smile” (2022), raises the stakes: Instead of a humble psychiatrist (played by Sosie Bacon in the original), we get the pop sensation Skye Riley (a splendid Naomi Scott), now sober and preparing to begin her comeback tour a year after a brutal car accident triggered a public meltdown.The curse hasn’t changed: its carriers still undergo spectacular mental breakdowns and kill themselves soon after they see someone else die. There’s no convincing others that these mental collapses are actually caused by an evil entity that warps its victims’ brains — changing their perception of time and reality, and provoking hallucinations of people with creepy smiles — because, well, that’s crazy talk.“Smile” got a lot out of this tension. There may be a gruesome being pulling the ropes, but the battle is still an internal one spiked with paranoia and self-revulsion. The film’s visual flair and sinister conceit were enough to make me ignore its generic trauma angle.“Smile 2,” directed by Parker Finn, is more thematically ambitious than the original, which also allows Finn to stage more satisfyingly ridiculous kills and ramp up its air of delirium. The film addresses ideas about addiction and dependency, stardom and solitude and the loss of control that comes with being chained to your job.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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      ‘Anora’ Review: A Pretty Woman From Brooklyn

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      Mikey Madison gives a career-making performance in a Palme d’Or-winning film about the romance between a sex worker and a rich scion.Sometimes a movie actually earns the old cliché of a “star-making turn,” and I’m here to say that Sean Baker’s “Anora” is this year’s star maker. I’ve seen it twice, and both times I left the theater on a high, exhilarated by the performances, the rhythm, the emotional shape of it. The only question that remains — and it’s a great one to have to ask — is exactly whose star “Anora” will make.One obvious (and obviously correct) answer is Mikey Madison, who plays the titular character. Madison is no newcomer; she played Sadie, a Manson family member, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”; and Pamela Adlon’s oldest daughter, Max, on the terrific FX show “Better Things.”Madison has always been good, an ingénue with extraordinarily expressive features who can play bratty and naïve at the same time. But this role requires her to go for broke, with elements of slapstick, romance, comedy and tragedy, along with dancing in skimpy or nonexistent clothing and throwing a couple of powerful punches. Playing Anora called for both an emotionally rich inner life and a breathtakingly kinetic physicality, all poured into a character about whom people form opinions the moment they meet her. And at every moment, Madison is mesmerizing.The movie is also a star maker for Baker, whose earlier films, like “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket,” have earned accolades and devoted audiences. With “Anora,” though, he has leveled up. (The film won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May.)Baker is known for making movies about people on society’s margins, frequently sex workers. But this film, which Baker directed, wrote and edited, is steadier and more confident than his previous work. In some ways “Anora” has the most in common with Baker’s 2015 film, “Tangerine,” a screwball comedy about transgender sex workers in Los Angeles, shot on iPhones. But it also feels like a significant evolution in his style, and makes me excited to see what he does next.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 Music

      Randy Newman Is at His Best When America Is at Its Worst

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      His movie songs are filled with memorable melodies; his own albums with unsavory characters. One of the most astute cultural observers is the subject of a new book.Around the summer of 1966, a song on the radio recorded by the Italian American pop crooner Julius La Rosa caught Bob Dylan’s ear: a forlorn, impressionistic ballad called “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” penned by a 22-year-old publishing company staff writer from Los Angeles named Randy Newman.“Randy’s song was so mysterious,” Dylan recalled. “I never heard a song like that before; it was so cynical.” Newman’s own rendition later stood out to him for “the sadness in Randy’s voice. Sadness and cynicism, it’s a strange combination but Randy always manages to pull it off.”Dylan’s testimonial is one of many in “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman,” by the former Los Angeles Times pop critic Robert Hilburn (out Oct. 22).“It’s an honor to have Dylan say something nice about me,” Newman said during a recent phone interview. Though he’s received plenty of accolades — including six Grammys, three Emmys and two Oscars, as well as induction into the Rock & Roll and Songwriters Hall of Fame — Newman, now 80, admitted, “what I really wanted was to have the respect from fellow workers in the field. That Bob or Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Linda Ronstadt, that those people liked what I did mattered to me — maybe an inordinate amount.”While Newman has never enjoyed the broad commercial success of his peers, his work has on occasion clicked with the culture. His somewhat controversial 1977 satire “Short People” was a bona fide hit that gave him his only gold album, “Little Criminals”; “I Love L.A.,” a wry celebration of his hometown from 1983, became an unlikely anthem for the city’s sports teams; the earnest “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from Pixar’s 1995 movie “Toy Story,” soundtracked millions of childhoods.In truth, far more people have heard the 20-plus film scores Newman has composed since the early ’80s than any of his singer-songwriter records. “It’s sort of a funny hand to be dealt,” 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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      in Theater

      The Enduring Allure of ‘Showgirls’? A French Play Investigates in Song.

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      Inspired by Paul Verhoeven’s infamous 1995 film, “Showgirl” considers what it means to be an actress who gets naked.Las Vegas was a hot location for movies in 1995. Nicolas Cage battled his demons in the character study “Leaving Las Vegas,” with Elisabeth Shue caught in the crossfire. Sharon Stone was a shrewd hustler turned mob wife in the Martin Scorsese drama “Casino.” All three actors landed Oscar nominations (Cage won), and even when certain critics didn’t care for those films, they at least respected them.That cannot be said of the third major Vegas movie from that year: Paul Verhoeven’s NC-17-rated “Showgirls,” the flashy, brash, somewhat bonkers tale of a dancer named Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) who claws her way to the top of the seminude entertainment heap — or volcano, as the case may be.And yet it is that film that has inspired a documentary, drag tributes, musical spoofs, memes, academic essays (some of them collected in the recent anthology “The Year’s Work in ‘Showgirls’ Studies,” from Indiana University Press) and even a poetic retelling in sestinas. The latest entry in this ever-evolving galaxy is Marlène Saldana and Jonathan Drillet’s “Showgirl,” a French play with an original techno score that will be performed at N.Y.U. Skirball on Friday and Saturday.‘It Doesn’t Suck’Saldana discovered the movie fairly early, catching it on VHS a couple of years after its release. She watched it like most people did around that time: for a laugh.“As I started doing more and more dance, I realized it’s a cult film in that world, like ‘Flashdance’ or ‘The Red Shoes’ — something else was going on,” Saldana, 45, said in a video interview from France.“I genuinely love this film,” she added. “Every time I watch it, I discover something new.”The various takes on “Showgirls” nowadays cover a wide spectrum in which serious-minded dissections counterbalance the midnight-screening crowd’s laughter and the drag satires. The movie is “revered both at the ‘low’ end of pop culture as a hardy cult favorite, and at the ‘high’ end by academics as a critical fetish object,” Adam Nayman wrote in his book “It Doesn’t Suck: ‘Showgirls.’”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