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      ‘Novocaine’ Review: Sticks and Stones Will Never Hurt Him

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      In this gross-out action spectacle, Jack Quaid plays an unlikely action hero who, because of a genetic disorder, can’t feel any pain.If we’re in a post- “John Wick” era, where action cinema has been revitalized and modernized — more bullets and blood, more choreographed spectacle — the thrills of the genre have strangely edged closer and closer to that earliest of movie pleasures: slapstick. Particularly in the man-on-a-rampage subgenre, as the violence and gore becomes increasingly absurd, these movies begin to echo that old format, where the more creative and outrageous the pain, the more visceral the pleasure.That’s essentially the kind of silly, gross-out fun of “Novocaine,” which taps into this understanding about as overtly as possible. The key is in the invincibility clause — if, like the Three Stooges themselves, our action hero is virtually indestructible, the pain and its wacky payoffs can be endless.Other films have presented unique and often inane spins on this idea (from Jason Statham in “Crank” to Logan Marshall-Green in “Upgrade”), but this film, directed by Robert Olsen and Dan Berk, takes it to its most extreme, via an almost stupidly simple premise: Because of a genetic disorder, our protagonist Nate Caine (Jack Quaid) can’t feel any physical pain. Cue just about as many ways one can try to invoke it.Nate, though, is no willing bionic man, but in fact the opposite. Because he doesn’t have the sensors of pain to notify him if something has gone wrong, he’s led a conversely bubble-boy existence, fearful that at any moment he might unknowingly injure and kill himself. He tennis-balls the corners of desks, doesn’t eat solid foods (God forbid he bites off his own tongue!) and has become a bit of a recluse.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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      ‘Who by Fire’ Review: Masculinity and Its Discontents

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      Men posture and peacock in the Québecois director Philippe Lesage’s ensemble drama set at an isolated house in a remote forest.One enduring storytelling strategy is to put some characters in a cage and watch them fight it out. There’s a reason so many mysteries, thrillers and horror movies take place in close quarters: Lockdowns have a way of turning people into lab animals. And whatever the cause — nature, nurture or screenwriting contrivance — when characters are stuck together, they often gnaw on one another, whether they’re on a lifeboat, in a hotel or on a private island.The studied drama “Who by Fire” from the Québecois writer-director Philippe Lesage takes place in a Canadian wilderness area that is as swooningly beautiful as it is expediently remote. Set over a blurry few days, the story largely unfolds in and around a waterfront property, a slice of paradise so isolated that visitors arrive by seaplane. There, old friends and new acquaintances connect. They read, listen to music, dance a bit, and laugh and shout over dinners filled with wine and talk. Amid the levity and Lesage’s heavy ideas about men and masculinity, they also enjoy nature and, at times, try to dominate it and one another.Lesage has a terrific eye, and he opens the movie with a grabber: a hypnotic shot of an old, boxy Mercedes alone on a highway in the near distance, a series of droning electronic notes rising and falling on the soundtrack. As the car passes miles of dense, mountainous forest, Lesage keeps the vehicle steadily positioned at the image’s vanishing point, which keeps your gaze similarly pinned. Outwardly, the setup looks familiar (you could be following friends in your own car) yet the absence of extraneous sounds — there’s no wind, no whirring engine — gives the whole thing a dreamy, somewhat eerie timelessness. Whatever the period, some old-fashioned flourishes and the absence of cellphones suggest that this is a memory piece.The car belongs to Albert (Paul Ahmarani), a screenwriter who’s en route to a friend’s house with his adult daughter, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), his younger son, Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon), and Max’s friend Jeff (Noah Parker). The owner of the remote getaway is Blake (Arieh Worthalter, an effective live wire), a successful director with an Oscar on a shelf and a plane out front. Blake’s baggage proves heavier than his visitors’: He has a dead wife, an unwieldy ego and a fraught past with Albert. When the two old friends meet, it’s all smiles and bear hugs. Before long, though, everyone is aloft in Blake’s plane and headed for some emotional, psychological and spiritual bloodletting.The movie’s opener — including the enigmatic drive, which can’t help but evoke Kubrick’s “The Shining” — announces Lesage’s gift for stirring up tension visually. That talent is evident throughout, notably during three leisurely dinners that anchor the story, each lasting some 10 minutes of screen time. Working with his director of photography, Balthazar Lab, Lesage stages and shoots these meals similarly, with everyone gathered around a long table. Over drinks and much talk, the camera alternately pushes in toward certain characters and pulls out to reveal the group’s dynamic, catching gestures and the circuitry of their gazes. “You know I hate fighting,” Albert tells Blake at one meal, an assertion that’s plainly hollow.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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      ‘Opus’ Review: A New Album They’re Dying to Hear

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      John Malkovich plays a ’90s pop star who emerges from retirement with a bloody agenda.As targets for satire, flamboyant pop stars and celebrity journalists are low-hanging fruit — maybe even slightly mushy, rotten fruit. But in “Opus,” Mark Anthony Green, a former style columnist for GQ making his first feature as writer and director, bids to say something trenchant about fame while cementing his reputation as a sleek new horror auteur. He comes up short on both counts.The protagonist is a 27-year-old magazine journalist named Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri), who laments that she hasn’t written anything she considers worthwhile in three years at her job. But there’s big news: The mysterious, reclusive singer Moretti (John Malkovich) — “arguably the biggest pop star of the ’90s,” per Wolf Blitzer, in his obligatory newscast cameo — is coming out of retirement to release his first studio album in roughly the time that Ariel has been alive.And for unknown reasons, Ariel receives an invitation to Moretti’s desert compound, where she and Stan Sullivan (Murray Bartlett), her highhanded, idea-poaching boss, will join several other V.I.P.s to be the first in the world to hear it.The other golden-ticket recipients include a TV personality (Juliette Lewis), an influencer (Stephanie Suganami) and a paparazzo (Melissa Chambers). Out of all of them, Ariel is the only one inclined to show any skepticism toward Moretti’s bizarre brand of hospitality, complete with disgusting meal routines (at a banquet, diners pass around and bite from the same, increasingly saliva-saturated roll) and by-your-side “concierge” service, which in effect means that guests are guarded at all times. When Ariel goes for a jog, her minder (Amber Midthunder) even stops and starts at her pace.Like the upstate home in “Get Out” and the Swedish enclave in “Midsommar,” two movies whose influence looms unflatteringly over the proceedings, Moretti’s compound is a place where something is obviously amiss. Moretti, clearly a leader of some sort of cult, adheres to a religion that preaches a “holistic path” for creative types. There are odd rituals involving pubic grooming, wounds from oyster shucking and a puppet show in which a marionette Billie Holiday is interrogated by anthropomorphic rats.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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      A Looney Tunes Movie With Daffy, Porky and Petunia

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      Subtitled “A Looney Tunes Movie,” this installment, directed by Peter Browngardt, takes bubble gum to a whole new level.Porky Pig just turned 90. His first cartoon was released on March 2, 1935; his tormentor and eventual foil Daffy Duck came along a couple of years later. These Warner Bros. comedic chaos agents were wild ripostes to Disney’s arguably saccharine Mickey Mouse. And after years of entertaining adults in the movie theaters of the early- and mid-20th century, television exposure turned Porky and Daffy, along with Bugs Bunny and others, into inspirations for generations of young wiseacres.“The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” directed by Peter Browngardt from a script by almost a dozen writers, races out of the gate with old-school moxie. Browngardt is a “Futurama” and Cartoon Network veteran. He’s also been honing his approach to Daffy and Porky with television’s “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” which has run six seasons on Max. Browngardt’s gnarly approach to the Looney Tunes characters seems more influenced by the gross-out antics of Nickelodeon’s “Ren & Stimpy,” than by, say, Warner’s own much-missed “Animaniacs.”The 20th- and now 21st-century pictures featuring these toons are a mixed bag. The least-inspired iterations of the characters, in the “Space Jam” movies, have been the most popular. Joe Dante’s wonderful “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” from 2003, had the spirit of the older cartoons — it appreciated the value of dropping anvils on coyotes’ heads, and more — but failed to find box office favor. But in Browngardt’s installment, citing pop-culture references and breaking out into song have little to no place. Instead, the movie subjects Daffy Duck to a butt-crack joke, and compels him to twerk.Which feels especially weird because the style in which our heroes are depicted comes directly from the Looney Tunes of old. The movie’s technical aspects are largely admirable, and it pays homage to the greats of the animation department once known as Termite Terrace by naming the movie’s restaurants after the past masters Robert Clampett and Tex Avery.Early on, the young BFFs Daffy and Porky are instructed by a creepy character that if they “stick together,” all will turn out right for them. Sticking is a major motif here, as an alien goo renders a new brand of chewing gum irresistible. It also makes its consumers mindless zombies. With the help of a “flavor expert,” Petunia Pig, Daffy and Porky scurry to save the world from, yes, blowing up like a gum bubble. The action is frenetic and gleefully vulgar; at one point a dome of bubble gum emerges from a dog’s rear end. There’s also some old-school slapstick; chattering fake teeth turn out to be practically world-saving.But the movie’s energy doesn’t pay off in dividends of real pleasure. Anarchy has never been so mere as it is ultimately rendered here.The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes MovieRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Electric State’ Review: 1990s Robot Apocalypse? As if!

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      Who needs dystopian artificial intelligence to destroy faith in humanity when you can watch this sci-fi extravaganza?In “The Electric State,” a young woman and a silent robot slowly make their way across the carcass of the United States, littered with beached war ships and drones. In this alternative history, machines got on a fast track to sentience during the 20th century and waged war against humanity, which barely won. By the alt-1990s, hyper-capitalism and virtual reality have destroyed communal and social bonds — people are so addicted to V.R., which they mainline via helmet-like neurocasters, that they can go into vegetative states, oblivious to the world around them. The story is muted and evocative, and it leaves you with a powerful feeling of bereavement and grief for what we, as a species, have brought on ourselves.I’m sorry, I was talking about the illustrated novel “The Electric State” (2018), by the Swedish artist and writer Simon Stalenhag.Anthony Russo and Joe Russo’s movie version, streaming on Netflix, is quite different.It does have the same context and setup, but whereas the book is elliptical in narrative, muted in color palette and melancholy in mood, the movie is obvious, garish and just plain dumb. (For those interested, the Prime Video series “Tales From the Loop” is a much worthier adaptation of Stalenhag’s universe.)Naturally, a film can have an autonomous worth, equal but distinct from its source material (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Blade Runner” come to mind). But even considered on its own, this “Electric State” remains a hyper-processed industrial product packed with sugar and sodium (in the form of quips and battles), along with such wonderful additives as goopy sentiment and automatic-pilot acting.We still have a young woman, Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), and she is still accompanied by a robot, Kid Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk). But she is no longer central to the story or even the cast, having teamed up with a swashbuckling smuggler, Keats (Chris Pratt), and his own bot sidekick, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie). Because it’s easier to blame epochal collapse on one bad guy than on collective apathy, we also get Stanley Tucci as Ethan Skate, a tech tycoon up to no good.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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      ‘An Unfinished Film’ Review: When Reality Interrupts Art

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      A drama full of unconventional touches recalls a time when all we had were our screens.It’s a little hard to get a grasp on what “An Unfinished Film” is at first. This semifictional drama opens with a film crew booting up a 10-year-old computer, hoping their footage will still be there. And after a little finagling, the screen springs to life. Director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui) watches, rapt, as a younger version of himself appears onscreen.This is a film he tried to make 10 years ago, but abandoned for reasons that start to become clear as he explains the plot to others. Director Xiaorui watches as his aborted film’s star, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), appears onscreen as well, and starts to get some ideas. Jiang is now a big movie star, married and with a baby on the way, but when the director calls and asks him if they might try to finish the film, he’s intrigued. Why not?This is a straightforward enough start to a movie, but it’s all a little meta. For instance, Mao, the actor who plays the director, has served as assistant director to Lou Ye, the actual director of “An Unfinished Film.” And Qin, who plays Jiang Cheng, is another frequent Lou collaborator. The footage that they’re watching is in fact outtakes and B-roll from others of Lou’s films, including “Suzhou River,” “Mystery,” “Spring Fever” and “The Shadow Play.” And Lou has some experience with filmmaking stops and starts; his movies have repeatedly been banned in China for running afoul of censors, and he has been put under several-year prohibitions from filmmaking several times as well — dictates he has at times ignored.So this feels personal for Lou, and it keeps getting more personal, in ways that global audiences will easily understand. Director Xiaorui, Jiang and the crew decide to shoot the rest of the film just before the Chinese New Year — but it’s January 2020, and they’re shooting in a hotel located near Wuhan. News of a virus spreads. By the time they decide to shut down production and head to their homes to wait it out, it’s too late. After some confusion and panic that feels ripped straight from zombie films, things become eerily quiet. Everyone must quarantine, alone, in their rooms. They don’t know when they’ll get out.Now reality narrows down to what they can see on their phones and computer screens, including for Jiang, whose wife, Sang Qi (Qi Xi), is increasingly panicked about Jiang ever making it home. Alone in his room, trying to retain his sanity, he watches the world coping with quarantine, observing videos of people dancing and recording his own videos for his child.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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      ‘Black Bag’ Review: Blanchett v. Fassbender

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      The actors play a glamorous couple of spies in this latest sleek collaboration from the director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp.“Black Bag” is the third movie written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh that’s been released since 2022, and it’s a banger. It’s also sleek, witty and lean to the bone, a fizzy, engaging puzzler about beautiful spies doing the sort of extraordinary things that the rest of us only read about in novels and — if we’re lucky — watch onscreen. It’s nonsense, but the kind of glorious grown-up nonsense that critics like to say they (as in Hollywood) no longer make. That’s true to a great extent despite exceptions like Koepp and Soderbergh, even if they’re too playfully unorthodox to be prototypically Hollywood.The filmmakers’ latest duet stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as Kathryn and George. Cozily and happily married, the couple lives in austere luxury in a townhouse in London, where they keep long, eventful hours working for a British intelligence agency, the (real) Government Communications Headquarters. As spies go, the two certainly look and speak their roles, or at least the fictional versions of them: They’re cunning, suave and as enigmatic as the title suggests. Unlike their famed counterpart James Bond (he’s at MI6), though, they put in serious face time at the office. Inside a glass tower, they watch and are watched in turn, tracking enemies and sometimes eliminating them.The setup involves an explosively dangerous threat in the form of malware called Severus, presumably named after the despotic Roman emperor. There appears to be a mole in the agency, and George is among a select few trying to identify the culprit. He has a list of five possible candidates, all of whom work in the agency’s power ranks. Among the suspects is — ta-da! — Kathryn. Because this isn’t a problem that George can take to a marriage counselor — even if one of the main characters is an agency shrink — he does what he’s trained to do: He spies on her. It gets tricky. It also gets funny and predictably violent, with some of the sharpest, nastiest scenes unfolding across a family dining-room table.Koepp and Soderbergh are virtuosos of genre, and “Black Bag” is right in their wheelhouse. Each has made a range of films (Koepp also directs), and they last collaborated on the ghost story “Presence,” which came out earlier this year. If the two excel at thrillers, it’s partly because, I imagine, high-stakes intrigues give filmmakers room to push norms to extremes and even ditch them. Koepp and Soderbergh’s “KIMI” (2022) is another tight genre piece that embraces and detonates conventions. Its myriad influences include films about trapped women as well as claustrophobic paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like “The Conversation” and “Three Days of the Condor,” reference points that also inform “Black Bag.”To judge from George’s chic glasses and turtlenecks, the filmmakers revisited some older Michael Caine movies, too. Fassbender doesn’t have Caine’s charms, and he’s less persuasive as a romantic foil. “Black Bag” has its share of intentionally outlandish moments, some giddily funny (there are more ticklish moments than thrills), but among the less convincing plot points is George and Kathryn’s oft-stated devotion to each other. Onscreen, Fassbender and especially Blanchett have an otherworldly quality that makes them reliably interesting to watch, but it’s one that can feel like a membrane separating them from more ordinary souls. They both draw you to them, but, unlike, say, Brad Pitt, they don’t necessarily invite you in.Whether these nagging doubts about George and Kathryn’s relationship are intentional, they work in a movie that teases you with secrets and weapons, border-crossing and misdirection, and is filled out with a note-perfect supporting cast that includes Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke and Marisa Abela. Even as the story heats up and starts to get crowded, George remains the intrigue’s central question mark. He prowls into the movie like Henry Hill strolling into the nightclub in the famously long take in “Goodfellas,” a scene that slyly suggests that George isn’t to be trusted. He may be hot for Kathryn, but there’s something “bloodless and inhuman” about him, too, as Le Carré wrote of his famous spy, George Smiley.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 Parenting’ Review: Meet the Poltergeist

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      A family getaway turns ghastly when a demon is awakened in this juvenile, meanspirited horror-comedy.“The Parenting,” a raunchy, gross-out horror-comedy directed by Craig Johnson, has plenty of toilet humor and gay jokes stuffed into its tedious running time, few of them clever or funny. Its best bit is in the setup: After a family is killed at home in the early 1980s, the house sits empty until the present day, when it is converted into an Airbnb that the young couple Josh (Brandon Flynn) and Rohan (Nik Dodani) rent for a weekend getaway. “This place is a mansion,” Rohan enthuses, about what in the ’80s was an ordinary suburban household. The punchline is that in this economy, no one can afford to buy even a haunted house anymore. Yes, there’s a 400-year-old poltergeist terrorizing inhabitants. But it would sure beat renting.The boys have secured this spacious if malevolent abode as an occasion to introduce each other to their parents, who are played by television royalty: Lisa Kudrow, Dean Norris, Edie Falco and Brian Cox. Some early water-and-oil mingling feels like a tepid riff on “Meet the Parents,” but when the demonic intrigue ramps up, the tone shifts to full-blown slapstick lunacy, with heads spinning “Exorcist”-style, family members projectile vomiting, and in a meanspirited fashion, more than one Pomeranian getting brutally butchered. The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”The ParentingRated R Rated R for crude humor, strong language, violence and some mild drug use. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Max. More