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      ‘The Breaking Ice’ Review: Desire on the Border of China and North Korea

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      A love triangle takes shape among three 20-somethings in this melancholy film by Anthony Chen.In “The Breaking Ice,” a new film written and directed by Anthony Chen, three lost 20-somethings find one another in a liminal world. The movie takes place in Yanji, a Chinese city bordering North Korea, where two languages and cultures mix in the shadows of snow-blanketed mountains.In this icy town, Nana (Zhou Dongyu), a tour guide, crosses paths with Haofeng (Liu Haoran), a financier from Shanghai who is visiting for a wedding. She recognizes in him a melancholy that rhymes with her own, and invites him along to dinner with Xiao (Qu Chuxiao), a friend who works at a restaurant and pines after Nana.As the three down copious drinks, ride about on Xiao’s motorcycle and engage in youthful adventures, a love triangle takes shape — though it never results in predictable conflicts. It’s as if the cold, otherworldly solitude of Yanji sublimates the characters’ unrequited desires into a deeper yearning for connection. They are grateful to have each other, even if not in the ways they really want.The setting is rife with metaphoric potential, and it is here that Chen falters as a director. Haofeng’s depression is signaled by his habit of chewing on ice cubes and balancing dangerously on snowy cliffs; Nana repeatedly encounters reminders of her thwarted ice-skating career; and news reports of a North Korean defector appear throughout the film, provoking something in the restless Xiao.Deployed without subtlety, these motifs weigh down a film that, in its best moments, feels as light and refreshing as a cool breeze.The Breaking IceNot rated. In Mandarin and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Which Brings Me to You’ Review: Out With the Old?

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      This rom-com boasts a clever conceit that at times feels a little cluttered.When Will stops midway through a makeout session with Jane in the romantic comedy “Which Brings Me to You,” it signals a kind of maturity on his part. And he’s met with surprise. Jane (Lucy Hale) was cool with a purely carnal interlude. Will (Nat Wolff) wants them to connect on a deeper level.Hale and Wolff make likable their romantically messy characters, a freelance journalist and an art photographer, in this movie directed by Peter Hutchings. After rethinking their coat-closet tryst — at a Jersey Shore wedding — the two reset and begin recounting their romantic histories over the next 24 hours.Her history tilts toward kind, deeply wounded men. His leans toward creative, vibrant women. The memories of these former romances unfold as visual vignettes, with each commenting on the other’s paramours. “Oh come on. … She’s really hot,” Jane says of Eve (Genevieve Angelson), the slightly older woman who spirited Will away from his college campus. “Oooh, Elton,” Wills says, hearing about the live wire (Alexander Hodge) who swept Jane off her feet before their relationship was upended by mental illness.Another Hutchings rom-com, “The Hating Game,” also starred Hale. And like that workplace comedy, this too features locations that may stir some nostalgia: Bahr’s Landing restaurant, Keansburg Amusement Park and the Asbury Park music venue the Saint.Based on the novel of the same name (by Julianna Baggott and Steve Almond, adapted by Keith Bunin), “Which Brings Me to You” is cleverly structured but often feels too crowded with the ghosts of lovers past. Then again, isn’t that the way with some of the most promising love affairs?Which Brings Me to YouNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The End We Start From’ Review: A Watery Apocalypse and a New Beginning

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      Jodie Comer stars in a lethargic adaptation of Megan Hunter’s best-selling novel.Flooding is among the extreme weather disasters on offer on a planet with a changing climate, and that’s both catastrophic and, in a literary sense, poetic. The first apocalypse recorded in more than one ancient text is, after all, a deluge.But there is such a thing as too much symbolism, and “The End We Start From,” adapted from Megan Hunter’s acclaimed best-selling novel, is drowning. The action starts in a bathtub that’s slowly filling for a woman (played by Jodie Comer and identified in the credits only as “Woman”). She is heavily pregnant, and the bath is soothing, a weightless relief for her strained vessel of a body.As the water fills the bathtub inside, the world is filling up with water outside. Woman and her partner, R (Joel Fry), live in London, which is rapidly coming to resemble Venice without the bridges and islands. Woman goes into labor, and by the time the baby is born, she and R cannot return home. R, looking at the television, jokes about naming the baby Noah. They leave the hospital and head, like everyone else in England, for a village on higher ground. But they’re only permitted to enter because R’s parents live there, and because they have a two-day-old baby in the car.From here it’s a survival movie, a story in which Woman must protect her child through a series of shelters and journeys and fearsome encounters of a sort familiar in postapocalyptic tales. Separated from R, she yearns for him, wondering if the world will ever have a place for their little family again. She meets a friend, O (Katherine Waterston), whose baby is two months older than Woman’s and whose partner is not worth yearning for. They form a kind of connection through the wilderness, a friendship that might keep them both alive.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?  More

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      ‘Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’ Review: A Wanderer on a Spiritual Quest

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      An uncommonly strong debut from the Vietnamese director Pham Thien An asks existential questions without answers.The complex dance of doubt and religious faith is frequently cast in terms of a quest. One might be “on a faith journey,” or be “a lost soul,” or be “searching” for meaning and the divine — all images derived from the idea of starting at one place, keeping your eyes open, and ending up, ultimately, in some final destination. Small wonder that many human cultures imagine a wander in the wilderness, literal or metaphorical, as pivotal to one’s initiation into maturity. Some fresh wisdom and revelation comes from walking around in circles for a while.This spiraling, meandering trek is the underlying structure of “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” an uncommonly strong feature debut from the Vietnamese director Pham Thien An. The protagonist, Thien (Le Phong Vu), is dragged into a voyage of his own. Having grown up in a rural village, he now lives in Saigon, where he works and hangs out with his friends. It seems that any faith or belief in the soul or the transcendent has disappeared completely into his hard, cold urban exterior.But one day, sitting at a roadside cafe discussing faith with two buddies — one of whom is selling his possessions and moving to the countryside to seek a life of communion with the divine — he observes a terrible motorcycle crash.Initially he thinks little of the crash. You get the sense he’s seen a lot of this sort of thing before. But soon after, while he lies on a table in the early stages of an erotic massage, his phone rings. “God is calling,” he tells the masseuse. “God?” she asks. “It’s my client,” he replies.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?  More

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      ‘I.S.S.’ Review: Ariana DeBose’s Turn as a Space Warrior

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      The actress stars in this low-wattage thriller about Russian and American astronauts facing off aboard the International Space Station.Three Americans, three Russians and one exceedingly cramped office hovering 250 miles above Earth — what could possibly go wrong? Given the typical genre coordinates, the 95 minute running time and historic hostilities between Russia and the United States, the more relevant questions here are when and how quickly and entertainingly things will go kablooey in “I.S.S.,” an enjoyable, low-wattage thriller set on the International Space Station.There are nothing but bilateral hugs and smiles when the space newbie Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) arrives on the station, having been shot into the story on a Russian Soyuz rocket. She and another American astronaut, a smiley family man, Christian (John Gallagher Jr.), have caught a ride to the station, where she’ll be studying mice or “my little guys,” as she cooingly calls them. Like a character’s early reference to the station’s life-support system (if it stops humming, uh-oh), these helpless creatures — soon seen floating tails-up in a container — are early warning signs that something will be disturbing the relative peace very soon.The movie — written by Nick Shafir and directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite — flashes its wailing red alarms early and often. The space station itself — a cluttered warren with tangles of wires, claustrophobic chambers and eerily weightless bodies — makes a convincing pressure cooker. And Cowperthwaite, who’s worked in nonfiction and fiction (she’s best known for her doc “Blackfish”), clearly maps the tight quarters straightaway, which adds to the ominous atmosphere. By the time a Russian colleague, Alexey (Pilou Asbaek), gruffly tells Kira that “it does not end well,” all this foreshadowing has certainly piqued expectations.What follows is consistently watchable and sometimes tense but, despite some twists, largely unsurprising. After the introductions — Chris Messina plays the third American, Gordon — and the assorted personalities and relationships have been sketched in, the movie gets down to genre business with some worrisome red-orange flashes on Earth. Communication failures ensue, as do the progressively more fretful faces and soundtrack music. The two crews close ranks, with the Americans retreating to one corner to sneak worried looks at the similarly alarmed Russians, who include Weronika (Masha Mashkova) and Nicholai (Costa Ronin).As things go bad and then seriously bad, Cowperthwaite keeps the pieces efficiently shuffling to and fro. She plays with constricted spaces, adds surveillance imagery to amp the disquiet and routinely folds in shots of both outer space and of the orbiting station. This reminds you of the setting’s exoticism and complements the slow-boiling sense of peril, including the obvious unease building in the characters’ head space. (The cosmic imagery also reminds you of how routine persuasive digital special effects are now.) Even so, despite the far-out milieu, the unfolding drama could have easily been set in a submarine — or any other constrained place in which characters have been assembled to prove the best and worst about humanity.DeBose, who’s best known for her powerhouse turn as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” makes a convincing narrative axis. The performer’s warmth and charisma nicely offset Kira’s guardedness and outsider status, and that combination makes the character seem more complicated than the bit of back story she’s been given. It’s clear from the get go, from all the close-ups and hovering camerawork, that Kira is the hero of this adventure. In the end, the biggest mystery here is precisely what type of space warrior — a Sigourney Weaver in “Alien” or a Sandra Bullock in “Gravity” — she must become in order to get the job done.I.S.S.Rated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      How ‘All of Us Strangers’ Hit Close to Home for Its Director

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      Andrew Haigh wanted to infuse “All of Us Strangers” with elements from his own life, which included shooting it in his childhood residence.“I got called a gay elder the other day,” Andrew Haigh said. This title, bestowed by a group of younger gay men, initially rankled him. It’s true that Haigh — the director of acclaimed films like “45 Years” and “Weekend” — had recently turned 50, but he still found that landmark age hard to believe.“I’m looking older,” he told me, “but it’s a strange thing to think that I’m not young anymore.”That uncanny feeling is a key theme in Haigh’s latest film, “All of Us Strangers,” which he adapted from the 1987 novel “Strangers” by Taichi Yamada. Andrew Scott stars in the film as Adam, a screenwriter in his late 40s with a whole lot on his mind: As he entertains a tentative romance with his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), he returns to his childhood home and finds it somehow inhabited by the parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who died when he was young. Though this reunion summons Adam’s inner child to the fore — a transformation Scott sells with heartbreaking subtlety, even when dressed in Christmas pajamas — there are still tricky adult conversations to be had with his parents about his sexuality and lonely middle age.“I knew that for this film to work, I had to throw myself into it on a very personal level,” Haigh said. “So much of the things they’re talking about and the memories that Adam has of being a kid are my memories.”That commitment even extended to filming much of the movie in the house where Haigh grew up, a notion that astounded many of his actors.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?  More

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      What Will Be Nominated for Oscars Next Week, and What Won’t?

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      While “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” are likely to do well, the directors race is hardly set and other categories are open, too.When it comes to predicting the Oscars, you ultimately have to go with your gut … and mine is in a state of agita.That’s what happens when there are simply too many good movies and great performances to all make the cut: Even the hypothetical snubs I’m about to dole out have me tied up in knots.Which names can you expect to hear on Tuesday, when the Oscar nominations are announced? Here is what I project will be nominated in the top six Oscar categories, based on industry chatter, key laurels from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, and the nominations bestowed by the Screen Actors Guild, Producers Guild of America and Directors Guild of America. Well, all of those things, and my poor, tormented gut.Best PictureLet’s start with the safest bets. “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” scored top nominations from the producers, directors and actors guilds last week and I expect each film to earn double-digit Oscar nominations. “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things” are secure, too: Though they didn’t make it into SAG’s best-ensemble race, both films boast lead actors who’ve won the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award. If this were an old-school race, these would be the five nominees.But there are five more slots to fill, and I project the next three will go to “Past Lives” and “American Fiction,” passion picks with distinct points of view, as well as “Maestro,” the sort of ambitious biopic that Oscar voters are typically in the tank for. I’m also betting that the French courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall” and the German-language Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” find favor with the academy’s increasingly international voting body. (Even the Producers Guild, which so often favors big studio movies over global cinema, found room to nominate that pair.)There are still a few dark horses that hope to push their way into this lineup, like “The Color Purple,” “May December,” “Society of the Snow” and “Origin.” But I suspect these 10 are locked and loaded.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?  More

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      New (and Old) Moves for a Choreographer to Hip Hop’s Stars

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      For Fatima Robinson, choreographing “The Color Purple” was far more than a job. It was a callback to her youth, before becoming known for her pop work.The choreographer Fatima Robinson made her name, at 21, with an epic Michael Jackson video. Two decades later, she orchestrated the moves for 1,000 performers at a Super Bowl halftime show. Then she rose to become Beyoncé’s director of choreography.But among the most meaningful work of her career has boiled down to a series of handclaps.When Robinson was growing up in Los Angeles, her mother took her and her two younger sisters to see “The Color Purple” — a family milestone. After that, “I saw the movie probably every year of my life,” she said. The girls were inspired by the onscreen sisters’ patty-cake-style routine; they made the claps their own and share it to this day, often in emoji form. If “we’re getting on each other’s nerves,” Robinson said, it’s a symbol of peace. “We know that’s, like, that special love that we have for each other.”Now, as the choreographer for the latest version of “The Color Purple,” a movie musical directed by Blitz Bazawule, she helped devise the onscreen clapping pattern for the young siblings Celie and Nettie. “It was sooo special,” Robinson said. “That sister love in this movie is so what I have with my sisters.”“The Color Purple,” based on the Broadway musical of Alice Walker’s seminal Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, arrives with a mantle of heavyweight backers and performers, including the producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg and the stars Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, Taraji P. Henson and Colman Domingo. In Robinson, 52, they added perhaps the most elevated hip-hop and R&B choreographer working today, who has worked in music, TV, film and live events, including Super Bowl halftime shows in 2022 and 2011. (She was also recently named a creative director for the Knicks City 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?  More